Generally, online debates and roundtables end up a bit stale and platitudinous. But the
exchange between Yglesias and Beinart is actually extremely good. In particular, Beinart hits on one of my favored points: The Iraq War can, in certain ways, serve as a distraction from other, yet more pressing, foreign policy concerns and debates. By creating the appearance of Democratic, or at least liberal, unity, it can obscure fault lines that will be important in the next few years. Particularly this one:
I think one of the important challenges for liberals in the upcoming years will be to argue that great power conflict (with China and Russia) is not inevitable, and would be a great tragedy, since it would imperil efforts at global cooperation against common threats. It is enormously significant that Kagan--by far, in my mind, the most important and talented conservative foreign policy thinker of the post-cold war era--is now arguing that the new focus of American foreign policy should be leadership of a united democratic bloc against the authoritarian powers of China and Russia. It's a return to pre-9/11 conservative foreign policy, when China was the key enemy. Motivated by a strong Cold War nostalgia, it seems likely that conservatives will spent the coming years arguing that a new great power showdown is inevitable, and attacking liberals for not preparing sufficiently to fight it. They may reassemble a version of the conservative cold war coalition: with realists signing up to battle China because it's a great power and neoconservatives signing up to battle China because it's authoritarian. Obviously, there are many foreign policy battles left to fight over the Middle East, but I wonder if perhaps they aren't all warm-up for the China and Russia struggle, for which Kagan has now rung the opening bell. (Or re-rung it, since it was his and William Kristol's major focus in the late 1990s).
I've said this before, but I think the defining foreign policy question in the next few decades will be whether you believe multipolarity can engender positive-sum cooperation amongst major nations, or whether it will lead to war and conflict and thus unipolarity must be maintained at all costs. I can make my argument for multipolarity (if China educates 42 million medical researchers and one develops a cure for cancer, we're going to be able to buy it, and be better off), but more fundamental than that is the case against a hostile stance towards China and other emergent powers, which was core to the neoconservative identity in the late-90s and will doubtlessly be resuscitated over the next few years. The political divisions over those arguments will not map neatly onto the current Iraq argument, but the Right's strategies will be much the same: More moral blackmail ("do liberals
really support the Chinese government torturing so-and-so?"), appeals for solidarity with Taiwan (remember the Kurds?), and lots of fearmongering (the Chinese are building a military! They have lots of people!) meant to pressure Democrats into accepting an aggressive posture. The response is something the Left should be thinking about now. On a related note, if you're interested in the case for multipolarity, you could do worse thn Fareed Zakaria's book,
The Post-American World
.
Image used under a Creative Commons license from Captain Chaos. 
