Charles Kupchan, writing with Peter Trubowitz, may well be right that the foreign policy mind of America is splitting in two: one pole in favor of American-led cooperation amongst the globe, one in favor of American-led coercion around it. Andrew claims that this is what happens when an ideological sect smashes the bipartisan consensus policy of American-led cooperative coercion "for internationalist ends in the world."
And that may well be so, or in part so, while (a) other, structural things are going on that may also share in a causal relationship and (b) agency and structure may be so intimately implicated within one another that a less misleading picture would portray the Truman Consensus as failed on arrival, in the world if not in America. But the domestic schism today -- which makes some of us pine for the days when Truman's International Vest, Mustache, and Haberdashery Squad of interchangeably blue-blood Eastern Corridor men 'put politics aside' to Attain Consensus -- is in large part, by my lights, the consequence of an international schism which was but temporarily eclipsed by the blinding sun of America's Cold War victory and can be said properly to have always existed. The great miracle of the Truman Team was in keeping the whole of Europe from going Communist; and remember it was Dean Acheson, the Mr. Universe of mythopoetic nostalgia for Establishment bipartisanship, who went hopping mad when the Establishment turned on Our NATO Allies (Portugal, specifically, while the Cuban Army was running amok) and insisted, Cold War and all, that they decolonize.
Neither Truman's nor anyone else's Foggy Bottom All-Stars could have maintained, much less fashioned, a bipartisan consensus for true internationalism outside of the Cold War context. Bottom line: international communism made 'internationalism' possible for the US and its Cold War allies, and only as such. After the euphoria of the '90s, the venerable fact reemerged that the interests of the US (material or otherwise) never aligned deeply with great powers that weren't islands. In itself this constitutes no crisis, being as it is the normal condition of the world, but it becomes one insofar as the US needs or wants to act coercively in the world in terms that jibe with the narrative coherence of its behavior as a great power since at least the Second World War. This is becoming -- regardless of which clique is in charge or what they want -- impossible.
Thus the big freakout in which Giuliani promotes Frankenstein's NATO, Romney plumps for a new concert of democracies, every freak in the book puts forth a fresh plan to 'revitalize' the UN or correct the Security Council's 'outmoded' veto system, the Frettin' Woods institutions hem and haw over their 'democratic deficit,' etc., etc., etc. The 'old' bipartisan consensus that Americans pine for cannot be reconstituted until the 'new' international consensus upon which it must be built is constituted. This is why the collapse.
The good news is I think this will happen very easily and mundanely. Iraq was, as I have always said, sui generis. Everywhere else you look there are internationalisms around that at least match Cold War levels. France will stand with us on Iran (but not follow us if we jump). Those six-party talks with North Korea were not figments of our imagination. If we respect the modesty of India we will gain a hugely valuable and natural ally. Post Cold War, the US hit a hegemonic wall, where the remainder of unresolved points of geopolitical controversy were the smallest but hardest of all nuts to crack. (So far only Libya has been resolved.) This shouldn't be terribly surprising, but our teeth hurt nonetheless, and each nut has a different shell requiring different tools. And of course perhaps some of these nuts are best left uncracked, a lesson neither to be ignored at the first instant of a Bourbon Truman Restoration.
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