Response by Michael Walzer

Jim Rule has written a wonderfully bracing but also a strangely high-minded critique of United States foreign policy. By “high-minded” I mean first of all abstracted from all the difficult decisions of past and present policy making. And I mean, second, that his piece is an exercise in moralizing—in the bad sense of that term, where anyone who disagrees with him is denied any possible moral conviction.

The “liberal hawks” are his first choice among enemies—though I think that he is a liberal hawk himself: he seems to support, at least in retrospect, U.S. military intervention in Bosnia (and presumably also in Kosovo, where the argument for intervening was pretty much the same). And he is ready, he says, to support military intervention to stop massacres and ethnic cleansing. He thought the Iraq War was utterly wrong, and so he is critical of some liberal hawks, but I don’t see how he can be critical of liberal hawkishness. He is a hawk for some occasions, as are I and many others.

But here’s the rub: he says that he favors only multilateral humanitarian interventions. That is easy to say, especially if you avoid talking about the many occasions when people are being massacred and no multilateral agency is interested in intervening. Should we stand by and watch the killing? What does he think of the unilateral Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia, the unilateral Indian intervention in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), the unilateral Tanzanian intervention in Uganda? He doesn’t say. Perhaps he is only against unilateral U.S. interventions—but he doesn’t say that either. There is no engagement with (what we used to call) the real world.

He thinks that the most important thing happening in the world today is the growth of international institutions and the erosion of state sovereignty. But, again, he never tells us how or where this is “happening.” Right now, no political leader in his right mind would entrust the safety of his people to any international organization. Right now, what the most oppressed and impoverished people in the world most urgently need is a decent and effective sovereign state. This is obviously true for Tibetans, Kurds, and Palestinians, but it is also true of people across Africa and in many parts of Asia, living in failed states, ruled by warlords, without effective police, without welfare systems or functioning schools. In the world as it is today, only sovereign states can provide these services. But Jim wants to get past state sovereignty. Maybe one day there will be pleasant pastures “beyond” the state. Right now, there is only a wasteland.

He is especially outraged by the claim that “Islamo-fascists” (rather than liberal hawks) are our enemy. He seems to believe that anyone who thinks that is just a mercenary intellectual in the service of American militarism. But Islamic radicalism is a powerful force in the world today, and surely secular liberals and lef...