And an excision...

While adding some links this week, I have also removed the link to the Crooked Timber weblog of assorted academics. This will be a matter of indifference to its authors, who have never linked to this site, so I'm at liberty to explain the excision with no risk of causing the distress that my strictures ought properly to elicit.

Of Kant's observation about "the crooked timber of mankind", Isaiah Berlin, in his book of that title, wrote:

To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity.

Recently the authors of the Crooked Timber blog have excelled not only in the neatness of their uniforms, but also in their eagerness to congratulate themselves on how they look. It is an unendearing rhetorical tick to commend one's own uniqueness among bloggers in commenting on a particular subject, and Crooked Timber's authors appear to have caught it from each other. But if it were only their perspicacity, I should still find it tolerable; it's their monopoly of virtue and omniscience that gets me down. Here's one of the authors in a post that deals mainly with a paper by John Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at Chicago and a critic of the Bush administration's foreign policy:

I don’t know of any serious I[nternational] R[elations] scholars who are prepared to defend Bush’s foreign policy...

Professor Henry Farrell (for it is he) can't have looked very far in that case. Here is John Lewis Gaddis, Professor of History and Political Science at Yale, and author of Strategies of Containment and other works on post-war US foreign policy, in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations earlier this year. First Professor Gaddis considers the demerits of administration policy: the needless frictions caused by an assertive unilateralism and "faulty execution i[n] the occupation and administration of Iraq". He then puts these in the wider context:

At the same time, if you back off from these things and simply ask the question, "What is the larger objective of this strategy?" [the answer is,] this is an administration, I believe, which is thinking in global terms. It is thinking in integrated terms, in the sense that the various parts of the strategy interconnect with each other in a fairly impressive way.

And if you ask about the overall objectives of the strategy, it seems to me that the picture is better and a good deal more successful. The logic of the administration's strategy has been to say that pre-emption is necessary to deal with adversaries like the 9/11 terrorists because you not only have to find these people themselves, but you also have to either intimidate or, if necessary, take out those states which might have been supporting such terrorists in the past, the assumption being that terrorism can't succeed without some kind of state support.

This isn't a partisan and uncritical endorsement. That's my point. It's the dispassionate assessment of a "serious scholar" in which the gap between the administration's promise and performance, as Gaddis describes it in a recent short book amplifying his ideas, is fairly assessed.

Owing to the nuanced character of Gaddis's judgements, Professor Farrell will surely be able to grant him absolution from the suspicion of looking favourably on the administration's foreign policy. (Gaddis is particularly concerned in his book with the administration's failure to confront the distinction, argued by Fareed Zakaria in The Future of Freedom, between spreading democracy and speading liberalism.) And if Gaddis at any time were to soften those nuances, Professor Farrell would doubtless then be able to pronounce his disqualification from the ranks of independent scholars.

Crooked timber, indeed.

UPDATE: Matthew Turner writes:

I agree with your post that Gaddis has supported the Bush foreign policy, though I think it would be correct to say no serious IR scholar supports the Bush Administration's execution of that policy.

This seems to me probably right, as both a summary of scholarly opinion and a judgement on the administration's record, and if Crooked Timber had confined itself to that formulation I should have had no complaints. Matthew points to this transcript of a discussion in May between Professor Gaddis and James Lindsay at the Council on Foreign Relations on the subject of Gaddis's recent book, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, which I referred to in the post. It's a thought-provoking exposition that's well worth reading in full, but one observation by Gaddis in particular reinforces his point about the gap between "promise and performance", or strategy and execution:

I think the grand strategy itself still makes sense. But the execution, particularly in Iraq, has been bordering on wretched, really.

James Lindsay has co-authored with Ivo Daalder a recent book that argues a similar case, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. The authors (both of whom are former Clinton staffers, and have written a scrupulously objective account) dismiss the notion that a covert group of neoconservatives has mounted a coup in the direction of foreign policy, and demonstrate that the President has a coherent approach to the international order that is "a profound strategic innovation". They maintain, however:

Far from demonstrating the triumph of unilateral American power, Bush's wars demonstrated the importance of basing American foreign policy on a blend of power and cooperation.

For what it's worth, that's my view too. I wrote a column a couple of months ago in which I offered my fellow-liberals across the Atlantic the following helpful advice, which they have unaccountably ignored completely:

President Bush’s foreign policy is liberal in conception but it differs from Wilsonianism in execution. That ought to be the Democrats’ line of attack. Woodrow Wilson believed in fostering democracy through international institutions. By contrast, President Bush is dismissive of the United Nations after its prolonged failure to implement its own Security Council resolutions on Iraq. He has a point, but his Administration has pursued it with unseemly slights against nations whose assistance is needed given the lamentable failure of postwar planning for Iraq.