12 Feb Washington’s Social Workers
Those of you who know The Political Forum’s now-retired founding partner – Institutional Investor magazine’s 7-time #1-rated Washington analyst Mark Melcher – may recall that he used to make a point of saying that he didn’t know anyone important in Washington. This oft-repeated claim, which he made to demonstrate his independence and the independence of his analysis, was true, but only in a very narrow sense. Mark pointedly didn’t know anyone important in Congress or in the various administrations or in the vast bureaucratic Levithan, but he did know other people, people who were far smarter and, in the end, far more important than the swamp-dwellers. Mostly, he knew and befriended a handful of truly brilliant intellectual mavericks, men (mostly) who had impeccable credentials but who rejected the academic and policy worlds’ groupthink. These friends – whom I refer to in these pages as “Mark’s old friend” or, in some cases “our old friend” – helped him develop his unique and quite successful “contrarian” approach to Washington analysis.
Today’s note is about two of those “old friends,” one of whom I’ve cited repeatedly over the last decade-plus, and the other of whom I have cited only rarely, if ever.
First up is the late, great Angelo Codevilla. Mark knew Angelo for years, although I had the pleasure of meeting him only a handful of times. Regular readers may note that the ruling-class/country-class dichotomy that has dominated my domestic political thinking for the last 15 years was first and most eloquently articulated by Codevilla in his rightly famous 2010 American Spectator article “America’s Ruling Class (and the Perils of Revolution).” He saw it all coming, long before any of the rest of us did.
I mention Codevilla here because yesterday, The Free Press featured him in its “Big Read” section, in a piece by Matthew Continetti, the Director of Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. There’s not much I can add to Continetti’s adept analysis of Codevilla’s brilliance and foresight, so you should, as they say, read the whole thing. You’ll be glad you did.
The second of Mark’s friends I want to discuss today is Michael Mandelbaum, the retired director of the Foreign Policy Program at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Mandelbaum is known for many things, most notably his defense of American hegemony. Unlike many of his contemporaries on the Left, Mandelbaum argued that America is a force for good in the world specifically when it pursues its national interests.
That last bit above – the part in italics – is the key to understanding Mandelbaum’s criticism of post-Cold War American foreign policy, as well as the reason that I think he’s especially relevant at the present moment.
In very early 1996, Mandelbaum penned a scathing and prophetic critique of the foreign policy of the Clinton Administration. His essay – “Foreign Policy as Social Work” (Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 1996) – recounted the three major foreign policy undertakings of the presidency to that point and explained the tie that bound them all together as abject failures. In short, Mandelbaum argued that Clinton and his foreign policy team had botched the first tests of the post-Cold War world order by forgetting (or intentionally ignoring) that the guiding principle of American policy had always been to ensure that its pursuits were, first and foremost, in the national interest. Instead, they engaged in efforts that made them feel warm and fuzzy and bolstered their sense of moral righteousness. He wrote:
These failed interventions [Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti] expressed the view of the worldwide role of the United States that the members of the Clinton foreign policy team brought to office. Their distinctive vision of post-Cold War American foreign policy failed because it did not command public support. Much of the administration’s first year was given over to making that painful discovery. Much of the next two years was devoted to coping with the consequences of the failures of that first year….
The abortive interventions shared several features. Each involved small, poor, weak countries far from the crucial centers that had dominated American foreign policy during the Cold War. Whereas previous administrations had been concerned with the powerful and potentially dangerous members of the international community, which constitute its core, the Clinton administration turned its attention to the international periphery. In these peripheral areas the administration was preoccupied not with relations with neighboring countries, the usual subject of foreign policy, but rather with the social, political, and economic conditions within borders. It aimed to relieve the suffering caused by ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, starvation in Somalia, and oppression in Haiti.
Historically the foreign policy of the United States has centered on American interests, defined as developments that could affect the lives of American citizens. Nothing that occurred in these three countries fit that criterion. Instead, the Clinton interventions were intended to promote American values.
[National Security Adviser Anthony] Lake… supplied[an] analogy. “I think Mother Teresa and Ronald Reagan were both trying to do the same thing,” he said in suggesting that the Clinton foreign policy encompassed both, “one helping the helpless, one fighting the Evil Empire.” In fact, they were trying to do different things. Reagan conducted a traditional foreign policy with a strong ideological overlay. He was in the business of pursuing the national interest of the United States as he understood it. Mother Teresa, by contrast, is in the business of saving lives, which is what Lake and his colleagues tried in 1993 to make the cornerstone of American foreign policy. They tried, and failed, to turn American foreign policy into a branch of social work.
Mandelbaum is right about most things here but especially about what the Clinton team tried to do. They did indeed try to turn American foreign policy into a branch of social work, the means by which to soothe their consciences and make themselves feel better about the power they held. What he is wrong about, however, is that they failed.
When I say that, I don’t mean to imply that the Clintons succeeded in their foreign policy endeavors. They clearly did not. All three – Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti – were disasters. And I don’t mean to suggest that the Clintons succeeded in turning the official foreign policy of the nation into a social work operation. They didn’t do that either. George W. Bush’s foreign policy may have been mistaken and overly interventionist, but it was, at least in theory, based entirely on American interests.
All of that notwithstanding, it is readily apparent that the Clintons did succeed in changing the perception in liberal and bureaucratic circles about the role that the United States should play in the world. While official Washington went back to focusing on the national interest, unofficial Washington – namely USAID – adopted the Clinton values-based scheme wholeheartedly. Over the first few weeks of the Trump presidency, USAID has been exposed as a massive slush fund used to underwrite leftist vanity projects throughout the world. Yes, it did some good, and yes, most of its efforts were legitimate. Nevertheless, its more discretionary spending has been frivolous, radically detached from the national interest, and in line with the constantly changing values of the permanent regime (the ruling class, if you will).
Mother Teresa may not have approved specifically of giving $50 million in condoms to Mozambique, but the liberal/left in Washington would certainly see that as a “mission of mercy” equivalent to her mission and would certainly pat itself on the back for its righteous use of American “soft power.” The same goes for transgender operas, transgender comic books, DEI musicals, and gender-affirming care instruction. To the ruling class, all of this is good; all of this is moral; all of this represents the best of what America can do when it is focused on embracing and spreading “values.”
Michael Mandelbaum had the Clinton Administration pegged. He saw what they were doing and knew why it failed. What he may have missed, however, is the graft and corruption enabled by the trillions of dollars of American borrowing and the additional avenues they would create for the conduct of values-based foreign policy.
