Charity in blogging, and the lack thereof

Having posted as I did last night, I’ve been having second thoughts. I’ve met Christian Brose a few times, spoken with him, and I certainly have a high opinion of his judgment, intelligence and knowledge. What I wrote last night sits wrong with me for some reason—it’s too vituperative, and underlying it is some unwritten implication that Chris hasn’t thought through things sufficiently well.

Reading Reihan’s post over at the American Scene, I found myself nodding in agreement. I then followed his lead and read Fred Kagan’s analysis over at NR. Again, same story. Reading Chris’ posts in the light of a broader regional strategy alluded to by both Salaam and Kagan, I find no real beef with any of it. I should have been more generous in my previous post(s).

But my disquiet about the Afghan endeavor remains. Part of it, I think, has to do with my congenital Slavic pessimism which has never properly acclimated to the sunny American optimism I’m confronted with on a daily basis. And part of it is a deep-seated aversion to utopian projects which seek to change societies, be they of the ideological democracy- and liberalism-spreading type, or of the softer international development type.

I have an underdeveloped theory of American foreign policy as perpetual tragedy, wherein idealistic Americans are constantly frustrated by the world as it is. This comes about because Americans, when they look at their own society, see a well-functioning, multifaceted, largely cooperative state in which citizenship and nationality are based on pledging fealty to an idea. They don’t recognize that the American way is not the end of history for all humanity, but a beautiful, wonderful historical accident that probably will not be replicable anywhere else. They see nationalist conflict in the Balkans and sectarian conflict in Iraq and write it off as mere epiphenomena of bad institutional design. They don’t see it as more fundamental than that.

This, in a nutshell, is why my hackles go up at the suggestion of making state-building a focus of our foreign policy; why I think Iraq will be at best a profound disappointment to us after all these years of blood and sweat have been invested; and why I think that we ought to have a better and broader approach to Central and South Asia as a whole rather than merely striving to ensure Afghanistan ends up a democracy. Geopolitics, especially for the world’s mightiest power, should not be about winning, succeeding, changing things—it should be about moulding a series of awful possible outcomes into the least awful configuration.