Liberal Doves Are No Answer to Liberal Hawks

When al-Qaida terrorists perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, America had already been following a liberal foreign policy for a decade. We had gone to war against Iraq to uphold the liberal international order. We had intervened militarily in Haiti and Somalia for humanitarian reasons. We expanded NATO after the Soviet Union fell, and although Serbia had never attacked NATO, our “defensive” alliance went to war with Serbia. 

Richard Nixon opened relations with red China in the 1970s as a Cold War gambit. Rather than reducing our reliance on China once the Cold War ended, America’s leaders deepened ties, accelerating Beijing’s rise to economic and military superpower status and gutting our own industrial workforce. America’s elites were determined to pursue free trade worldwide. Free-trade ideology also implied open borders: labor was just another commodity to exchange.

Underlying all this was a liberal understanding of human nature, according to which people are naturally blank slates, and such things as religion and national culture are superficialities easily washed away. What all human beings have in common is a desire for freedom, which is much deeper than any faith or culture. It arises from the fact that only freedom can provide objective material prosperity—maximum GDP—and all higher, nonmaterial ends are subjective. Happiness means getting wealthier and pursuing one’s own amusements. 

The 9/11 atrocities didn’t change Washington’s thinking: liberal wars, liberal immigration policies granting visas to the likes of Mohamed Atta, liberal attitudes toward ethnic or religious “profiling” at airports, and liberal beliefs about human nature made America vulnerable, but in response to the attacks the George W. Bush administration remained true to Washington’s bipartisan ideology. We would not only punish the Taliban and al-Qaida, but we would also democratize Afghanistan. We would insist that Islam was a religion of peace. We would prove it by invading Iraq and turning it into an irenic pro-American liberal democracy, setting off a revolutionary domino effect that would transform the Arab world. Meanwhile, Bush urged Americans to go back to their amusements: “Get down to Disney World in Florida,” he said in a Sept. 27 speech. “Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”