Tom Farer Interview (2007): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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In your book you define the distinguishing characteristics of liberalism as "cosmopolitanism. That is, it is a commitment to the rights shared by all peoples and its corresponding dictation of limits on privileging one's own community, and its related view of coercion is at best a lesser evil inspired by a search for cooperative mechanisms."
Yes. That, again, springs from the sense of the moral equality of people with some inevitable preference for a community but that preference limited by respect for the basic rights of other people. That's fundamental. And are you asking, how does this affect your policies?
Yes.
Well, let's take the case of Iraq. As war approached, when I was asked what I thought, I said, "I like the message, getting rid of one of the worst dictators, a sociopathic dictator. I like the message." We should have done it, I thought, in '91. But I said, "I totally distrust the messengers, this administration, because I don't believe, given their ideology, even though they're a mixed group, that there is that concern for other communities (that is, the Iraqi people) -- concern for people and for other communities that is necessary to limit the collateral damage of an intervention." I wrote that just in a draft, and as I was finishing, as I was polishing the draft, the war began. You remember how we allowed the looting of the libraries and government buildings and hospitals, and I thought, "My worst fear is confirmed. " The very way we intervened, the very way we invaded the country, showed indifference to the Iraqi people -- "for the sake of democracy," of course.
Do you think that this myopia on the part of the conservatives is partly determined by the fact that they start off as Realists? They don't remain Realists because they move very much beyond the theory of Realism, but this indifference to the peoples that you invade or whose leader you overthrow -- how do we account for that? Is it their philosophical assumptions? Is that the only thing?
That's a very interesting question. I think we have to step back, again, to the proposition that there are several different strains of right-wing thought that had been brought together, linked up in this administration. For the Realists, foreign policy is a struggle for power among national communities, so no problem. Philosophically they're quite clear. Now that doesn't mean that you make war or use force whenever possible, only when it serves your interest. Sometimes it serves your interest now to use force. And so, it was perfectly consistent for a Realist to be opposed to the invasion of Iraq. They just thought it wasn't sufficiently in our interest, and you may recall that a group of academic Realists, like Mearsheimer at Chicago, and Walt, and others, bought a page in the New York Times, saying "We Realists are opposed to the war, not for any moral reason but because we don't think it serves the national interests."
So, that's one strain of the conservative thinking. Some Realists, in their policies, end up on the liberal side of the equation, but they end up there for slightly different reasons, as I'm trying to suggest.
Then you have a kind of -- well, I think it's a dystopian vision, but an idealism. It's perfectly possible for right-ers to be idealists. I mean, Hitler, to take the extreme case, was an idealist. Benito Mussolini was an idealist. It's not pure cynicism, any more than Machiavelli was a cynic. He had an ideal: a unified Italy. He just said, "Whatever means you have to use to get there are means you have to use. Use them." So, I don't suggest that a person on the right can't be an idealist. I think they're the most dangerous, actually, because a chauvinist idealist, an idealist or idealism without empathy, without what I call liberal empathy, although that's probably redundant, is pitiless.
Is some of this about power and how absolute power corrupts? Because out of liberalism we do derive this sense of checking power, of having checks and balances, of self-constraint or institutional constraint. The conservatives we're talking about, especially the neocons, took control of a very powerful machine, if not an empire, with enormous military power, with toys that could be tried out -- so, I'm just curious if that sort of plays into this equation and tells us that liberals might be less inclined to abuse the power if they held office in the United States.
Let me make two points about that. One, liberalism as it's evolved draws both on the John Stuart Millian idea of liberating the individual, but also on the Burkean idea (I said I'm close to Burke, as well as to Mill), and it's a classic conservative notion, that people are sinful. The notion of original sin was something you'd find on the conservative side of the spectrum. The contemporary liberal recognizes that power is liable to be abused and if you have unchecked power you're bound to abuse it.
The contemporary conservative, particular the neoconservative, seems to have no sense that power is dangerous, and this emphasis in the American right on building up the power of the presidency is extremely unconservative. It is rightist. Conservatism on the Continent, European conservatism, was tied up initially with the absolute monarchy, with the powerful church; that's what European conservatism, or right-wingism, was about. It was definitely authoritarian and didn't worry about the sins of ordinary people, perhaps, but there were superior people who transcended sin.
So, the liberal is concerned about an over-developed executive, an unchecked executive, in part because in its DNA is some of this Burkean sense -- Reinhold Niebuhr was the best modern expression of this -- that people are egoistic, people will inevitably serve their interest, even as they convince themselves that they are serving some higher purpose.
But the other aspect of liberalism, the Millian aspect of liberalism, the emphasis on the individual, on individual liberty -- that, of course, leads to uneasiness about any agglomeration of unchecked power. (Well, that's redundant. It's an agglomeration of power. If it's checked, it's not so powerful. If it's unchecked, it's power.) The liberal is concerned about that, whether it's in private hands or in public hands, because power is there to be exercised and if you don't have a democratically controlled state, if you give the executive the power to ignore the law, [that power will go unchecked.]
[This] is what the present group of rightist lawyers, the people that come out of the Federalist Society, the people who have been planted all over the federal government [are promoting]: this view of executive prerogative, this view of the need for a "supreme president" who transcends the law. Bush has said this frankly, when he signed the detainee treatment bill, McCain's effort to limit torture (at least he said that was what he was trying to do) and said, "Of course I reserve the right of the president to do what is necessary when I deem it necessary, because I am the decider." This is not a Burkean view, and it's certainly not the view of the founding fathers. It is a rightist view, however, because of its emphasis on the power [and] the virtue of an elite, an enlightened elite. As Himmler once said to new recruits to the Gestapo, "You have to be super-humanly inhuman." It's that idea carried, in Himmler's case, to an extreme.
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See also: Interviews with John Mearsheimer (2002) and Stephen Walt (2005)