Daydream Believers:

If novelty were the only criterion for judging polemical arguments about the Bush Administration’s foreign policy failures, then Fred Kaplan’s new book would merit little praise. This is because it says something that every informed critic of the War on Terrorism already knows: despite the claims made by the President and his advisors, nothing fundamental about the world of international affairs actually changed on September 11th, 2001; every policy that has been subsequently justified by suggesting the contrary has been based on a mistake. Fortunately for Kaplan and for us, however, historians do not labor under the tyranny of novelty. We can forgive them for boring us if they are right. Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power is a monotonous book, but it’s a dogged one, too. Like its central argument, the details it provides are familiar. They are also, simply, depressingly true.

Kaplan rebuts the idea that 9/11 changed how the international world works. But he does allow for the fact that something actually did change seven years ago: our national self-perception as a secure and prosperous country, comfortably removed from the religious and political struggles that scarred the globe with increasing frequency in the 1990s. After 9/11, we had good reason, for the first time in generations, to fear our place in the world. Of course, it’s precisely when we are most afraid that we tend to confuse our perceptions of the world with its realities. Daydream Believers shows how the Bush Administration manipulated this fear, using it as a pretext to assert a hubristic vision of an America unconstrained by alliances and delicate balances of power.

In order to achieve this, in order to make it seem like something fundamental about the world had changed, and therefore to justify any manner of radical and foolish decisions abroad — the invasion of Iraq on behalf of human rights and the simultaneous condoning of torture are complementary in this regard — it was necessary for the Administration to ignore reality as much as possible in matters of state. Instead of recognizing the real, then, it decided to invent it. Orwellian language like this may sound too partisan, so it’s useful to remember that the most succinct way of describing this attempt at remaking reality came not from the President’s opponents but from the people who worked for him. Recall Ron Suskind’s famous conversation with an unnamed White House aide in 2002, later published in The New York Times Magazine:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Hardt & Negri could not have said it better themselves. You don’t need to be a Marxist or even a critic of globalization to get the problem with this kind of thinking. All you need to do is look around. The imperial fantasy ignores a basic fact about the world: there are other people living in it. These other people have their own interests that do not necessarily coincide everywhere with our own. They just might have something to say about our actions, particularly if they include violent attempts to refashion their countries and cultures in our image. If the catalog of recent US failures in Daydream Believers is any indication, this Administration sorely underestimated the capacity of the world to resist our attempts at creating it anew. It made this mistake because it believed the rest of the world was irrelevant, and it believed this because it believed in the omnipotence of American power.

Why did this Administration — particularly one whose initial electoral platform had called for more humility in dealing with the rest of the world — believe something that, on its face, seems so ludicrous? Kaplan answers this question by telling two stories, myths really, about American invincibility.

The first story is one about naiveté; specifically, the belief that superior military technology will always and necessarily translate into lasting victory on the ground. We learn from Kaplan that Donald Rumsfeld’s controversial decision to invade Iraq with a relatively small but agile force was not just a bureaucratic whim: it was the culmination of forty years of institutional thinking about how technologically-enhanced weaponry had fundamentally changed the nature of warfare, a “revolution in military affairs.” Smart weaponry would be so ruthless, quick and efficient that it would shock and awe enemy forces into submission while keeping US troops out of danger. The war to drive the Taliban from Afghanistan — one in which Special Forces riding on horseback transmitted intelligence to unmanned Predator drones flown from bases thousands of miles away — appeared to confirm this notion.

In fact, all it confirmed was that the new toys for killing people were more efficient than the old ones, in the same way that a gun is more efficient than a spear. The rest of the vision, in which the enemy quickly capitulates in the face of our awesome military technology, never materialized. It was, in other words, a fantasy. If it took some time for this to be clear in Afghanistan, where the Taliban slunk away to remain dangerously on the margins, it was almost immediately apparent in Iraq. There, the widespread looting and instability that greeted our arrival in Baghdad — immortalized in Rumsfeld’s laconic “Freedom’s untidy” — indicated that our lightning victory had been purchased at a terrible price, one that ordinary Iraqis would have to pay. Kaplan reminds us, approvingly, of Clausewitz’s maxim in which “War is politics by other means,” and then juxtaposes this wisdom with the complete lack of a plan for transitioning Iraq’s politics from a dictatorship to a democracy. What sort of politics, then, were we conducting in our invasion of Iraq? The terrifying answer is that, like every empire, we were only ever conducting domestic politics.

This brings us to Kaplan’s second myth of American omnipotence. This story, too, is about a naive mistake — the mistake of thinking that the rest of the world will let us do what we want, because the rest of the world, deep down, wants to be just like us. Kaplan lays responsibility for this simple but insidious notion at the feet of the President and his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson. Working in tandem, these two translated the practice of religious evangelism into contemporary political language. Instead of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the United States government was morally bound to spread its own gospel of freedom through the aggressive promotion democracy. Kaplan delves into considerable detail here, explaining how the President’s evangelical model of foreign relations melded two other approaches that would have otherwise been incompatible: the Neoconservative desire for re-moralized foreign policy, and the old-fashioned nationalist concern for protecting US strategic interests.

The gist of the Bush/Gerson agenda was that toppling tyrants and promoting democracy abroad was a strategic interest for the United States in the post-9/11 world. It sounds as nice now as it did back in 2005, when the President made it the centerpiece of his second inaugural. But there are three obvious problems with this big idea, none of which appeared to trouble the President, his wordsmith, or anyone with any meaningful access to either.

First: there’s the logical contradiction involved in promoting democracy by force: invading a country and subjecting its citizens to the risks of armed conflict belies the stated goal of giving these same citizens the opportunity to decide their political future for themselves. When your family members die in an errant bomb or are killed in post-war chaos, why should you be grateful for your liberation?

Second: democracy is not a sufficient condition for the kind of freedom that some people in our own country have enjoyed at some times — that more complicated picture requires civil society, the rule of law, an active press, a robust marketplace, an accommodation between religious institutions and political ones, and a coherent idea of nationhood. Caught in the Oedipal quest to live up to the achievements of the “Greatest Generation,” the President and his advisors thought that Iraq would resemble post-World War II Germany or Japan when, in fact, it did resemble something a lot more like post-Tito Yugoslavia. Given the Neoconservative enthusiasm for the interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s, it is doubly surprising that no one on the President’s National Security Council ever thought about this similarity.

Third: the United States has, to put it mildly, not been a friend to every democracy in the developing world. Either as a consequence of past grievances or simply as a matter of choice, not every democracy that comes to power there now will be a friend of the United States. What’s more, some of these democracies will decide, like India and Pakistan did in the 1990s, to develop nuclear weapons. Given that we've withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to pursue the fantasy of missile defense, what will we say then?

As we count down to the end of the Bush era, all of these problems persist: the first two in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the last elsewhere (Iran, Venezuela, Gaza). This doesn’t even include the thorniest problem of all, North Korea, about whose successful quest for nuclear weapons Kaplan has much to say (unsurprisingly, the narrowly moralistic approach of assigning the country to the Axis of Evil is largely to blame).

Coupled with unprecedented levels of domestic inequality, these foreign policy problems comprise this President’s legacy to his country. What should we do about them? Daydream Believers does not offer much in the way of specific solutions. When he does shift finally into a prescriptive mode, Kaplan calls for a return to “statecraft.” This sounds, at least at times, very much like a return to old-fashioned realism. Not, mind you, the arrogant realism of Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, or the cynical realism of Henry Kissinger, but the more hopeful, alliance-building realism of the post-war period: the realism of Harry Truman and George Marshall, Dean Acheson and George Kennan.

Here Kaplan skirts nostalgic territory previously explored by Peter Beinart, and runs up against a similar set of problems. There is more than a bit of liberal fantasy burnishing the reputation of these Cold Warriors, a problematic irony for a book whose purported target is fantastical thinking. As the author himself admits in a brief aside, American policies of the Cold War were not perfect. This is surely an understatement, given those experiences in Southeast Asia that liberals nostalgic for American power tend so easily to forget, and the real economic duress created in the developing world by institutions born out of post-War alliances, like the IMF.

From the perspective of Daydream Believers, the great liberal anti-Communist thinkers are worth emulating insofar as their foreign policies were grounded, however imperfectly, in an attempt to understand the world — and not, as in the Bush Administration, in ideology divorced from its realities. All well and good. But wouldn’t it be morally and strategically better for the United States to articulate a foreign policy in which our preeminent global position was matched by our capacity to grasp the problems caused by our preeminence? In other words, we should figure out a way to preserve and legitimate our power by making it less of a threat to other nations, by making it serve the common good. This much seems clear: Acheson and Kennan were better for everyone than Cheney and Rice. The mistakes of the past were made by greater and nobler thinkers than the mistakes of the present. We should avoid both.