The US isn’t inevitably evil or imperialist – they sanction inaction in the face of global atrocity

The second shortcut, perhaps even more popular than the first, is to stand up always against “imperialism”—or, a shortcut inside the shortcut, always to oppose American policies abroad. Anti-Americanism is a common left politics, which, again, sometimes gets things right, and sometimes doesn’t. I believe that it got things right in Vietnam in 1967; it mostly got things right from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end in Central and South America; it got Iran right in 1953 (when leftists criticized the anti-Mossadegh coup), and Iraq in 2003; it gets NAFTA right, and the IMF, too. But that’s still not enough to make it a reliable shortcut. Remember that the defeat of Nazism and Stalinism, the two most brutal political regimes in world history, was in significant ways American work. This was work that many people on the left supported, as we should have. In 1967 Dwight Macdonald wrote to Mary McCarthy that the American war in Vietnam proved “that despite all the good things about our internal political-social-cultural life, we have become an imperialist power, and one that, partly because of these domestic virtues, is a most inept one.” We have continued to be inept: in December 2005, with 100,000 American soldiers in Iraq, we organized an election—and our man came in third. This is a result, I think, without precedent in imperial history. Macdonald’s understanding of U.S. imperialism reflects a political intelligence and a moral balance that is mostly missing in contemporary anti-American writing. The anti-American shortcut sometimes produces a short-circuited politics—as in the Syrian case where leftist writers predicted terrible consequences if the Americans inter - vened on the side of the anti-Assad forces. The predictions have come true even though the United States didn’t intervene, but once it was clear that the awfulness was not America’s fault, many leftists simply lost interest— except for an ongoing but not very effective engagement on behalf of the war’s victims. Who was responsible for the ongoing war, for the killing, the terror, and the refugee crisis; what social forces were involved; what should we (on the left) make of them and how should we respond to them? This kind of analysis, standard in left critiques of impe - rialism, has mostly been missing. One reason for its absence is that it offers no opportunity to criticize America; a second reason is that it would require a close reading and sharp critique of Islamist politics. Another much-used shortcut (though it doesn’t work in the Syrian case) is to oppose everything Israel does and to blame it for much that it hasn’t done, since it is the “lackey” of American imperialism or, alternatively, the dominant force in shaping American foreign policy. The policies of the current Israeli government require radical criticism—the occupation, the settlements, the refusal to suppress Jewish hooliganism on the West Bank. Nonetheless, the anti-Israel shortcut is an example, to paraphrase August Bebel, of the leftism of fools. The last shortcut is simply to support every government that calls itself leftist or anti-imperialist and sets itself against American interests. This is different from the old Stalinist shortcut: support the Soviet Union whatever it does because it is the first proletarian dictatorship and the first workers’ paradise. That kind of politics is, I think, definitively finished, though it had a brief afterlife, focused on China and then, with very few believers, on Albania and North Korea. The more recent version celebrates Maximal Leaders like Nasser, Castro, or Hugo Chávez— along with occasional short-lived infatuations, as in the case of Michel Foucault and the future Ayatollah Khomeini. Leftist enthusiasm for populist dictatorships is one of our sad stories, which ends when resources run out, the failure to build the economy is suddenly apparent, and the military takes over. But often the Maximal Leader is a military man himself, and the repressive role of the army simply becomes more obvious over time. In Latin America today, the better left is repre - sented by socialists and social democrats who reject demagogic populism and struggle to produce economic growth, greater equality, and a stronger welfare state—and who attract less enthusiasm from American leftists than they deserve. Most leftists are idealists, and so we tend to idealize other people and to imagine that the world is more hospitable to our ideas than it actually is. At the same time, we know better; so I call this the politics of pretending. Consider the response of many leftists to the al Qaeda attack of 9/11. They argued that the United States should call the attack a crime and look to the UN and the International Criminal Court to deal with the criminals. That was the “Dial 911” response to 9/11 (it has been repeated again and again in response to later terrorist attacks), and it would have made sense if we lived in a world that was actually run by the UN and the ICC. But, as I argued in Dissent at the time, there was no one answering the phone at 911. Self-help isn’t, indeed, the only effective and justified response to criminal attacks; different forms of mutual assistance and collective security are possible, and the left should take a forward position in exploring them. But self-help has to be part of the story, given the world we live in, and it isn’t a good idea to pretend otherwise. Another example: some leftists who opposed the Kosovo intervention argued that it didn’t have what every legal and justified use of force requires: UN authorization. Indeed, it didn’t. The UN Security Council is incapable, almost all the time, of acting in a timely way. Think of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia to shut down the killing fields; or the Indian invasion of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, to end the terror there; or the Tanzanian invasion of Uganda to overthrow the murderous regime of Idi Amin. None of these had or could have gotten UN approval. Many leftists opposed each of these interventions, pretending that the UN was already what leftists want it to be, an effective political agent. It isn’t that, and so the unilateral use of force is often, as Jürgen Habermas said of the Kosovo case, “illegal but morally necessary.” The best and last example of leftist pretending is the insistence on the reason - ableness of people who give no sign of being reasonable. Paul Berman writes of the large numbers of French socialists who supported the Munich Agreement that “they gazed across the Rhine and simply refused to believe that millions of upstanding Germans had enlisted in a political movement whose animating principles were paranoid conspiracy theories [and] blood-curdling hatreds. . . .” In the same spirit, many leftists were eager to describe the Chinese communists as “agrarian reformers.” And many today have been quick to grant the legitimacy of Islamist opposition to American bases in Saudi Arabia, say, or to the exis - tence of Israel—and to ignore the demand for a shari’a state and the radical subordination of women. I am fairly sure that most of the people involved in all these cases knew, deep down, that they were pretending. There is a lot to be said for the default position. We should work in the place we know best to make things better. The improvement of humanity begins at home. This argument has special force for Americans, who live in an increasingly inegalitarian society that is also a near-hegemonic world power: we need to be wary of adventures abroad that make our work at home more difficult. Still, good leftists can’t avoid internationalism. We can’t escape what Václav Havel in 1993 called “the feeling of co-responsibility for the world.” Our deepest commitment is solidarity with people in trouble, and some of the worst troubles—poverty, hunger, tyranny, and mass murder—are being experienced right now in other people’s countries. So we are going to be engaged again and again in arguments about what we can do to help. There is no magical way of getting these arguments right. But certain ideological positions, rigidly held, are almost certain to get them wrong: that the use of force is never justified; that “imperial” powers, like the United States, can never act well in the world; and that revo - lutionaries and fighters for liberation, populist leaders and political vanguards, must never be criticized. In all these cases, ideological commitment means that we will only get things right by accident. Political intelligence and moral sensitivity work much better than ideology, and it is these two that should guide our choice of comrades and our decisions about when and how to act abroad. Dictators and terrorists are never our comrades, but only those men and women who really believe in, and who practice, democracy and equality. We should act abroad only with those who share our commitments, and we should act only in ways consistent with those commitments. Leftists have done that often in the past, but often also, we have not: we have mistaken or betrayed our comrades and acted in ways that did not serve either democracy or equality. We need to learn from our history—and the first lesson is this: no more shortcuts, no more pretending.