The American left has always been more comfortable with domestic policy than foreign. Progressives are happy to talk about injustice at home. But what about injustice abroad? Are there circumstances in which the United States can use its power and influence to advance justice or to check repression in a foreign country? Modern American liberals don’t have enough faith in our country to think we have the right, or even the ability, to lead other peoples toward worthier forms of governance. They fall back on rejectionism—rejection of militarism, rejection of imperialism, rejection of American “arrogance.” No dictatorial regime is ever odious enough, no threat to the interests of the United States or our allies sufficiently egregious to warrant decisive action.
“Over many years and many occasions, this negative argument is certain to be right some of the time,” the liberal intellectual Michael Walzer remarks in his new book A Foreign Policy for the Left. “But when reiterated pretty much all the time, it amounts to a questionable demand for inwardness. Arguing against this imperial aggression or that military adventure, we regularly insist that our country should avoid all engagements abroad and devote its energy and resources to creating a more just society here at home.”
This proclivity was in the making long before the rise of Barack Obama, but his presidency led the American left into permanent inertia. Obama’s foreign-policy officials considered themselves masters of pragmatism, the opposite of their “neoconservative” forerunners. Mainly this meant refusing to use American power to counter tyranny and oppression abroad. Instead they dithered, engaging in endless rounds of deal-brokering.
The most famous of their agreements is the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. It has now been so thoroughly discredited that almost its only defenders are the Obama administration officials behind it. The mullahs never had any intention of abiding by their promises—Iranian officials were caught trying to buy banned ballistic-missile devices almost as soon as the ink was dry, and the regime has never allowed nuclear inspectors the full access to its facilities stipulated in the deal. Perhaps the worst part of the deal, though, is that the United States freed roughly $100 billion in frozen Iranian assets, money Obama insisted would benefit the Iranian people. It has, instead, in large measure been used to fund the regime’s military adventurism in Gaza, Syria, and Yemen.
To achieve this folly of a deal, the Obama administration kept almost totally silent about the Green Revolution that swept Iran after the stolen presidental election of 2009. Even more ignoble was Obama’s silence as the Iranian government supplied Bashar al-Assad with the means to slaughter entire populations in Syria—in some cases with chemical weapons. Obama knew that to intervene directly would have upset the Iranians and jeopardized the nuclear agreement.
And so perhaps it’s not such a surprise to witness the post-Obama left’s near-total incapacity to offer so much as a heartfelt cheer for the Iranian protesters who again have taken to the streets. These men and women are demanding a say in their political future. They are opposing a government that imprisons its critics, oppresses women, and abets genocide. There is nothing about these protests that should give American liberals the slightest cause for ambivalence. Everything about their worldview—their fervent belief in the equality of women and minorities, in the superiority of secular government over theocracy, in the rights of free speech and free assembly—should impel them to cheer the Iranian protesters and back any effort to advance their cause.
Yet we hear hardly a word.
Crippled by self-doubt, beguiled by Obama into thinking every malevolent actor can be pacified through superior negotiating skills, American liberals have lost any moral impulse. They seem to have returned to the perverse anti-anticommunism of the Cold War, when America’s enemies were always at least half-right and always had to be negotiated with, never confronted or criticized.
So as we watch videos of brave Iranians risking imprisonment and death by demanding the abolition of a quasi-police state run by religious zealots, liberal intellectuals are defensive and quiet. Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador to the U.N. and long ago a strong proponent of humanitarian interventionism, confined herself to a snarky shot at Donald Trump on Twitter. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s foreign-policy adviser, dourly pointed out that “it seems lost on too many” that events in Iran are “about what Iranians want for Iran, and not about us.” In the New York Times, Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice counseled the Trump administration to keep quiet about the protests. Thomas Erdbrink, the New York Times’s Tehran bureau chief, downplayed the protests and even complained on Twitter that it is “hard to report” because “my driver is afraid his car will be vandalized.”
How strange that by comparison with many American liberal commentators and intellectuals, the nationalist and intermittently isolationist Donald Trump sounds like a thoroughgoing humanitarian: “Big protests in Iran,” the president tweeted on New Year’s Eve. “The people are finally getting wise as to how their money and wealth is being stolen and squandered on terrorism. Looks like they will not take it any longer. The USA is watching very closely for human rights violations!”
American liberals, it would seem, are internationalists only if it means handing over U.S. sovereignty to transnational organizations like the United Nations or the International Criminal Court. If it means confronting the globe’s most powerful and repressive thugs, or even offering a hurrah for the subjects who stand up to them, they fall quiet. American liberals have in essence become cynical “realists”—little Kissingers without the learning or foresight.
Liberal internationalism is dead, along with a great many Syrians and other innocents. Brutalized populations will need to look elsewhere for help.
