Egypt and the Idealist-Realist Debate in U.S. Foreign Policy

Egypt and the Idealist-Realist Debate in U.S. Foreign Policy

The first round of Egyptian Parliamentary elections have taken place and the winners were the Islamists. The Islamists are themselves split between more extreme and more moderate factions, but what is clear is that the secularists that dominated the demonstrations and were the focus of the Arab Spring narrative made a poor showing. Of the three broad power blocs in Egypt—Military, Islamists and secular democrats, the latter proved the weakest.

It is far from clear what will happen in Egypt now. The military remains un-fragmented and powerful, and it is not clear how much actual power they are prepared to cede or whether they will be forced to cede. What is clear is that the faction championed by Western governments and the media will now have to either make peace with the Islamist agenda, back the military or fade into irrelevance.

One of the points I made back during the height of the Arab Spring was that the West should be careful of what it wished for. It might get it. Democracy does not always bring secular democrats to power. To be more precise, democracy might yield a popular government, but the assumption that that government would support a liberal democratic constitution that conceives of human rights in the Euro-American sense is by no means certain. Unrest does not always lead to a revolution. A revolution does not always lead to democracy. Democracy does not always lead to Euro-American constitutions.

It is not clear where Egypt will go. It is far from clear that the Egyptian military will cede power in any practical sense, that the Islamists can form a coherent government, or how extreme that government might turn out to be. This really isn’t about Egypt. Rather, Egypt serves as a specimen to study—it is a case study in an inherent contradiction in Western ideology, and ultimately, in the attempt to create a coherent foreign policy.

The West, following the principles of the French Revolution, have two core beliefs. The first is the concept of national self-determination, the idea that all nations—and what a nation means is complex in itself—have the right to determine for themselves the type of government they wish. The second is the idea of human rights, which are defined in several documents but are all built around the basic values of individual rights, and particularly the right not only to participate in politics, but to be free in your private life from government intrusion.

The first principle leads to the idea of the democratic foundations of the state. The second leads to the idea that the state must be limited in its power in certain ways, and the individual free to pursue his own life in his own way within a framework of law limited by the principles of liberal democracy. The core assumption within this is that a democratic polity will yield a liberal constitution. This assumes that the majority of the citizens, left to their own devices, will favor the enlightenments definition of human rights. The assumption was this simple, while the application was tremendously complex. But in the end, the premise of the Euro-American project was that national self-determination, expressed through free elections, would create and sustain constitutional democracies.

It is interesting to note that human rights groups and neo-conservatives, who on the surface are ideologically opposed, actually share this core belief. Both believe that democracy and human rights flow from the same source, and that creating democratic regimes will create human rights. The Neo-conservatives believe outside military intervention might be an efficient agent for this. The human rights groups oppose this, preferring to organize and underwrite democratic movements, and use measures like sanctions and courts to compel oppressive regimes to cede power. But these two apparently opposed groups actually share two core beliefs. The first is that democracy will yield constitutional democracy. The second is that outside intervention by different means is needed to facilitate the emergence of an oppressed public naturally inclined toward these things.

This then yields a theory of foreign policy in which the underlying strategic principle must be not only the support of existing constitutional democracies, but also bringing power to bear to weaken oppressive regimes and free the people to choose to build the kind of regimes that reflect the values of the European enlightenment.

The case of Egypt raises the interesting and obvious question—regardless of how it all turns out. What if there are democratic elections and the people choose a regime that violates the principles of western human rights? What for example happens if after tremendous Western effort to force democratic elections, the electorate chooses to reject Western values and pursue a very different direction—for example one that regards Western values as morally reprehensible and chooses to make war on it. The obvious example is Adolph Hitler, whose ascent to power was fully in keeping with the processes of the Weimar Republic, a democratic regime, and whose intention, clearly stated, was to supersede that regime with one that was, popular (and there is little doubt but that the Nazi regime had vast public support), opposed to constitutionalism in the democratic sense, and hostile to constitutional democracy in other countries.

The assumption is that the destruction of repressive regimes opens the door for democratic elections and those democratic elections will not result in another repressive regime, at least by Western standards. But this assumes that all societies find Western values admirable and want to emulate it. This is sometimes the case, but the general assertion is a form of narcissism in the West, that assumes that all reasonable people, freed from oppression, would wish to emulate us.

At this moment in history, the obvious counter-argument rests in some, and not all, Islamic movements. We do not know that the Egyptian Islamists will be successful and we don’t know what ideology they will pursue, but they are Islamists and their view of man and moral nature is different from those of the French Enlightenment. From their view of the relations of the individual to the community to the view of obligation to their understanding of the distinction between the public and private sphere, Islamists have a principled disagreement with the West. Their opposition to the Egyptian military regime was not that it limited individual freedom but that it violated their understanding of the moral purpose of the regime. It was not that they weren’t democratic—they claimed, apparently with some right—that they spoke for the Egyptian people. Rather it was that they had a different, and in their view superior, concept of moral political life.

The collision between the doctrine of national self-determination and the western notion of human rights is not an abstract question but an extremely practical one for Europe and the United States. Egypt is the largest Arab country and one of the major centers of Islamic life. Since 1954 it has had a secular and militarist government. Since 1973 it has been a pro-Western government. At a time when the United States is trying to bring its wars in the Islamic world to an end, along with its NATO partners in Afghanistan, and with relations with Iran, already poor, getting worse, the democratic transformation of Egypt into a radical Islamic regime would shift the balance of power in the region wildly.

There is therefore the question of the type of regime Egypt has, whether it was democratically elected and whether it respects human rights, two very different questions. There is then the question of how this new regime might effect the United States and other countries. The same can be said, for example of Syria, where an oppressive regime is resisting a movement that some in the West regard as democratic. It may be, but its moral principle might be anathema to the West. At the same time the old repressive regime might be unpopular but more in the interests of the West.

Pose this question then. Assume there is a choice between a repressive, undemocratic regime that is in the interest of the a Western country, and a regime that is democratic but repressive by Western standards and hostile to the these interests. Which is preferable and what steps should be taken?

These are blindingly complex questions that some—called Realists as opposed to Idealists—say are not only unanswerable, but undermine the ability to pursue the national interest without in anyway improving the moral character of the world. In other words, you are choosing between two types of repression from a Western point of view and there is no preference. Therefore a country like the United States should ignore the moral question altogether and focus on a simpler question, and one that’s answerable—the national interest.

Egypt is an excellent place to point out the tension within U.S. foreign policy in particular between Idealists who argue that pursuing enlightenment principles is the national interest, and realists who argue that the pursuit of principles is very different from their attainment, and you wind up with neither just regimes nor protect the United States. In other words, the United States could wind up with a regime hostile to the United States and equally if differently oppressive by American standards. There would be no moral improvement but a practical disaster.

There is a temptation to accept the realist argument. Its weakness is that its definition of the national interest is never clear. The physical protection of the United States is obviously an issue—and given 9-11 it is not a trivial matter. At the same time, the physical safety of the United States is not always at stake. What exactly is our interest in Egypt and does it matter to us whether or not it is pro-American? There are answers to this but they are not always obvious and the Realists frequently have trouble defining the national interest. Even if we accept the idea that the primary objective of US foreign policy is securing the national interest irrespective of moral considerations—what exactly is the national interest.

It seems to me that two principles emerge. The first is that having no principles beyond interest is untenable. Interest seems very tough minded but it is really a vapid concept when you drill into it. The second is that there can be no moral good without power. Proclaiming a principle without pursuing the power to pursue it is a form of narcissism. You know you are doing no good but talking about it makes you feel superior. Interest is not enough and morality without power is mere talk.

So what is to be done in Egypt. The first thing is to recognize that little can be done not because it is impermissible morally, but because practically Egypt is a big country, hard to influence, and meddling and failing is worse than doing nothing at all. Second, it must be understood that Egypt matters and the outcome of this affair is not a matter of indifference given the past decade.

An American strategy on Egypt—one that goes beyond policy papers in Washington—is hard to define. But a number of points can be deduced from this exercise. First, it is essential to not create myths. The myth of the Egyptian revolution was that it was going to create a constitutional democracy like Western democracies. That simply wasn’t the issue on the table. The issue was between the military regime and an Islamist regime. This brings the second point, which is that sometimes, in confronting two different forms of repression, the issue is to select the one most in the national interest. That will force you to define the national interest, but that is salutary.

Washington, like all capitals, likes policies and hates political philosophy. The policies frequently fail to come to grips with reality, because the policy makers don’t grasp the philosophical implications. The contradiction inherent in the human rights and neo-conservative approach are one thing. But the inability of the Realists to define with rigor what the national interest consists of creates policy papers of monumental insignificance. Both sides create polemics as a substitute for thought.

Its at moments like Egypt that this really is driven home. One side really believed that Egypt would become like Minnesota. The other side new it wouldn’t and devised a plan to be tough minded—but not tough minded enough to define what the point of the plan was. This is the crisis of U.S. foreign policy. It has always been there, but given American power, it is one that creates global instability. One part of the American regime wants to be just; the other part wants to be tough. Neither realize that such a distinction is the root of the problem. Look at American (and European) policy toward Egypt and I think you can see the problem.

The solution does not rest in slogans or ideology, nor in soft versus hard power. It rests in clarity on both the moral mission of the regime and requirement that the regime understand and wield power effectively. It requires the study of political philosophy. Jean JacquesRousseau with his distinction between the General Will and the Will of the Many might be a good place to start. Or reading the common sense of Mark Twain would be a more pleasant substitute.

Egypt

Concept of democracy and self determination

Tension between ethics and national interest

Limits of power

Egypt and Israeli national security as an example

Egypt and American interests

Similarity between human rights and neo conservatives

Criticism of moralists and realists

No clean answer. Policy making in a messy world