Back to School on Foreign Policy

John Yoo asked for it, and is now going to get it good and hard!

Editor's note:

John Yoo's lengthy and substantial response more than a week ago to the dissents on foreign policy from me, Hadley Arkes, and Michael Deis threatens now to turn into something resembling those long Supreme Court opinions that come in several parts, with concurrences and partial dissents, all filed separately in a manner that assures maximum confusion among readers. Today we begin a three-part daily installment responding to John, after which he will no doubt want to ignore Healey's First Law of Holes ("If you're in one, stop digging!"), and offer another response.

I'll lead off today with some specific observations about John's continuing obtuseness about Leo Strauss, though I reserve the right to a sequel that goes point-by-point through some of his specific queries and challenges. Hadley will turn up tomorrow, and Michael Deis on Thursday.

Game on!

—Steve

John is attempting to practice Straussian analysis without a license. He doesn't even know the secret handshake! I'm going to order a case of Claremont/Hillsdale/Dallas Cracker Jacks until he finds the correct decoder ring (or perhaps, as a desperate measure, I'll get McDonald's to include in them in happy meals).

Concerning the thesis statement of his argument in the first paragraph, it is quite an achievement for John to have packed so many errors into so few words. Let's start with his statement that "Leo Strauss wrote little to nothing about foreign policy, and his intellectual descendants appear to share no established school of thought on the question."

It is fortunate John prefaces this statement with "As far as I know." But for this, we could not remain friends. He is missing the deeper ground of the argument, which comes in two parts: the first part is understanding why the pretentions of the "scientific administrative state" informs not only the administrative state at home, but the liberal internationalism abroad that the Trump Administration and a rebalancing toward realism threatens to upend in fundamental ways.

The second is the anchoring of statesmanship in prudence rightly understood, rather than abstract axioms like "idealism" (Wilsonian or otherwise) or "realism," whether understood as mere interest or brute power politics.

Fortunately I don't have to build from the ground up, as Thomas G. West wrote the thorough treatment about Strauss and foreign policy almost 20 years ago in the Claremont Review of Books, in "Leo Strauss and American Foreign Policy." Here's one relevant part:

The confrontation of the West with Communism, Strauss wrote in The City and Man, has demonstrated that “no bloody or unbloody change of society can eradicate the evil in man: as long as there will be men, there will be malice, envy and hatred, and hence there cannot be a society which does not have to employ coercive restraint.” Strauss implies, among other things, that the extravagant hope for permanent progress in human affairs believed in by Woodrow Wilson and his contemporary admirers is a delusion. In particular, Strauss wrote, the ideal of “a universal state, unitary or federative” (Strauss appears to be speaking of the United Nations) is also a delusion. “If that federation is taken too seriously,” said Strauss, “as a milestone on man’s onward march toward the perfect and hence universal society, one is bound to take great risks supported by nothing but an inherited and perhaps antiquated hope, and thus to endanger the very progress one endeavors to bring about.”

To begin with, then, according to Strauss each nation should conduct its own foreign policy, and it should not turn its policy over to international organizations. In current parlance, Strauss was a unilateralist, not a multilateralist.

Strauss concluded the passage quoted above by remarking that the lesson of the Cold War is that “political society remains what it always has been: a partial or particular society whose most urgent and primary task is its self-preservation and whose highest task is its self-improvement.” . . .

Let's turn directly to The City and Man for Strauss's extended thoughts on the core problem with Wilsonian internationalism (and, by extension, the neoconservative misuse of Strauss):

According to the modern project, philosophy or science was no longer understood as essentially contemplative and proud but as active and charitable; it was to be in the service of the relief of man's estate; it was to be cultivated for the sake of human power; it was to enable man to become the master and owner of nature through the intellectual conquest of nature. Philosophy or science should make possible progress toward every greater prosperity; it thus should enable everyone to share in all the advantages of society or life and therewith give full effect to everyone natural right to comfortable self-preservation and all that that right entails to everyone's natural right to develop all his faculties in concert with everyone else's doing the same. The progress toward ever greater prosperity would thus become, or render possible, the progress toward ever greater freedom and justice. This progress would necessarily be the progress toward a society embracing equally all human beings: a universal league of free and equal nations, each nation consisting of free and equal men and women. For it had come to be believed that the prosperous, free, and just society in a single country or in only a few countries is not possible in the long run: to make the world safe for the Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations. Good order in one country presupposes good order in all countries. The movement toward the universal society or the universal state was thought to be guaranteed not only by the rationality, the universal validity, of the goal but also because the movement toward the goal seemed to be the movement of the large majority of men on behalf of the large majority of men: only small groups of men who, however, hold in thrall many millions of their fellow human beings and who defend their own antiquated interests, resist that movement. [Emphasis added.]

This is a perfect restatement of what's wrong with the philosophy of Wilsonian internationalism. It is, to pick a specific example in the news, the underlying philosophy of USAID (even if it wasn't a corrupt money-pot for leftist groups). It explains why our State Department insisted it needed a $700 million embassy compound in Kabul, and a $1.1 billion embassy compound in Baghdad. It explains why George W. Bush thought it was perfectly sensible in his second inaugural address to declare that "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. . . So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

It is hard to come up with a more un-conservative thought than this.

Let's return to Tom West:

Strauss summarizes one of the very few discussions of foreign policy in Plato’s Republic as follows:

The good city is [not] guided in its relations to other cities, Greek or barbarian, by considerations of justice: the size of the territory of the good city is determined by that city’s own moderate needs and by nothing else; the relation of the city to the other cities belongs to the province of wisdom rather than of justice; the good city is not a part of a community of cities or is not dedicated to the common good of that community or does not serve other cities.

The last part of Strauss’s summary implies that according to Socrates, the foreign policy of a sensible nation is never devoted to the good of other nations, except to the extent that the good of another nation accidentally happens to promote one’s own nation’s existence.

As to John's ongoing puzzlement about the supposed fixation with "regime type," ask a simple question: Why do we not build missile defenses—or any defenses—against the British and the French (or even engage in arms control talks), both of whom have nuclear weapons? It won't do to repair behind the formal answer that we are in an alliance with them (because in fact France cooperates with but is not a member of NATO for strategic purposes). Even if we were not in an alliance with Britain, we would still not need to defend against them precise because of the character of those regimes. (Though I am not too sure about France this week.)

This is enough for the first lesson in John's remedial education. I'll treat the matter of prudence separately, as it provides the answer to John's specific questions and challenges.