Progressive Pragmatism

The American Interest: Progressive Pragmatism

The Obama Administration represents the dawn of a new and superior conception of American foreign policy. …

… Over the past two decades, policy has oscillated between liberal internationalism and neoconservatism. Liberal internationalism dominated during the Clinton years, with UN- or NATO-backed humanitarian interventions in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Neoconservatism defined the George W. Bush Administration’s approach to post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both approaches took an aggressive interest in military expeditions abroad, and, despite their differing conceptions of the national interest, both struggled to achieve positive post-combat political outcomes from those expeditions. …

… Obama’s foreign policy has been widely attacked in ways that range from unprincipled to defeatist to incoherent to downright incompetent. The critics protest too much. …

… Progressive pragmatism is based on two central principles. The progressive principle is a belief in bottom-up democracy, in the self-determination of a people. Neoconservatives and liberal internationalists are both willing to forcefully push political and economic development from outside a country’s borders. During the 1990s and 2000s, each camp supported military interventions abroad, at least ostensibly or in part to promote democracy and human rights. During the 1990s, each group also supported the Washington Consensus’s one-size-fits-all approach to economic development.

Progressive pragmatists believe that communities need to take charge of their own destinies. When it comes to intervention or overthrowing governments, progressive pragmatists will often balk; self-determination calls for revolts to come from below. In a 1980 essay, “The Moral Standing of States”, Michael Walzer explained the relationship between intervention and respect for the self-determination of a political community. If a government ceases to meet the people’s political demands, the people are free to rebel, or not to rebel. In some cases, the people may be loyal to leaders, think success is unlikely, or simply be accustomed to an autocratic style of rule. But they retain the choice to rebel, no matter how draconian their overlords may be. When a foreign state intervenes, it violates the people’s ability to organize its own historical path and to develop its own cultural destiny. Similarly, progressive pragmatists believe that the constitutional design or economic policies of foreign countries need not look exactly like those of the West in order to produce effective and legitimate institutions. People should choose how to govern themselves. …

… The second foundational principle, the pragmaticprinciple, is a belief in real-world limitations, in the need to assess carefully the costs, benefits, and unintended consequences of actions. For founding progressives William James, and John Dewey, pragmatism didn’t just mean “what works” in a technocratic sense. It meant learning from experience within the context of a person’s (or community’s) particular experiences, culture, and beliefs. We each have opinions and biases that are frequently challenged by new facts or that are unable to explain new situations. Over time, we learn from these new experiences and change our views. Knowledge is therefore always partial, fallible, and contingent. It is tested and reshaped over time. As a consequence, genuine pragmatists are humble: They cannot discern perfect truths or certain futures, and they know it. …

… The pragmatic principle is best captured by the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, though Niebuhr himself was not exactly a “pragmatist” or even a “progressive.” Niebuhr, whom President Obama has called one of his favorite philosophers, placed humility at the center of his approach to foreign policy. He believed that history is defined by contingency and irony, not by utopian triumph or purely rational actions. The central guide to policy, therefore, is not dogma or ideology, but experience. American idealism, he argued, needs to confront “the limits of all human striving, the fragmentariness of all human wisdom, the precariousness of all historic confrontations of power”, and embrace the “slow and sometimes contradictory processes of history.” …

… Progressive pragmatists will take action when necessary to further American interests. But when it comes to promoting American values, they take an indirect approach. Instead of making the world safe for democracy, they seek very patiently to make the world ready for democracy. They focus not on immediate regime change and democracy promotion, but on creating conditions that enable states to become more democratic and more responsible in their own time and in their own ways. Progressive pragmatism requires restraint when it comes to direct intervention, but assertive action when it comes to long-term cultural change. With reforms to international institutions, open access to information, fostering education abroad, cultural exchanges, and other such programs to shape culture and values, the United States can empower people around the world to embrace one of the most important progressive values: self-government.

An excellent essay. I resonate strongly with progressive pragmatism as described here, if not necessarily with every particular action of the Obama administration. I think Obama gets it mostly right.