In addition to continuing his abuse of the word autocracy to describe the governments of Russia and China, Kagan writes this clarifying, horrifying passage:

What right, indeed? Only the liberal creed grants the right–the belief that all men are created equal and have certain inalienable rights that must not be abridged by governments; that governments derive their power and legitimacy only from the consent of the governed and have a duty to protect their citizens’ right to life, liberty, and property. To those who share this liberal faith, foreign policies and even wars that defend these principles, as in Kosovo, can be right even if established international law says they are wrong [bold mone-DL].

This is refreshingly straightforward.  Here is an admission that democratist interventionism is based on an ideological fantasy and has no legal basis at all.  It is revealing that Kagan writes an entire article about the “autocracies” and seems not to notice the irony that they, not the democratic West, are on the side of international law as it actually exists.  If democratists were right that only other kinds of regimes are the revisionist, aggressive ones, this might be less worrisome, but in a world where democracies believe they have a higher calling to violate international law in the name of “rights” the preservation of international order necessarily falls to authoritarian and authoritarian-populist states.  (I would still say that Russian is not undemocratic, but it is illiberal because it is democratic, but authoritarian populist will do for now.)  This is a very undesirable and potentially explosive arrangement.  On one side, you have an ideologically-driven mania that says sovereignty and international law can be compromised whenever certain powers feel (and feel is the right verb here) it necessary to protect “rights,” and on the other hand there are states that now have every incentive not to reform their political systems, because reform has been inextricably associated with foreign subversion and attempts at isolation and encirclement, and have absolutely no incentive to help the West isolate pariah regimes around the world.  On the contrary, they now have every reason to work overtime at subverting and overthrowing democratic and pseudo-democratic, ”pro-Western” regimes along their borders, since they see them (correctly) as outposts of a fundamentally hostile ideology. 

Structurally, Russia and China are in the position the U.S. and western Europe were in during the late 1940s with the beginning of containment, while the U.S. and Europe have adopted the revolutionary posture of the USSR and China.  Then, theirs was the supposedly “popular” and definitely militant ideology that transcended borders and sovereignty in the name of “universal values,” while we relied at least partly on the strictures of international law to resist their subversive and expansionist goals.  Back then, our posture was basically defensive and interested in thwarting interference in our affairs.  Even so, containment was used to justify projections of power and interventions all across the globe.  We should not be surprised if we see something similar in coming decades, especially if Washington insists on restarting the Cold War with the Russians with continued NATO expansion.  Of course, when new proxy wars backed by these other states or revolutions against our allies finally do occur, there will be mystification and confusion in Washington as to how this could have happened, since there were supposedly never any provocations to trigger such a response.  In the same fantasy world where NATO has supposedly become less aggressive and Russia more so, and Russian outrage at the latest NATO expansion is supposedly something new, whatever responses these other states have to continuing encroachment and meddling will be treated as unprovoked neo-imperialism and used as the justification for a new round of our own interventions. 

Filed under: foreign policy, politics