A Distorted Self Image

It is astonishing how little Americans understand their own nation. Recently, Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a man long on intellect and government experience, opined that the Iraq war had generated so much controversy because it was such an aberration: "The emphasis on promotion of democracy, the emphasis on regime change, the war of choice in Iraq -- all of these are departures from the traditional approach."

Many Europeans would certainly like to believe that Iraq was the product of aberrant "neo-conservative" ideas about foreign policy and that a traditional United States lies just around the corner. Many Americans would like to believe this, too. Americans prefer to see themselves as a peace-loving, introspective lot; a nation born in innocence and historically never choosing war but compelled to war by others.

This self-image is at odds with reality, however. The United States has gone to war frequently in its history, rarely out of genuine necessity. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has launched more military interventions than all other great powers combined. The interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were wars of choice, waged for moral and humanitarian ends, not strategic or economic necessity, just as realist critics protested at the time. Even the first Gulf War in 1991 was a war of choice, fought not for oil but to defend the principles of a "new world order" in which aggression could not go unpunished. The United States might have drawn the line at Saudi Arabia, as Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposed.

The first U.S. military intervention of the post-Cold War era, the 1989 invasion of Panama, was a war for regime change and democracy. President George H. W. Bush sent 22,500 troops to oust Manuel Noriega and, as he declared, "to defend democracy" in a conflict "between Noriega and the people of Panama." The conservative columnist George Will favored this "act of hemispheric hygiene," even though U.S. national interests, narrowly construed, did not justify war. That was an argument "against the narrow construing of national interests."

The United States, in fact, has always defined its interests broadly to include the defense and promotion of the "universal" principles of liberalism and democracy enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. "The cause of America is the cause of all mankind," Benjamin Franklin declared at the time of the American Revolution and, as William Appleman Williams once commented, Americans believe their nation "has meaning ... only as it realizes natural right and reason throughout the universe."

This is the real traditional approach: the conviction that U.S. power and influence can and should serve the interests of humanity. It is what makes the United States, in former President Bill Clinton's words, the "indispensable nation," or as then-U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson colorfully put it six decades ago, "the locomotive at the head of mankind." The United States does pursue its selfish interests and ambitions, sometimes brutally, as other nations have throughout history. Nor is it innocent of hypocrisy, masking selfishness behind claims of virtue. But the United States has always had this unique spur to global involvement, an ideological righteousness that inclines it to meddle in the affairs of others, to seek change, to insist on imposing its avowed universal principles usually through peaceful pressures but sometimes through war.

This enduring tradition has led the United States into some disasters where it has done more harm than good, and into triumphs where it has done more good than harm. These days, this conviction is strangely called "neo-conservatism," but there is nothing neo and certainly nothing conservative about it. U.S. foreign policy has almost always been a liberal foreign policy. As Will put it, the "messianic impulse" has been "a constant of America's national character, and a component of American patriotism" from the beginning.

The other constant, however, has been a self-image at odds with this reality. This distorted self-image has its own noble origins, reflecting a perhaps laudable liberal discomfort with power and a sense of guilt at being perceived as a bully, even in a good cause. When things go badly, as in Iraq, the cry goes up in the land for a change. There is a yearning, even among the self-proclaimed realists, for a return to an imagined past innocence; to the mythical "traditional approach"; to a virtuous time that never existed, not even at the glorious birth of the republic.

This is escapism, not realism. True realism would recognize the United States for what it is, an ambitious, ideological, revolutionary nation with a belief in its own world-transforming powers and a historical record of enough success to sustain that belief.

Whether the United States conducts itself successfully or stumbles in the coming years will depend on the wisdom and capacity of the statesmen and women the U.S. people choose to shape and carry out their foreign policy. But the broad direction of that foreign policy will remain much as it has been for over two centuries. Anything else would be an aberration.

Robert Kagan is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of "Dangerous Nation," a history of American foreign policy. This comment was published in the Financial Times.