Harvard University Press Blog

The Rise and Fall of Syria's President for Life?

Roger Owen writes in The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life that he became interested in the subject in the spring of 2009, and soon after decided to write a book. It was virtually completed by the end of December 2010, “just as the first rumblings of opposition to President Zein El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia suggested that these systems of quasi-monarchical government were much more vulnerable to popular pressure than almost anyone had previously imagined.” Faced with the question of whether or not to amend his work to reflect the inchoate Arab Spring, Owen compromised: “I would adapt my manuscript to take account of the fall of two presidents, Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt; the tremendous pressure faced by three more, Bashar al-Asad of Syria, Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya; and the announcement by Omar al- Bashir of Sudan that he would not seek another term as president when his present term expired in 2015. This meant, in effect, the end of the system that my book seeks to explicate as a particular form of modern Arab political practice.” Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya have of course since been removed from power. In Syria, however, Bashar al-Asad remains. With the massacre last week of over 100 villagers in central Syria ratcheting international outrage yet higher, an end to Asad’s reign may be growing closer. We offer below an excerpt from Owen’s book that outlines the common features of the system of Arab monarchical republics, which may also be seeing its end.

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The systems of Arab presidents for life were many decades in the making, having their origins with the (mostly military) leaders who came to power from the late 1960s onward and soon learned how to construct the coup-proof regimes that would allow them to remain in offi ce for as long as they lived. From then on, only one Arab republican president, Abdul Rahman al-Iryani of North Yemen, left office more or less of his own free will when his term expired in 1974. Other unusual exceptions were Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr of Iraq and Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, who got pushed aside by ambitious subordinates, while two more, Gafar Nimeiri of Sudan and Chadli Bendjedid of Algeria, were removed by fellow military officers in 1985 and 1992, respectively.

As of 31 December 2010, the list of longtime presidential survivors included Muammar Qaddafi, who got rid of the Libyan monarchy in 1969; Ali Abdullah Saleh of North Yemen (1978–) and a United Yemen (1991–); Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (1981–); Zein El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia (1987–); and Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan (1993–). By then, just one—Hafiz al-Asad of Syria (1970–2000)—had managed to pass on power to his son, Bashar. But there was every reason to suppose that others, like Mubarak, Saleh, and Qaddafi, fully intended to try. Meanwhile, at least two of the Middle East’s remaining monarchies, Morocco and Jordan, had become significantly more presidential in their exercise of royal authoritarian power.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise to those who have read the long history of political republics, beginning with the emergence of powerful figures such as the Caesars of ancient Rome. Then, too, there are the cases of the two powerful leaders of the revived form of republicanism represented by the American and French revolutions, with George Washington fighting off the various influences suggesting that he become another type of monarch and Napoleon Bonaparte agreeing to become emperor in the interest of ensuring that the revolution could be continued on a permanent basis.

Nevertheless, it took some little time to understand how, in a roughly similar republican context, roughly similar pressures encouraged the leaders of the world’s newly independent states to take their first step in the process toward permanency by allowing themselves to serve on and on without thought of retirement. It remains true that, in the Arab world at least, the general rationale of such systems, their structures, their politics, and the ways in which they sought to legitimize themselves remain little researched and poorly understood. All this in spite of the work of a small group of academic researchers, mostly political scientists, who have begun either to explore the present political dynamics of individual Arab presidential security states such as Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia or to look comparatively at certain aspects of these same dynamics either across the Middle East or, in a few cases, across all or most of the former colonial world.

Human Rights and the Glamour of Dissent

In a recent NYT opinion piece sparked by the now-resolved international episode of the blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng’s escape from house arrest to American protection, Samuel Moyn considers the evolving implications of “human rights.” Moyn is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, in which he argues that the modern conception of human rights begins not with the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but in the decade after 1968. In his op-ed, Moyn writes that what was initially an “uncontroversial effort to establish moral norms above the fray of the cold war’s ideological battles” has since become both more familiar and less clear-cut:

In reporting on Mr. Chen, most publications, including this newspaper, used the terms “dissident” and even “prisoner of conscience” to refer to him.

However, since the time Amnesty International and other groups popularized those phrases, human rights—a term that once meant the defense of individuals against the oppression of an unjust state—has come to imply other things, too.

Today, it is just as likely to be invoked by powerful states to wage war in distant corners of the globe, much to the chagrin of authoritarian leaders in wealthy rising powers like Russia and China, who see such “humanitarian interventions” as a violation of states’ sovereignty—not to mention a threat to their manner of rule.

Moyn goes on to detail how the concept of human rights has “lost some of its romantic appeal and moral purity” and become a political tool. Even still, he writes, human rights can be useful to “Chinese dissidents and their Western allies” just as they’d been to the “glamorous dissidents” who came before.

In describing Chen, Moyn knowingly evokes the codified concept of the dissident (“the lone icon speaking for moral principle against totalitarian rule, the anonymous but courageous network at home that sheltered him, the supporters abroad who rallied around his cause, and the governments that made their choices based on a difficult calculus of moral ideals and geopolitical interests”), but elsewhere uses “dissent” in a fairly straightforward fashion. A short op-ed can sustain only so much complication, to be sure, but it’s interesting to see the concept of dissent taken as stable in the course of a discussion of the evolution of human rights.

Jonathan Bolton’s Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism is another recent HUP book that deals with some of the same events and themes as does Moyn in The Last Utopia. Bolton’s book unpacks the myths and the glamour to show how the struggle against state repression was felt by those who lived it, making clear the messy humanity of dissent.

Closing the Civic Empowerment Gap

Meira Levinson’s No Citizen Left Behind is a landmark call for the remaking of civic education in America’s schools. In presenting her challenge to the status quo, Levinson documents a number of organizations that demonstrate the progress to be wrung from her prescriptions. We invited friend of the Press and incoming Harvard Graduate School of Education student Jessica Gerhardstein Gingold to describe her experience as a youth council director with Chicago’s Mikva Challenge, one of the programs that Levinson highlights.

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In No Citizen Left Behind Meira Levinson puts some fire into the often dull argument that the United States needs to get serious about civic education, calling for reform for a system that today largely excludes poor and minority students from democratic participation. She begins the book by describing the experience of teaching on 9/11, and shares a remarkable story about her middle school students predicting the Iraq War. Despite their evident understanding, though, she laments that what she calls a “civic empowerment gap” made it unlikely that her students would become participants in the course charted that day:

Whether my students were misguided or prescient, whether their life experiences blinded or exposed them to the true character of our political leaders, there is ample evidence that they are unlikely to become active participants in American civic and political life. As a result, they are unlikely to influence civic and political deliberation or decision-making. This is because there is a profound civic empowerment gap—as large and as disturbing as the reading and math achievement gaps that have received significant national attention in recent years—between ethnoracial minority, naturalized, and especially poor citizens, on the one hand, and White, native-born, and especially middle-class and wealthy citizens, on the other.

Levinson explores the causes of and potential solutions to this gap through many lenses. As a political philosopher, she considers the political, sociological and historical context of the United States and of our education system, closely examining the meanings of citizenship and democracy. She asks hard questions about how we teach civics in a diverse country where our ethnoracial identities invariably dictate our experiences of citizenship. She grapples with how these theories trickle down into practice by sharing personal stories from her years of inner-city teaching. In addressing these questions and others, she doesn’t fantasize about an unreachable Shangri-La of civic education. Instead, she clearly outlines the qualities of her gold standard curriculum, Action Civics, and highlights schools and organizations that have begun to actualize it.

Action Civics is designed to create “an engaged citizenry capable of effective participation in the political process, in their communities, and in the larger society.” It is founded on the principle that young people have authentic civic experiences that matter and that should be part of their civic educational experiences. “I recommend a constructivist approach that helps students construct their own empowering means of engaging in this work,” Levinson writes, “rather than telling them how to do it. As important as it is for students to learn to take multiple perspectives, educators, too, need to be open to students’ diverse perspectives and experiences.” One of the founding organizations of the National Action Civics Collaborative (NACC) is Mikva Challenge, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to create the next generation of civic leaders. Mikva Challenge is one of many organizations that Levinson highlights in her book, and, having been a member of its staff for over two years, I personally witnessed the efficacy of her prescriptions for closing the civic empowerment gap.

Indexing the Age of Fracture

Daniel T. Rodgers, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, has been named a winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize for Age of Fracture, his exposition of the late-20th century dissolution of the ideas that had previously served to shape Americans’ understanding of the world. The Bancroft is one of the most distinguished academic awards in the field of history, and, says the book’s editor, Joyce Seltzer, for Rodgers it was well-deserved:

The very first time I read Dan’s manuscript, I knew it was very special. He managed to brilliantly characterize the last three decades of intellectual discourse in the U.S. so as to enable me to see it in a new and revealing light. By mapping out major ideas about the market, race, gender, political obligations, and social welfare, and demonstrating the shift from collective to fragmented perspectives and outlooks, Dan makes the radical changes taking place in our way of thinking provocatively clear. I began to see the transformation he explored everywhere—in the arts, sciences, and in our social and political relations and expectations. Age of Fracture is a wake-up call to all of us that we must pull together again for the greater welfare and future of our community and nation.

Accurately and coherently characterizing an era is a challenging endeavor, especially when one’s period of inquiry is so recent. In his Prologue, Rodgers quotes Stuart Hall on the naming of ages: “What is important are the significant breaks—where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes.” Though the task is to focus on major ideological threads, rather than to catalogue an age’s every idea, one of the striking things about Age of Fracture is just how much ground Rodgers is able to cover in a book that comes in well under 400 pages.

Age of Fracture is certainly no pastiche, though, and it’s also not the sort of free associative cultural criticism that we’d associate with, say, Greil Marcus. Nevertheless, Rodgers makes his way from Jimmy Carter to Judith Butler, the Civil War to the Culture Wars, Game Theory to the Gay Rights Movement, Nietzsche to Noonan, Earl Warren to Alice Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Howard Stern. He covers so much ground, in fact, that we thought we’d just be blunt about it and offer up the Index. Give it a skim or a scour below.

A New Grammar of Political Disobedience

In October, Bernard Harcourt argued that the then-nascent Occupy Wall Street movement represented a political paradigm shift, one that demanded a new vocabulary. The protests signaled the emergence of a form of what he called “political disobedience.” He described political disobedience as a fundamental rejection of the “political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War,” and contrasted it with civil disobedience:

Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.

The movement exercises its political disobedience in part through its refusal to issue demands, Harcourt argued, and even well-meaning fellow travelers who attempted to steer Occupy toward articulate positions were “missing the point of the resistance.” Harcourt, chair of the political science department and professor of law at the University of Chicago, and author, most recently, of The Illusion of Free Markets, argued that protesters should continue to resist making explicit demands, because such demands would merely submit the movement to the partisan political sphere that Occupy is meant to resist. “Ultimately,” he wrote, “what matters to the politically disobedient is the kind of society we live in,” and distilling themselves to a handful of demands would be conceding to the terms of the society that the Occupiers aim to leave behind.

This week Harcourt extended his analysis of the movement with a piece on Occupy’s grammar of political disobedience, suggesting that, if the new paradigm of political resistance calls for a new vocabulary, it also calls for an entirely new grammar:

The syntax that the critics and pundits are using no longer seems to work. Statements to the effect that Occupy Wall Street should get an agenda or, as the Wall Street Journal disdainfully remarked, should stop engaging in “days of feckless rage”, no longer fully make sense. It is as if these grammatical formulations cannot be “heard” properly given the leaderless paradigm of the new resistance movement. They sound like the inaudible noise in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus – or, perhaps more familiarly, the “mwa, mwa, mwa” that adults make in Charlie Brown cartoons.

For Harcourt part of what makes such statements inaudible is a spatial matter: they cannot be “heard” by the movement “unless the speaker is physically occupying an Occupy space.” Again, this applies as much to those who side with the movement as those who oppose: “You can't ‘occupy’ while sitting at your computer or publishing an editorial. You cannot ‘occupy’ at a distance from an Occupy site.”

"Can you have work and love in a damaged world?"

The duo behind the Thinking Aloud video archive recently interviewed George Kateb about the possibilities of living a good life in our damaged world. Kateb, one of the most respected and influential political theorists of the past several decades, is the author, most recently, of Human Dignity, a secular defense of a concept that has received little true scrutiny.

We encourage you to watch the full video of his interview, available at The Stone. Here, though, is a bit of what Kateb had to say about how to live:

The point is to live one’s life, whether or not you think the world is damaged. To live a life. But, never, never to think that you can lead a good life. Never, never to think that you can lead the good life.

I think of two things that help to define a tolerable life that people need and are right to need and want. And they are the two that Freud comes up with: work and love.

Can you have work and love in a damaged world? Yes, you can, but not with an easy conscience. Why not an easy conscience? Because it’s never justified. There’s always too much damage in the world for you to think that the world exists for your work and your love.

We are oblivious, and can’t help but be to some extent oblivious. We would die from the impact of true knowledge of the amount of suffering existing just around us at any given moment in time. This is a lesson taught powerfully by George Eliot in Middlemarch. We’d die if we could hear the heartbeat of a squirrel. We would die from the roar at the other end of silence.

So how does one live against a backdrop of nothingness? What does one do about the pathologies that seem to make life less worth living, rather than more worth living?

Once you’re determined to do something, the obligation is to do your best. Should you assume an obligation to do something? I think one should. It’s not the same thing for everybody, though. But, to sort of struggle against pathology on the one hand, and the temptation of destructive nihilism, on the other hand, it’s enough to keep you going… fill up a life.

Hardt and Negri on "The Problem of Transition"

Now in its seventh week, the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to expand and evolve. Notable events this week include the successful effort by Occupy Oakland protesters to shut down the city’s port, the fifth busiest in the nation, and tomorrow’s coordinated “Bank Transfer Day,” when those opposing our banking system plan to move their money from large corporate banks to local institutions. Throughout the movement’s duration, much attention has been focused on its governance structure and on its “demands.” For the protesters themselves, these things are deeply intertwined: the decision-making process is just as critical as the decisions. The dynamic puts us in mind of the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, co-authors of Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. In the following excerpt from Commonwealth, the authors discuss how the governance structure of a movement can itself help to prepare its participants for what comes next. Or, in terms of Occupy, how the work of deciding on “demands” can itself create the conditions for their achievement.

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Too much of revolutionary thought does not even pose the problem of transition, paying attention only to the overture and neglecting all the acts of the drama that must follow. Defeating the ruling powers, destroying the ancien régime, smashing the state machine—even overthrowing capital, patriarchy, and white supremacy—is not enough. That might be sufficient, perhaps, if one were to believe that the formation of the multitude was already achieved, that we were all already somehow not only purified of the hierarchies and corruptions of contemporary society but also capable of managing the multiplicity of the common and cooperating with one another freely and equally—in short, that democratic society was already complete. If that were the case, then, yes, maybe the insurrectional event destroying the structures of power would be sufficient and the perfect human society already existing beneath the yoke of oppression would spontaneously flourish. But human nature as it is now is far from perfect. We are all entangled and complicit in the identities, hierarchies, and corruptions of the current forms of power. Revolution requires not merely emancipation, as we said earlier, but liberation; not just an event of destruction but also a long and sustained process of transformation, creating a new humanity. This is the problem of transition: how to extend the event of insurrection in a process of liberation and transformation.

Condorcet proclaims, and Hannah Arendt echoes him almost two hundred years later, that “the word ‘revolutionary’ applies only to revolutions that have freedom as their object.” We would extend this to say that revolutions must have democracy as their object and thus that the direction and content of revolutionary transition must be defined by the increase of the capacities for democracy of the multitude. People are not spontaneously, by nature, capable of cooperating with one another freely and together governing the common. W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, studying the promises, betrayals, and failures of Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War, is keenly aware that emancipation alone is not sufficient. In addition to all the traps and subterfuges of the U.S. government and dispossessed Southern slaveholders, in addition to the color and class hierarchies created by Northern carpetbagger capitalists, Du Bois also focuses on the problem that even after the abolition of slavery the vast majority of the population, white and black alike, remains poor and ignorant, lacking the capacities for democracy. Emancipation is only the beginning.

In the annals of modern revolutionary thought Lenin provides the locus classicus for understanding the revolutionary transition. Lenin recognizes, as we noted earlier, that human nature as it is now is not capable of democracy. In their habits, routines, mentalities, and in the million capillary practices of everyday life, people are wedded to hierarchy, identity, segregation, and in general corrupt forms of the common. They are not yet able to rule themselves democratically without masters, leaders, and representatives. Lenin thus proposes a dialectical transition composed of two negations. First, a period of dictatorship must negate democracy in order to lead society and transform the population. Once a new humanity has been created, capable of ruling itself, then dictatorship will be negated and a new democracy achieved. Lenin has the great merit of posing the problem clearly, but his dialectical solution is today widely and rightly discredited, not only because “transitional” dictatorships so stubbornly hold on to power, resisting the dialectical inversion in democracy, but more important because the social structures of dictatorship do not foster the training in democracy necessary to make the multitude. On the contrary! Dictatorship teaches subservience. Democracy can be learned only by doing.

The problem of transition must be given a positive, nondialectical solution, leading toward democracy through democratic means. Our analysis in the previous section has already developed some elements for such a democratic transition. The insurrectional event, we explained, must be consolidated in an institutional process of transformation that develops the multitude’s capacities for democratic decision making. Making the multitude is thus a project of democratic organizing aimed at democracy. Rather than counting on the boomerang effect of the dialectic to thrust the process at the final moment to the opposite end of the spectrum, this notion of transition delineates an asymptotic approach such that even if the movement never reaches a conclusion, the distance between transition and goal, between means and end becomes so infinitesimal that it ceases to matter. This process should not be confused with old reformist illusions that insist on gradual change and constantly defer revolution into the indefinite future. No; rupture with contemporary society and its ruling powers must be radical: as much as insurrection is swept up in the process of transition, transition must constantly renew the force of insurrection. Often in evaluating the state of the present society, in other words, the point is not to haggle over whether the glass is half empty or half full but to break the glass!

Deng Xiaoping and China's Rise

“I first visited China in 1979, a few months after our countries normalized relations. China was just beginning to remake its economy, and I was in the first Senate delegation to witness this evolution. Traveling through the country last month, I could see how much China had changed in 32 years — and yet the debate about its remarkable rise remains familiar. Then, as now, there were concerns about what a growing China meant to America and the world.”

That’s Vice President Joe Biden, from an op-ed titled “China’s Rise Isn’t Our Demise” that ran in yesterday’s New York Times. As Biden notes, 1979 was a turning point for China’s place in the world. The country was opening itself up, working to normalize its relations with other nations and finally bring its industry and economy into the twentieth century. All of the developments that Biden encountered on his recent visit were set in motion by those earlier changes. And no one was more responsible for those changes than Deng Xiaoping, China’s preeminent leader from 1978 through 1992.

In 1979 Ezra F. Vogel published a book, Japan as Number One, that helped prepare westerners for Japan’s surprising 1980s rise. After retiring from teaching in 2000, Vogel wanted to do it again, to write another book that would help Americans understand key developments in Asia at the outset of the twenty-first century. The biggest thing happening in Asia was China, as Vogel realized then and Biden affirms now. And the way to understand China was to understand Deng. So Vogel began the work for what became Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, a massive biography of a man who likely had as great an impact on the world’s course as any other twentieth century figure.

Deng led a long, complicated life that included time in France and the Soviet Union as a young man, years as a military leader and Communist Party official, and a long, fraught relationship with Mao Zedong, who twice purged Deng but never destroyed him. Vogel describes Deng as a pragmatic politician who led China’s embrace of technological innovation and worked to overcome the damage of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but who also approved the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He wasn’t usually the source of the ideas that were transforming China, but he was the only person equipped to implement them. 

We spoke with Ezra Vogel about Deng and the challenges he faced: 

 

Guns and Violence in Britain

Last week we looked at what the likes of Paul Gilroy and Zygmunt Bauman have had to say about the rioting and unrest in Britain. They represent a strain of analysis that takes these events as reaction against a system that casts its citizens as nothing but consumers and then looks the other way after economic collapse.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Joyce Lee Malcolm offers a different perspective, suggesting that the recent violence is instead a reflection of Britain’s “sympathy for offenders, intolerance of self-defense, and unwillingness to pay for adequate crime control.” Noting that baseball bats were Amazon’s hottest seller in the UK last week, Malcolm presents the case against Britain’s approach to crime and concludes that “The lesson from many years of failed criminal justice policies is that deterrence matters, police cannot always protect the public from violence and criminality, and ordinary people must be allowed to protect themselves.”

Malcolm is the author of Guns and Violence: The English Experience and To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right, both of which were published by HUP. Last week one commentator noted that both books “ought to be force-fed to every member of Parliament.” The books take the long view on guns, with Malcolm embracing the historian’s charge to hold current conceptions against the past. From the Introduction to Guns and Violence (which was published in 2002):

Behind the passionate debate over gun control and armed crime lie untested assumptions about the connection between firearms and violence. Conventional wisdom equates the number of guns in private hands with the frequency of armed crimes. Contributing causes—poverty, unemployment, an unstable social environment—are acknowledged, but guns are viewed as an important, if not the most important, factor. Indeed some scholars claim that “the weapons effect on aggressive behavior is well established”—that is, the mere presence or sight of a gun triggers hostile action. The removal of privately owned firearms therefore seems the easiest means of reducing violence. This logic undergirds the firearms policies of Great Britain and of most other developed countries. Further, it presumes that legislation is capable of reducing the quantity of guns available to those individuals likely to commit crimes.

The belief that statutes can actually deprive criminals of firearms has long been questioned. But recently the deeper question, the relationship between the number of guns and the number of armed crimes, has been vigorously challenged as well. One forceful argument turns that equation on its head, claiming that having more guns in private hands will decrease crime. Criminals are logical, according to this argument; therefore, when they weigh the cost of committing a crime, they will be more hesitant to prey on individuals who are armed. Thus, if many people are armed, violent crime will decline. On that theory thirty-three American states now have statutes permitting law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons. There is a third possibility, of course: the number of guns available to the public may have no appreciable impact on the rate of violent crime, and the solution, whatever it is, lies elsewhere. These alternative approaches deserve closer scrutiny.

Obama’s Demi-Doctrine: Historical Resonances

The post below comes from Christopher McKnight Nichols, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in U.S. History at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age.

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President Obama is shaping a new vision of America’s foreign policy. It involves a limited, ethical, and coalition-oriented U.S. global presence. Such a position aims to combine recent multilateral actions in Libya with unilateralism in Pakistan, pending troop reductions in Afghanistan, and likely new commitments elsewhere. It is nuanced. It seeks to present U.S. global activism as a shared “burden” of membership in the international community. It defines threats on an individual basis. Though it upholds aspects of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy commitments and goals, it explicitly casts itself in opposition to Bush’s national security strategies, which were characterized by preemption and unilateral regime change, painting them as costly and unwisely aggressive.

This is Obama’s Demi-Doctrine. It is “demi” because it is less than a fully elaborated doctrine but closer to one than it might at first appear. It has refocused U.S. military and intelligence assets on the threat from Al Qaeda while also recognizing the need for building diplomatic bridges, seeking genuine multilateralism, and avoiding overreach by drawing down troops in Iraq and preparing to do so in Afghanistan. This “half” position does not bind America to any one-size-fits-all model for international relations. It posits no singular definition of the “nation’s interests.” In those respects it is fundamentally unlike such “full” doctrines as President Truman’s Doctrine opposing communism everywhere (1947) or President Monroe’s Doctrine prohibiting foreign powers meddling in the hemisphere (1823).

Still, the tenets of the Demi-Doctrine aren’t entirely new. In fact they have a long history. As a policy stance it began with the first modern American debates over foreign engagement and expansion more than a hundred years ago. At that time philosopher and anti-imperialist William James argued for taking all peoples and places on their own terms. He maintained that the nation should pursue “moral suasion” over “savage ambition” in foreign affairs, acting more as an exemplar than as a crusader. Obama’s new multilateral, case-by-case approach to U.S. involvement abroad builds on such views. It blends internationalist, isolationist, realist, and idealist arguments. And it has roots in pragmatism and anti-imperialist rhetoric. It encompasses Woodrow Wilson's idealism, draws on WWII Era beliefs about the international obligation to protect human rights, and builds on Cold War ideas of collective security (such as embodied in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).

But just because Obama’s “new” American foreign policy has a history and has merits does not mean it does not have costs. Again and again over past decades, American interventions—particularly when linked to multilateral military coalitions and aimed at humanitarian ends—have had negative, sometimes catastrophic, and often unintended consequences. Relatively limited U.S. commitments of military and diplomatic force abroad have ranged from the unilateral actions in the Philippines in the late nineteenth century to various interventions during and after the Spanish-American War, through much more recent multilateral involvement in Bosnia and Somalia in the 1990s. Engagements such as these, which involved humanitarian rationales, have been deeply problematic. Few succeeded.