Liberal Interventionism R.I.P.

While conducting fieldwork in Washington DC this summer, I was struck by the many complaints about President Obama’s lack of interest in pursuing liberal values abroad. “Those working in the ‘democracy sector’, haven’t seen many resources coming their way from this administration”, one critic told me in private. Others quibbled about Obama’s deafening silence on international human rights issues. Let alone the tsunami of TV commentators debating whether the President was keener on allegedly importing European-style big-government socialism rather than promoting, at home and abroad, America’s entrepreneurial spirit and free-market ethos.

Wondering whether these narrow policy complains reflected broader shifts in American strategic thinking, I turned to Obama’s newly released (May 2010) National Security Strategy (NSS) in search for clues. And I found them. Indeed, what I found was that America’s liberal interventionist grand strategic approach, which had come to define much of its foreign policy thinking and practice since the end of the Cold War, had all but faded. Roughly speaking, liberal interventionism is the belief that the active promotion of liberal values worldwide - such as free markets, human rights and democracy - are instrumental to maintaining international peace and stability and a vital U.S. security interest. Its advocates have generally proposed that the U.S. use its power to pursue and protect these values through direct intervention - even military if necessary - in the domestic affairs of foreign countries.

Take human rights and democracy promotion for example. At a close look of Obama’s NSS, riddled it is with the language of engagement, building cooperation and investing at home to renew American leadership, while impulses of intervening on humanitarian grounds or to spread liberty internationally seem to have gone. Compare Obama’s NSS, for example, with Bush’s 2002 NSS and Clinton’s 1998 NSS. One has to go to page 36, to have a hint of what Obama’s strategy to uphold “universal values” would be:

“The United States supports those who seek to exercise universal rights around the world. We promote our values above all by living them at home...America will not impose any system of government on another country…More than any other action that we have taken, the power of America’s example has helped spread freedom and democracy abroad.” (p.36)

Contrast this ‘exemplarist’ stance with Bush’s highly interventionist freedom agenda, which took center stage in his NSS. Indeed the document opened with the following lines:

“The United States possesses unprecedented - and unequaled - strength and influence in the world. Sustained by faith in the principles of liberty, and the value of a free society, this position comes with unparalleled responsibilities, obligations, and opportunity. The great strength of this nation must be used to promote a balance of power that favors freedom.” (p.1)

The 2002 NSS’ first key strategic objective was to “champion aspirations for human dignity” (i.e. democratic institutions and human rights). This logic then became a central ideological component in pursuing strategies of democracy promotion in the Middle East, build support in the run up to the war in Iraq as well as driving state-building activities in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

So too there are few echoes in Obama’s strategy of anything like the Clinton era concept of “democratic enlargement”. Nor are there many openings for possible humanitarian interventions, which instead peppered the 1990s decade.  Clinton’s 1998 NSS also articulated a more explicit activist approach to “promoting democracy and human rights”, than Obama’s current one, explicitly indicating it as the third core objective of its national security strategy.

“We must sustain our efforts to press for political liberalization and respect for basic human rights worldwide, including in countries that continue to defy democratic advances.” (p.34)

On the economic front, as well, the self-confidence in the necessity of advancing a liberal economic order internationally has evaporated from the 2010 document. Out of the post-Cold War era administrations, Clinton’s was the one which most vigorously articulated a foreign policy vision around the universal expansion of markets. Indeed he appeared at times to elevate economic interests at the same level of more traditional national security concerns. Globalization was the word of the day, while key American priorities were to extend open markets and free trade worldwide alongside building and beefing-up international liberal economic arrangements such as NAFTA, APEC and the WTO. During the 1990s, The Bretton Woods organizations were also given a freer hand in their lending and in advocating for a markedly neoliberal approach to poverty reduction and economic growth.

Similarly bullish was Bush’s NSS about the need to intervene internationally to advance neoliberal economic policies. A stated objective in the 2002 NSS was to “ignite a new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade”. The 2002 NSS also tied economic liberty to the President’s freedom agenda:

“A strong world economy enhances our national security by advancing prosperity and freedom in the rest of the world. Economic growth supported by free trade and free markets… reinforces the habits of liberty. We will promote economic growth and economic freedom beyond America’s shores.” (p.17)

Then contrast this cavalier attitude of previous decades towards liberal economic prescriptions with Obama’s call for more state-led fiscal stimulus during the latest G20 meeting in Canada. In parallel the 2010 NSS has few words to spare for the universal application of liberal economic principles. It instead concentrates primarily on the notion of rebuilding the domestic foundations for American ‘prosperity’, by:

“Strengthening education and human capital, enhancing science, technology and innovation, achieving a balanced and sustainable growth” (p.2).

I’ll leave it to more rigorous academic analysis than this simple blog post to try and explain why such a shift away from liberal interventionism has happened. One can simply speculate that both international structural and domestic forces are at play here. The slow end of unipolarity with the rise of regional powers along with the soft balancing of an international public opinion which has repercussions on how far national governments can support a highly interventionist American foreign policy, may be at work here. Also domestic forces within the US, such as the high economic, military and human costs of repeated and protracted foreign adventures, could have dampened passions for more of the same.  Furthermore, particular policies have been delegitimized given their partial or complete failures. For example, the realization that protecting human rights abroad through military means is hopeless when there is no functioning state, as in the case of Haiti and Somalia. Similarly, the realization has taken hold democracy isn’t built in a day, as neoconservatives hoped for in Iraq and Afghanistan, and requires a more sustained commitment than interventionists might have previously assumed. Likewise, the 2007-2008 financial cataclysm appears to have deflated enthusiasms for neoliberal economic recipes. Given this scenario, liberal interventionism, which has defined much of American foreign policy strategy for the past two decades, has now been put to rest. 

Gregorio Bettiza is a PhD candidate in International Relations and IDEAS Centre Stonex Scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  He serves as Programme Assistant on the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Programme.

“The Connection Was Reset”: Google goes to War for the West

Internet users in China last night discovered that the domain Google.cn redirected to Google.com.hk, as the world’s largest search engine shut down its Chinese servers and redirected traffic to Hong Kong, where – crucially – the search engine results would be uncensored by Google themselves.  Of course, users with IP addresses in mainland China attempting to search for material deemed ‘sensitive’ by the Chinese authorities would still be prevented from accessing information by the ‘Great Firewall’, with its tell-tale error message: ‘the connection was reset’.

Yet Google’s decision is of limited significance to Chinese surfers.  Experienced activists in China have ways and means of getting round the authorities’ controls, for example by using IP blocking, VPNs and proxy severs.  Indeed, within China Google accounts for only around 20% of searches, with the home-grown search engine Baidu holding the kind of dominance Google is used to enjoying, with 75% of all searches.  Having said that, China’s technology for blocking and filtering web results is less sophisticated and effective than the rules Google voluntarily applied to its Chinese ‘spiders’ four years ago, so the move does represent a very small, but nonetheless welcome, boost fro freedom of information in China.

Nor is Google’s decision of particular significance for the finances of the company itself in the short term, even if the decision has been taken – as was the case in 2006 when Google decided to filter its results in China – very much from a business perspective.  China accounts for less than 1% of Google’s total income: whilst companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have been eager to gain access to a rapidly-growing market with up to a billion new customers, the fact is that currently revenues from China are insignificant.  Indeed the business decision that Google appears to have taken is that their stance on China has begun to erode their position in other markets.  Google’s idealistic founders may have based the company around the slogan ‘don’t be evil’, but that clever piece of marketing disguised the essential truth behind the search engine’s success: yes Google was fast; yes it returned different, and ultimately better, results; but the key to Google’s dominance was that their users had trust in it.  And user trust is all the more important as firms compete to control user data as more and more computing takes place ‘in the cloud’.  So whilst Google’s decision is based on a long-term business argument that has brought it great success to date, it risks little in the short term in the Chinese market.  Google also clearly believes that Chinese censorship is unsustainable, and that once controls are removed it will be able to return to that market victorious, able to generate user trust quickly on the basis that it – unlike Microsoft or Yahoo – has a genuine commitment to open information, that it had not been evil.

And here is the rub: by revealing the Chinese government’s widespread hacking regime – a fairly open secret in the IT world – and by withdrawing from China, Google has raised the stakes in the ideological conflict surrounding the rights of people versus the rights of governments; it has essentially gone to war for liberalism.  Whilst China may have embraced the economic tenets of liberal capitalism fairly convincingly over the last two decades, its attitudes to political liberalism lag far behind.  Ultimately – as Google rightly believes – sociologically the two cannot be separated: free consumption requires political freedom and vice-versa, and the progress of Chinese economic growth, particularly as it seeks to develop its economy past the core manufacturing stage to focus on R&D and information services, cannot hope to proceed smoothly without political liberalisation.  Google’s actions, however, are a spur to that process, which will both embolden activists, weak though they remain in the face of the Chinese state, and more importantly detract from China’s ability to continue to progress its economy into more advanced sectors.

It is, as well, inconceivable that Google would have taken this move without consultation with the United States government.  Whilst the administration is truly a ‘team of rivals’ with regards to policy on China, with Hilary Clinton significantly more hawkish than the President and Vice-President, the government’s enlisting of Twitter as a policy adjunct during the Green protests in Iran demonstrates that the administration understands the power of open information in driving social and political change conducive to US interests.  So while China is able to defy the diplomatic demands of the US on the level of the Yuan, on sanctions for Iran, or on human rights, in Google it may encounter an irresistible force for the spread of political liberalism.

Dr Nicholas Kitchen  is a Fellow of LSE IDEAS and Programme Coordinator of the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Relations Programme.