Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Three days after the 9/11 attacks, President George W Bush claimed, “Our responsibility to history is already clear: To… rid the world of evil.” I can recall being stunned by the scope of that assertion. Your most recent book is subtitled A History of American Hubris. How did that characteristic shape post-9/11 policies?
The theory of my book, The Icarus Syndrome, is that American hubris tends to stem from American success, and so American foreign policy is most likely to over-reach after periods where we’ve had a lot of success in exerting our power to reshape the world as we want. So while others have explained Bush policy as just a response to the trauma of 9/11 or as a result of neoconservatism, I argue that a lot of what Bush did after 9/11 can be seen as an escalation of trends that started to emerge in American foreign policy in the 1990s.
You were the editor of the influential left-leaning political magazine The New Republic during the attacks. How did the events of 9/11 initially impact on the liberal intelligentsia?
For me, and most of us at The New Republic, the effort to conceptualise a response after the shock of the event was very influenced by our set of recent experiences. This is something I write about in the introduction to The Icarus Syndrome. My views about the response to 9/11 were very influenced by my experience, at a formative time in my life, of the debates over the Gulf War, Bosnia and Kosovo. Like many others, I tended to see the post-9/11 debates through that prism and that was a prism that promoted a degree of optimism about the efficacy of American military power and its ability to be used in support of human rights.
So let’s move forward to the five books you’ve selected about the post-9/11 political environment. Beginning with The Fight is for Democracy, a volume of nine essays edited and introduced by The New Yorker’s George Packer. What makes it essential reading in your mind?
The Fight is for Democracy really captures a spirit that existed in the wake of 9/11 amongst the species known as liberal hawks. I myself was one at the time. To read this book is to understand the moral and intellectual nature of this species, which helps to explain why the Afghan war was so bipartisan and why even the Iraq war had so much support from Democrats and some liberals.
In the essays you see the struggle against Al-Qaeda through the lens of a certain liberal conception of the Cold War. Liberals became more sympathetic to the whole enterprise of the Cold War after it ended and they also saw the struggle against Al-Qaeda through the prism of the war in the Balkans, which had a big impact on people like George Packer and Paul Berman and myself. The book really helps sets forth the basis of one of the important ideological strands that emerged after 9/11, this liberal-hawk perspective.
What path do these essays collectively chart for post-9/11 American policy?
They supported an active ambitious American role around the world, including openness to military force to spread democracy and human rights and an effort to combine that with a struggle for greater democracy in the United States. I think that twin vision was influenced by the efforts of people on the anti-totalitarian left in the United States, starting in the 1930s and continuing through into the first decades of the Cold War.
This book was published in 2003 and, as you said, it suggests a path for liberals seeking to re-conceptualise America’s place in the world. Your 2006 book The Good Fight seemed to take steps further down that path. Can you recapitulate its core points please?
The Good Fight was influenced by the same impulses, the effort to find a usable liberal anti-totalitarian past, to find a liberal language for expressing revulsion against what Al-Qaeda represented and a path between what could seem like conservative neo-imperialism and a leftism that seemed to me at that point uncomfortable with the use of American power. The Good Fight outlined what the struggle against jihadist terrorism could look like from a liberal perspective, drawing from the way in which liberals thought about the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism.
The first point I stressed, as liberal anti-communists tended to stress, was that the health of American society at home was absolutely central to our long struggle against the Soviet Union. Our ability to regenerate ourselves and bring ourselves closer to our own democratic ideals, as we did during the Civil Rights movement, was crucial in our struggle to be a stronger society than the Soviet Union. So in The Good Fight I stressed the importance of America not sacrificing principles of human rights and civil liberties during the post-9/11 period. I also argued that America would not be able to sustain a long-term costly struggle against Al-Qaeda if we were not fostering a society in which average Americans were able to prosper.
The second point I stressed was that international law and international alliances weren’t a source of weakness, as they were often imagined to be by figures on the right, both during the Cold War and after 9/11. They could actually be a source of great strength in a struggle against totalitarians.
Peter Beinart is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York. He is also senior political writer at The Daily Beast and a contributor to Time. As a Rhodes Scholar, Beinart earned an MPhil in international relations from Oxford University, and from 1999 to 2006 he was editor of The New Republic. His latest book is The Icarus Syndrome
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