Matthew Yglesias
The Atlantic Monthly blogger talks about his new book and an old approach to foreign policy.
By Nickolas Sifuentes
May 29, 2008
Matthew Yglesias started out as a kid with a blog but has quickly become one of the heavy hitters when it comes to talking about foreign policy. Although he wrote in the acknowledgments to his first book, Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats, that he had “resigned [himself] to the idea that a blogger’s first book had to be about blogging rather than on a topic about which he had something worthwhile to say,” Heads in the Sand, which came out last month, doesn’t discuss blogging at all. The book uses the Iraq War as a stepping-off point to examine the need to return to “liberal internationalism” in our approach to foreign policy. Yglesias is currently an associate editor and blogger at The Atlantic Monthly, appears regularly on BloggingHeads.tv, and was formerly a staff writer at The American Prospect. Campus Progress caught up with Yglesias to talk about nuclear non-proliferation, the role of the United Nations, and today’s conflict in Myanmar.
Campus Progress: You talk a lot in your book about the need to return to liberal internationalism and how presidents, both Democratic and Republican, have practiced it since the Wilsonian era. Can you explain that argument a little bit for people who haven’t read your book?
Matthew Yglesias: Sure. The general idea of liberal internationalism is the way the United States participates in world affairs: by trying to build and strengthen certain common institutions that allow countries to cooperate with each other and have a world that, hopefully, will someday be governed really and truly by international law rather than force and coercion. The creation of the United Nations, the creation of NATO, proposals that have come through for the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the International Criminal Court—these are all part of that international system. It’s a very American idea and it was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who was its initial leader. But unfortunately in recent years we’ve had a tendency to turn away from that.
CP: Talking about all of these institutions, like the United Nations and the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, what would we need to do to update them, and liberal internationalism, for our new era?
MY: There are always changes that need to be made. Clearly at some point the structure of the U.N. Security Council is going to have to be revised. It happens to have been locked in place in 1945/1946 and it can’t last forever. I think sometimes conservatives bring up these points about the slightly outdated nature of the structure and they use it as a reason to say, “Well, screw the whole thing. Let’s burn it down.”
One of the most urgent things has to do with the non-proliferation treaty, which, as it goes at the moment, elect countries legally have a right to come very close to building nuclear weapons—too close, really—and the United States has an interest in seeing more restrictions in place on what a county can do. We need a multinational framework for the creation of nuclear fuel so that countries can use civilian nuclear power without gaining the ability to also produce nuclear weapons. It’ll be a tough task to do these negotiations, but there’re a lot of reasons to think we could make it work.
CP: Now, as far as the United Nations, what would you suggest in terms of Security Council reform?
MY: There’s probably a need to expand the roster of permanent members to include, at a minimum, Japan and India. Once you do that you’re probably going to add Brazil from Latin America, South Africa, probably a Muslim country. If you’re going expand the membership, you’ll need to get rid of the rule where one country can veto a resolution. Maybe they will decide that two-thirds is enough. What’s important is that there be an institution where it’s possible to accomplish things and which is widely regarded as legitimate. What precise shape it takes would need to be negotiated over time with other countries, but certainly more representation for the major new powers in the world is what it’s going to take.
CP: A large part of your book talks about the run-up to the Iraq war. The Bush Administration drummed up public support for the war and Congress failed to critically examine the intelligence data. What can we do to make sure such a failure doesn’t happen again?
MY: You know, in order to make sure it doesn’t happen again, you have to remember what happened the last time. Part of the reason it didn’t get as much scrutiny as it deserved was that a lot of people didn’t think the president of the United States would be willing to be as deceptive as Bush was about this material. I think we need to learn that a lot of executive leaders have been very dishonest with people about what the country is facing. This is the reason we have a Congress and this is the reason Congress has the independent powers it has.
CP: What mistakes did the media make?
MY: Sometimes I think we’re unrealistic in our expectations of the media. In the absence of a vigorous opposition political party, the media is not going to take up that role. It is a real failing of the media, but at the same time that’s the reality. What you need to check the claims made by the Republican Party is the Democratic Party and, of course, vice versa. As for the press, I think one problem is that you have a lot of people who are primarily political reporters working in journalism and they have to cover “What did the president say yesterday?” and they aren’t necessarily knowledgeable at all about the issues the president is talking about. It’s much more about enlightenment: If you’re going to run a story about the president’s claim about the Iranian nuclear program, you should have that story written by someone who understands Iran or who understands nuclear programs, rather than someone who has a lot of lore in their head about campaigns from decades ago.
CP: You make some criticisms of what you call “humanitarian militarism” and the dangers of unilateral military action. In that same vein, you wrote on your blog recently that when pundits discuss the idea of a military invasion in Myanmar that it’s “absurd.” Is there any situation where you can imagine unilateral action being anything less than absolutely abhorrent?
MY: If you’re generally concerned about humanitarianism, the sad reality is that the world has a lot of problems. There are a lot of people living under dictators—the bulk of them live in China, but various people live elsewhere; there are a billion people who live in poverty; there are problems with malaria, AIDS. That’s the background context we need to understand when talking about humanitarianism.
We need to stop making foolish proclamations like, “Well, if we invaded this country, we can solve all its problems.” The truth of the matter is that it’s really hard to solve problems by invading other countries. There’s a certain mindset—a kind of false machismo that comes around where some people get interested in humanitarianism and in helping foreigners only when killing some other foreigners is the method at hand. There’s a desire to cherry-pick situations where allegedly sending in the Marines and dropping bombs will help people, which I think reflects an attitude of militarism more than it reflects a concern with humanitarianism or human rights.
We’re not going to solve all of those problems by 2011, realistically, so the question is: How do we make the world a better place over time? If you look seriously at that, we need to preserve a general climate of international peace, a peace in which the United States, Russia, China, India, and Brazil, all the major countries, have basically friendly relationships with one another. This is what we have now, and it’s a good thing—that’s a necessary prerequisite for doing anything right, for putting together a global campaign against AIDS, or defeating malaria, or preventing catastrophic climate change.
Nickolas Sifuentes is a law clerk in downtown Los Angeles. He graduated from UCLA in 2007.
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While friendly relations between member states of the UN Security Council might preserve a “general climate of international peace” in the First World, maintaining these relations often requires us to turn a blind eye to regional instability, war, and genocide in the Third World. For example, China has supplied the Sudanese regime with arms and oil revenue that has directly sponsored the Janjaweed militia in its killings of anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 in Darfur. Only after widespread condemnation from human rights NGO’s, Western governments, and international media—some attempted to link Darfur with the 2008 Olympics—did China relent and press the Sudanese government to reach a settlement with the UN. Similarly, China has shipped arms to the Congo regime—implicated in a conflict that has killed 5.4 million since 1998—and rerouted the shipments only after dock workers in South Africa refused to unload the shipments.
— Raymond Lu - Jun 3, 04:42 AM - #In both Sudan and the Congo, it was condemnation and the threat of humiliation on the international stage that drove China to relent in its support of murderous regimes and regional conflict. Naturally, these successful campaign against Chinese policies took a toll on Chinese relations with the international community. But had NGO’s and Western leaders placed the kind of premium on “friendly relations” that Yglesias seems to be advocating here, they would hardly have pressed China on either issues, and even the modest gains toward peace we’ve seen in Darfur might not have occurred.