Meanwhile on the Left.

• Author: Kaplan, Lawrence F.

AT THE END of the Cold War, there was a widely held belief that an era of rancorous foreign policy debates had been put behind us. But within a year or two foreign policy intellectuals were again going at each other full bore--over Bosnia, China, NATO expansion, human rights, trade and sundry other topics. It is fair to say that these debates have been dominated by conservatives. Typically, they have taken the form of intramural disputes between "neoconservatives" and "realists" in the pages of journals like Commentary, The Weekly Standard, National Review, First Things and The National Interest.

Given this dominance, it has been easy to overlook the fact that some interesting things have been happening on the foreign policy Left. True, with the Cold War's denouement many of its members have shifted their gaze to perceived injustices at home, while others have retreated to the academy and, as Paul Hollander has put it, "to new preoccupations like multiculturalism, identity politics, postmodernism, deconstructionism, or radical feminism." But even if somewhat marginalized, there remains a distinctive leftist critique of America's global role.

Or rather several competing leftist critiques. For just as the demise of Soviet communism dissolved the substantial foreign policy consensus on the Right, so did it sunder the Left into competing factions. From these there have emerged four distinct camps, which are of interest both in themselves and because, in a way, they help to explain the divide on the Right.

The Not-So-New Left

THE FIRST and least interesting of these--what might be labeled the Not-So-New Left--descends from the radicalism of the Vietnam era. In fact, to listen to the rhetoric of its spokesmen is to be transported back to that fractious period, for neither the end of the Cold War nor the advent of humanitarian intervention seems to have made the slightest impression on this group. What motivates its ranks and is central to its position is the conviction that American foreign policy is irredeemably tainted, marred by past involvement in too many suspect conflicts and past support for too many dictators. "This fitful attention to human rights should arouse suspicion", Nation columnist Katha Pollitt cautioned her readers during the war in Kosovo. "How likely is it that the United States has suddenly awakened to moral realities of which it was ignorant when it was supporting the Mobutu regime in Zaire, financing the contras in Nicaragua?"

And even Pollitt was outdone by Tom Hayden, who seized upon the military effort in the Balkans as clear proof that the United States intended to "consolidat[e] an economic and military alliance" of "the former colonial and imperial powers."

For all their coarseness, however, the Haydens and Pollitts of this world are the residue of a vanishing past. Less hidebound commentators on the Left, indeed, have felt constrained to rebuke them for their reflexive opposition to American power. One of these, David Rieff, recently denounced in the pages of World Policy Journal "the utopian nihilism of a left that would prefer to see genocide in Bosnia and the mass deportation of the Kosovars rather than strengthen, however marginally, the hegemony of the United States." Likewise, Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens has admonished Noam Chomsky for his rote denunciation of American intervention in Kosovo, drawing his attention to the fact that we live "in a new era, where old reflexes serve us less well." These "old reflexes", moreover, have been subjected to some honest, and what for some must be a painful, scrutiny. Casting a glance backward in Dissent, for example, Paul Berman has conceded that, on matters of foreign affairs, "we, too, as much as any sli ppery Nation editor or forthright Fidelista or honest Sandinista, had gotten frozen in the...