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Transforming the United States into a knight-errant, though, is at the
heart of liberal internationalism. As in nineteenth-century Britain, so
in modern America; just as with Gladstone, the current manifestation
of this impulse first became apparent in the Balkans, when NATO
established a no-fly zone there, during the bombings of 1995. And so
a new generation of liberal hawks emerged, overcoming the
discomfiture associated with the use of force in Vietnam, seeing
themselves as divine intervenors for mistreated ethnic minorities
abroad. It amounted, in some ways, to a multicultural foreign policy,
or at least one that sees America as key to creating a new democratic
order. Madeleine Albright, for example, announced during the
Clinton administration, “If we have to use force, it is because we are
America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see
further than other countries into the future.”
The hubris of ascribing a unique percipience to the United States was
hardly confined to Albright. It also amounted a fortiori to the credo of
the George W. Bush administration, which witnessed a fusion of
neoconservatives and liberal hawks. “Damn the doves,” Christopher
Hitchens announced in the conservative London Spectator in 2001 as
the United States readied to topple Saddam Hussein. While in
Dissent, Michael Walzer declared that the Left was being “stupid,
overwrought, grossly inaccurate” and should accept America’s
imperial status, modeling any opposition to the Iraq invasion on the
Little Englanders during the Boer War.
Then, as the insurgency developed, the alliance melted away. A
notable defector was Peter Beinart, who first wrote a book calling for
a nationalistic Democratic Party, then issued a second one taking it
all back.
Now the alliance between liberal hawks and neocons is returning,
epitomized in an open letter sent to the White House in February
2011 by the Foreign Policy Initiative (successor to the Project for the
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