Michael Ignatieff
Persuasion, Dec. 6, 2021
“As a painful demonstration of the limits of American military might, liberal internationalism’s collapse has accelerated the decline of Washington’s global power too.”
What’s a committed liberal internationalist like myself to make of the collapse of our hopes?
Liberal internationalism promised to promote democracy and strengthen a “rules based international order” with other countries. Rather than turning inwards, it envisioned an active role for the West, as a champion of human rights abroad. But its signature projects, military intervention and nation-building, have failed in Afghanistan, just as they did in Syria and Libya. As a painful demonstration of the limits of American military might, liberal internationalism’s collapse has accelerated the decline of Washington’s global power too. What went wrong?
At its heart, liberal internationalism suffered from a democratic deficit. It was a product of what the political scientist Stephen Walt has called “the blob”, the bipartisan foreign policy elite that dominated policymaking during the Cold War and beyond. But “the blob” forgot that power-projection overseas depended ultimately on the willingness of Americans to fight and pay for it. American domestic support, never robust anyway, drained away as body counts mounted in Afghanistan and the “forever war” blundered on without end. When divorced from the pursuit of vital American security interests, which might have carried the backing of the electorate, liberal internationalism degenerated into boutique virtue signaling, social work in places we understood poorly and had no essential reason to be in, anyway.
Alongside its lack of domestic support, liberal internationalism suffered from a fatal case of “mission creep”—the tendency to expand objectives beyond their initial parameters. If the U.S. had limited its aims in Afghanistan to countering the terrorist threat and had withdrawn when the threat had been contained, military operations there would have served American vital interests and maintained sufficient domestic support. Instead, the U.S. and its allies let themselves be drawn into an objective—a stable and democratic Afghanistan—which was never realizable. Both the U.S. military and the international civil society that flooded in to “rebuild” Afghanistan failed to grasp the political canniness of their Taliban foe or confront the inveterate corruption of their Afghan political friends. American aid agencies and NGOs raised the hopes of their Afghan partners, and then, once the game was up, the United States abandoned them all.
In the bleak clarity of hindsight, nation building in Afghanistan was worse than a mistake. It was a side-show. The main strategic challenge was China. Instead of developing a long-term strategy to deal with its first serious competitor since the end of the Cold War, America wasted time, money and lives on a peripheral enterprise that could only end in failure.
Michael Ignatieff is Rector Emeritus of Central European University in Vienna and the author of the forthcoming book On Consolation: Finding Solace in Hard Times.
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