Does Libya represent a new Wilsonism?

• Position: Symposium - Discussion

In the last issue of The National Interest, we ran a cover story by Nikolas K. Gvosdev and Ray Takeyh positing that America's military role in helping bring down Libyan president Muammar el-Qaddafi represented a significant new era in the country's foreign policy--the ascendancy of a doctrine that placed far greater emphasis on humanitarian considerations as a rationale for military interventions overseas. This was a provocative thesis, and the authors' probing analysis and tight argumentation rendered it one that we were proud to display prominently in our journal. But it occurred to us that it certainly didn't represent the last word on the subject of the future of American foreign policy. And so we invited three prominent international-relations thinkers Leslie H. Gelb, Patrick J. Buchanan and Marc Lynch--to weigh in with their own thoughts on the subject. Their musings follow, along with a final response from Gvosdev and Takeyh, who get the last word as a reward for introducing the subject in the first place.

Leslie H. Gelb

I'm with Gvosdev and Takeyh if they are warning Washington against military intervention for humanitarian reasons or to promote democracy--without due regard for the costs and effects or chances of success. Too often American leaders get carried away by emotions or politics without a decent sense of what they're getting the nation into. Such warnings are always in order, especially when encased in good scholarship. Gvosdev and Takeyh score on all those counts, but I have some questions about exactly where their analysis leads.

First, I wonder about their worries that Libya will set a potent and bad policy precedent. The Obama administration, liberals and even Republicans are all crowing about having overthrown Muammar el-Qaddafi, a vicious dictator, without the loss of one American life and all with the participation of our NATO allies and some key Arab friends. Gvosdev and Takeyh are rightly dubious about that joy. After all, Qaddafi was a rather important intelligence source for the United States in the war against al-Qaeda and terrorism. A1-Qaeda is far from finished, and the loss of Qaddafi's information will hurt. Further, Qaddafi's successors might be much worse than he was in terms of mistreating Libyans and threatening American interests. So, for these and other reasons, warning flags about Libya becoming a precedent for American policy are quite in order.

But, frankly, while I approve of the warnings, I'm not too worried about the precedent. "Success" in Libya has not prompted the Obama administration to intervene militarily in Egypt or Syria, for example. Indeed, Obama tried to save President Mubarak, if only for a transition period, because he was an important American ally in the Middle East. In the end, he let Mubarak go because he couldn't do anything about it. Besides, Obama and many foreign-policy experts were carried away by the Arab Spring, which they saw as the tide of history moving toward the "street democrats." Obama felt he had to get on top of that tide. So, in the end he "intervened" politically in Egypt to support "the democratic revolution." But Obama had no thought of U.S. military intervention in Egypt or anywhere else in the region. It has to be noted as well that Obama has stayed his hand, despite considerable pressure, in Syria, where many are calling for him to help overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. Nor did he do much about the civil war that raged in Sudan or troubles in Bahrain. To be sure, U.S. teams of one hundred men or so are now operating in two or three African countries to deal with humanitarian crises, but that is no big deal. So, thus far, Libya is not proving to be a model for future U.S. policy.

To push the point further, one could argue that Obama's policies elsewhere in the Middle East have been "business as usual," caution squared, even as he was trampling on Qaddafi. There is no talk of democratizing Saudi Arabia or any of its autocratic neighbors friendly to the United States. Indeed, the administration is on an arms-selling spree in the region. Obama is well aware that these states are almost all oil producers and not anti-American. And he is doing nothing to pressure them to make democratic reforms or do anything to endanger their internal control. Gvosdev and Takeyh acknowledge this but say that the Middle East is the "exception." In fact, it is the rule.

Military intervention has not, all of a sudden, become easy. A number of factors cast doubt on the authors' contention that Obama is basically living in a restraint-free world that makes U.S. military intervention easier or even more likely. First, I think the Obama team is wising up about who really benefits from U.S. intervention. China, for example, is the nation profiting from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We do the fighting there, and Beijing buys the oil and other resources. Second, Gvosdev and Takeyh argue that drones have now made the costs of intervention much lower and thus more acceptable. But that really depends on where the battles are fought. Populous areas or trees and mountains with moving targets may be much harder terrain for drones. In theory, drones could spy out targets and strike them anywhere. But drones have been more effective in northwest Pakistan than southern Afghanistan. The authors also seem to suggest that intervention is easier because Washington has forgotten that it might pave the way for bad guys to be succeeded by even worse guys. That is a real concern. But I think Libya was a special case. There, our key allies, who have been helping us in Afghanistan, plus the Arab interventionists made it quite difficult for the Obama team to be sensible. Good sense got shoved aside by unusual allied pressure. Surely, these allies will be less eager to repeat Libya if and when that country falls into hands more unfriendly and murderous than Qaddafi's.

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In sum, I think a good case can be made that we are not entering a period where the floodgates to intervention are opening but a period where floodgates are probably closing. I see increasing caution and opposition to intervention worldwide, and especially in the United States. Strictly humanitarian interventions such as Haiti will remain the exceptions. It might even be hard to duplicate good humanitarian...