Drezner's Disappointing Attempt to Escape Dialogue

There's been a lot of back and forth over the last few days over blogger criticism of "the foreign policy community" between liberal bloggers Glenn Greenwald and Matthew Yglesias and foreign policy specialists Gideon Rose and Daniel Drezner. The liberal blogger or "netroots" critique of the foreign policy community or "establishment" is essentially the same as their critique of the mainstream media. According to Greenwald and Yglesias, the prominent foreign policy specialists who promoted the invasion of Iraq suffered no apparent consequences for their egregious misjudgments. In fact, the consensus of the foreign policy community still seems to be at least close to neo-conservative military adventurism. Likewise, it still appears that war opponents are frozen out of significant participation in foreign policy discussion. Despite the monumental nature of the Iraq disaster, nothing seems to have changed in the foreign policy community.

Greenwald and Yglesias are two of my favorite bloggers though and I think it fair to say that I'm biased toward them. However, I have to say that my main reaction to the controversy is disappointment in the writing of Drezner and Rose. They both work at foreign policy full-time and I believe they have more knowledge in the area than generalists like Greenwald and Yglesias. Yet, instead of using his expertise to further the discussion, the specialists set up a bunch of straw men and phony hypotheticals that seem designed to obfuscate rather than enlighten.

Let me give an example from Drezner's discussion of military intervention. Greenwald argues that "the U.S. should not attack another country unless that country has attacked or directly threatens our national security . . ." Greenwald's main weakness as a commentator is that he often engages in overly broad formulations like this and Drezner certainly could have contested this definition of legitimate attacks on other countries as too broad to be useful or in need of modification. Given Drezner's expertise in international affairs, he could have done so in a way that advanced the discussion of appropriate American conduct in a post/9-11 and post Iraq world. In other words, Dresner could have used his specialist knowledge to improve on Greenwald. But no dice. Instead, Drezner asks a set of rhetorical questions:

How does one define direct threats to national security? For the United States, would civil war in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan qualify? Should the use of force be categorically rejected in both cases? Does Iran's links to the Khobar Towers bombing justify the use of force against Teheran, as per Greenwald's criteria?

Ultimately, these questions are disingenuous, and perhaps dangerously so. By using the hypothetical examples of civil war in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan just to frame a rhetorical question about Greenwald's definition, Drezner implicitly claims that Greenwald's definition fails because Drezner can raise these kinds of questions. Instead of using his expertise to further discussion, Drezner apparently seeks to drive Greenwald back to a zero point where there is no limitation on the ability of the American government to attack other countries.

It didn't have to be this way. At a minimum, Drezner could have used his examples to articulate something like a concept of "indirect threat" to American national security as justifying attacks on other nations as a complicating factor. Such indirect threats certainly would not always justify attacks, but civil wars in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan "might" impinge enough on American national security to justify attacks in "certain circumstances" that shouldn't be discounted in advance. In such a case, one could justify an American military operation without aiming for the global domination envisioned by PNAC and the Bush doctrine.

In other words, Drezner could have defined a "prudent" rule of thumb that closed off military adventures like Iraq but didn't unnecessarily hamstring American policy-makers.

There's a danger in Drezner's giving Greenwald the back of his hand like this. While attempting to close down Greenwald's effort to define a limit to American attacks, Drezner is opening up the possibility that the U. S. has a right to attack any country any time we want as neo-cons like Ledeen, Bolton, and Robert Kagan (especially in Of Paradise and Power) argue. Without any principled limitations on the right of the American government to attack other countries, the question then becomes whether the U. S. has the military power to execute all the attacks that the warmongers can imagine. Given that the neo-cons believe we have potentially unlimited military power, that means we can attack practically any country (except Israel) at any time.

Drezner goes on to bait Greenwald in ways that refuse to take him seriously even though the article was entitled "Taking Glenn Greenwald Seriously." Ultimately, both Drezner confirms the blogger critique of the foreign policy community. They are determined to learn nothing from Iraq.

More than anything else, I find that disappointing.