Editor’s Page

“Please leave your threat after you hear the beep.” This was the message on Slobodan Milosevic’s answering machine as rendered by a French cartoonist back when Bosnia was being “ethnically cleansed.” The sorry point of this witticism finally became moot with NATO’s attack on Serbia this past spring—just as Belgrade readied to do to Kosovar Muslims what it had done elsewhere.

“Ethnic cleansing” trumps a lot of other considerations, at least for some of us on the left. Yet it is vexing (for me, anyway) to find part of the left more agitated about any use of American force than about a profoundly menaced population—and speaking as if there is nothing Milosevic could do that is not the fault of Washington. This is the internationalism of fools. Yes, there is always the caveat: “We don’t like Milosevic either, but there are so many like him around.” But not all bad guys and bad acts are the same; assimilate them all into the wickedness of the world and you merely relieve yourself of tough moral choices.

Here’s a hard call: can you favor an action though you are suspicious of the actor? If you have a complex worldview, the answer must—sometimes—be “yes.” After all, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia, Hanoi broke international laws, violated its neighbor’s sovereignty, and did so for self-interested and not humanitarian reasons. A good thing? Yes. It ended the murderous reign of the Khmer Rouge; the rest is secondary.

The left is leery of the use of American power for very good reasons. We have seen its abuse a little too often in this half of the century. Doubt, however, can be deployed intelligently—or simplistically.

President Clinton has provided ample cause for doubt. How, one wonders, would this president respond to Michael Walzer’s query: “Are countries with armies whose soldiers cannot be put at risk morally or politically qualified to intervene?” The Third Way in war seems as slippery as it is in domestic policy.

Even if the official aims of the war are just, it has been conducted in a morally ambiguous way by an organization—NATO that has been more in a rush to increase its members than to define its post–cold war purpose. Bush’s Gulf War slogan was a “New World Order,” but no such thing exists. Instead, there is still post–cold war flux. Clinton furnishes no coherent vision of America’s role in this world—except when it comes to economic globalization, where the “Washington Consensus” continues Bush’s “free” market fundamentalism. (James K. Galbraith dissects this consensus in our Brave New Globe series). Not that the Republicans are better. Some support the NATO intervention, some waffle on it, but at least their right wing has invented something original: anti-interventionists for huge defense budgets. Incoherent Republican foreign policy has its counterpart in a bankr...