Genealogy fails—reinscribes violence

Public Opinion and the Iraq Syndrome One popular explanation for the American public’s palpable unwillingness to countenance military involvement in the Syrian civil war in 2013 was that the country was slumping into a deep isolationist mood, and there was concern about a new isolationism or a growing isolationism or a new non-interventionist fad.23 In contrast to those envisioning a new isolationism, some commentators, including such unlikely soulmates as Andrew Bacevich, Robert Kagan, John Mearsheimer, Rachel Maddow, Gregory Daddis, and Vladimir Putin, have variously maintained that we have seen the rise of a new American militarism in the last decades or that Americans congenitally hail from Mars.24 But both perspectives are flawed. The American people have not become isolationist: they have not come seriously to yearn for full withdrawal from the world. However, they have long had a deep and abiding wariness about costly and frustrating military engagements. And the militarism perspective, it seems to me, extrapolates far too much from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These ventures – the 9/11 wars – have proved to be aberrations from usual patterns, not portents of the future. Although they demonstrate that Americans remain willing to strike back hard if attacked, they do not indicate a change in the public’s reticence about becoming militarily involved in other kinds of missions – or errands. Instructive is an examination of the long-term trends in a set of poll questions designed to tap “isolationism.” Three versions are mapped in Figure 8.1. 25 They document something of a rise in wariness about military intervention after the Vietnam War and then, thereafter, a fair amount of steadiness punctured by spike-like ups and downs in response to events including 9/11 and its ensuing wars. In the wake of the disastrous military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, “isolationism” as measured by these poll questions has gone back to about where it was in the aftermath of Vietnam. The poll question with the longest pedigree has been asked at least since 1945: “Do you think it will be best for the future of this country if we take an active part in world affairs, or if we stayed out of world affairs?” The question seems to have been fabricated to generate an “internationalist” response. In 1945, after all, the United States possessed something like half the wealth in the world and scarcely had much of an option about “taking an active part in world affairs,” as it was so blandly and unthreateningly presented. The authors of the poll question got the number they probably wanted: so queried, only 19 percent of poll respondents in 1945 picked the “stay out” or “isolationist” option. As can be seen in the figure, however, high levels of “isolationism” can be generated if the question is reformulated by asking respondents whether they agree or disagree that “We shouldn’t think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our own national problems and building up our strength and prosperity here at home.” In that rendering, the option of staying out of world affairs is only implied, and measured “isolationism” consistently registers 30 or 40 percentage points higher. In the years following 1945, the “stay out” percentage rose a bit to around 25 percent, but it had descended to 16 percent in 1965 in the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and as the war in Vietnam began. The experience of that war pushed it much higher – to 31 to 36 percent as part of what has been called the “Vietnam Syndrome.” The percentage has stayed at around that level ever since except for some spike-like jolts upward or downward. There was a downward dip during the Gulf War of 1991, at the end of which, as noted in Chapter 3, the war’s chief author, President George H. W. Bush, grandly concluded a speech by trumpeting, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” Within weeks, however, the “stay out” option had regained its previous attractiveness. There were also interesting spikes suggesting a wariness about military interventions abroad when troops were sent to Bosnia in late 1995 and at the time of the Kosovo conflict in 1999. In these instances, the spikes were upward, even though no American troops were lost in either venture and even though both were deemed successful, at least in their own terms, at the time. In the current century, the “stay out” percentage dropped to 14, its lowest recorded level ever, in the aftermath of 9/11. It rose the next year, and then plunged downward again in 2003 and 2004 – the first two years of the Iraq War. By 2006, however, it had risen to post-Vietnam levels, where it has roughly remained although a related question, asking whether the United States “should mind its own business internationally” while letting “other countries get along as best they can on their own,” did reach new – or almost new – highs in 2013. 26 Given the bland attractiveness of the “take an active part in world affairs” option, it is impressive that around a third or more of the public since Vietnam has generally rejected it to embrace the “stay out” option. However, this should probably be taken to be more nearly an expression of wariness about costly military entanglements than as a serious yearning for full withdrawal from the world, or “isolationism.” There is, for example, no real indication that Americans want to erect steely trade barriers.27 And polls continually show that the public is far more likely to approve foreign ventures if they are approved and supported by allies and international organizations.28 Real isolationism should be made of sterner stuff.29 As Christopher Preble puts it succinctly, “for the most part, Americans want to remain actively engaged in the world without having to be in charge of it.”30 John Mearsheimer argues that the public has become less enthusiastic about acting as the world’s policeman.31 However, it does not seem that it has ever been very enthusiastic: there has always been a deep reluctance to lose American lives or to put them at risk overseas for humanitarian purposes. That perspective is seen most starkly, perhaps, when Americans were asked in 1993 whether they agreed that “Nothing the US could accomplish in Somalia is worth the death of even one more US soldier.” Fully 60 percent expressed agreement.32 This is not such an unusual position for humanitarian ventures. If Red Cross or other workers are killed while carrying out humanitarian missions, their organizations frequently threaten to withdraw no matter how much good they may be doing. Essentially what they are saying is that the saving of lives is not worth the deaths of even a few of their service personnel.33 Thus, civil warfare and vicious regimes have not actually inspired a great deal of alarm except when they seemed to present a direct threat to the United States. As a result, few have inspired military intervention. Rather, the most common official pattern about such situations has been, as suggested earlier in this book several times, vast proclamation followed by half-vast execution. For example, the United States did a great deal of bloviating about the civil war in Bosnia in the early 1990s, but it held off intervention on the ground until hostilities had ceased. Even then, the public was anything but enthusiastic when American peace keeping soldiers were sent in, and enthusiasm did not rise even when it turned out the atmosphere remained “permissive” and the troops were met with little or no hostility.34 Indeed, about the only time the public chose to pay much attention to the war in Bosnia, a venture much publicized and much agonized over by elites and by the media in the 1990s, was when an American airman was shot down behind enemy lines and when American troops were dispatched to the area to police the situation.35 Intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was by bombing alone, and in Somalia, the United States abruptly withdrew when 19 of its troops were killed. The United States, like other developed nations, mostly remained studiously distant from genocide in Cambodia in 1975–79 and Rwanda in 1994 and from catastrophic civil war in Congo after 1997 or in South Sudan after 2013. 36 In many respects the Libyan effort of 2011 was quite a bit like the campaign in Somalia in 1992–93: after some initial success, troops and direct military involvement were pulled back when things began to go awry. The reluctance is most evident in the supportive, but distant, response to rebels in the calamitous Syrian civil war. In general, then, those who suggest there has been a surge of militarism put far too much weight on the temporary successes of the stridently hawkish neoconservative movement in the early part of the George W. Bush administration. In fact, there has never been much support for sending American troops into hostile situations in the last decades – or maybe even century – unless there was a decided provocation. In the 9/11 cases, opinion was impelled not by a propensity toward militarism, but, as with entry into World War II, by an outraged reaction to a direct attack on the United States. Even at that, as seen in Chapter 4, Bush was unable to boost support for going to war with Iraq in his campaign to do so in 2002–3 despite the fact that there was little opposition from the Democratic leadership. Even support for the once-popular, 9/11-induced war in Afghanistan waned. Using the same poll question, initial support for that war was some 15 percentage points higher than it had been at the start of the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, but, like those wars, support gradually declined as American casualties were suffered.37 People, contrary to a large literature, do not seem to be readily manipulable by opinion elites or by the media on such issues. As noted in Chapter 5, the Obama administration dramatically proposed military action in response to chemical weapons use in Syria, and leaders of both parties in Congress rather quickly fell into line. Nonetheless, the public was decidedly unwilling even to support the punitive bombing of Syria – a venture likely to risk few if any American lives – out of concern that it would lead to further involvement in the conflict there.38 Leaders may propose, but that does not mean public opinion will move in concert – that people will necessarily buy the message. And on the occasions when they do, it is probably best to conclude that the message has struck a responsive chord, rather than that the public has been manipulated.39 If George W. Bush was unable to boost support for invasion during the runup to his war in Iraq, neither was his father able to do so, despite strenuous efforts, for going to war against Iraq in Kuwait in the runup to the 1991 Gulf War as discussed in Chapter 3. On the other hand, public concern about international terrorism, as discussed in Chapter 7, has not altered much in the two decades since 9/11 even though there have been multiple reasons to have expected an erosion of concern to take place. After Vietnam, there was strong desire – usually called the Vietnam Syndrome – not to do that again. And, in fact, there never were other Vietnams for the United States during the Cold War. The administration was kept by Congress even from rather modest anti-Communist militarized ventures in Africa and, to a lesser extent, in Latin America – though there was bipartisan support for aiding the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan, a venture, however, that did not involve sending American troops. A rather comparable Iraq, or Iraq/Afghan, Syndrome now seems likely.40 Christopher Dandeker parses the situation succinctly: “the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq represent the high-water mark of the Western belief that states can successfully use military force to intervene in the affairs of failed, rogue, or other states to achieve ambitious foreign policy goals.” Further, “the difficulties of achieving success in these interventions, even when ‘success’ is modestly defined, have shaken confidence and belief in the value of intervention among Western political and military elites and publics.” Dandeker also argues that “military interventions will continue,” but they will be different from those in Iraq and Afghanistan and “more like the Libyan example of 2011.”41 As noted above and in Chapter 5, however, the behavior in the Libya venture is not all that new. It is similar to the one in Somalia in 1993 – initial success and then rather abrupt and unsentimental withdrawal as things begin to fall apart. Although support for one tactic, direct military intervention, declined after Vietnam, the general policy of maintaining somewhat lesser exertions in dealing with the perceived Communist threat continued to be supported and a huge military continued to be extravagantly financed although it had little to do. And something like that seems likely in the case of today’s monsters. There will be general support in principle for policies intended to deal with proliferation and international terrorism, but not so much for militarized ventures of invasion and particularly of occupation.42 The US military seems to be on much the same page. In its defense priority statement of January 2012, the Defense Department firmly emphasized (that is, rendered in italics) that “U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct largescale, prolonged stability operations.” Later, when President Donald Trump suggested that “the military option” might be appropriate for dealing with the problems entailed by Venezuela (which had systematically destroyed itself but was occasionally belligerent and defiant), his defense secretary at the time, James Maddis, simply responded, “The Venezuelan crisis is not a military matter.”43 As David Sanger puts it, “America is out of the occupation business.”44 Although there was some backward creep after 2014 in response to the ISIS menace as discussed in Chapter 5, this basic policy perspective does not seem to have changed. Overall, as many military people have come increasingly to appreciate, many problems simply cannot be solved by military means. The public also seems to be increasingly capable of containing the notion that it is the destiny of the United States to lead the world. The American record on this score, actually, is less than stellar. Out of sympathy over 9/11, NATO countries did more or less “follow” the United States into the invasion of Afghanistan. However, over time the “leader” lost its followers as the occupation increasingly became a debacle. And, when the United States tried to get support for its ill-destined invasion of Iraq in 2003, only the British and the Australians signed up to join its tiny “coalition of the willing.” Most countries, including especially France, tried to dissuade the United States from the misguided venture – a true sign of friendship if not of blind followership. As noted earlier, for its prescient advice and its efforts to pacify the chief primate, France’s effrontery was met with humorless derision in the United States Congress when a fat-laced accompaniment to hamburgers was relabeled “freedom fries.” At that, Australia soon left the Iraq misadventure and so, later, did the United Kingdom where outraged parliamentarians from the party of invasion-supporting Prime Minister Tony Blair used the episode to destroy his political career. In the runup to Iraq, the United States, using not only “leadership” but bribery, also tried to get NATO ally Turkey to let it use its territory for bases for the invasion and failed. In an earlier decade, the United States had also tried to entice (aka “lead”) some of its “followers” to help it out in the Vietnam War, with only modest success. Although fully two-thirds of Americans continued to favor greater US involvement in the global economy in 2013, only 46 percent deemed it “very desirable” for the United States to exert strong leadership in world affairs – the lowest level ever registered by the poll question. In the same poll, only 11 percent of Europeans said they felt that way: the dominated, it would appear, do not seem to have gotten the message.45 In a speech at West Point in 2014, President Barack Obama self-importantly contended that “the question we face is not whether America will lead but how we will lead.”46 Perhaps the American (and European) people can be forgiven for worrying about the results. At the same time, the American military – despite its substantial record of failure – continues to receive high approval ratings in public opinion surveys. It’s just that the public does not seem to want it actually to be used very much and then mainly (or only) when it espies a clear threat to the United States. And even where there was substantial public fear about a threat, as with ISIS, the military, anticipating that support even for popular ventures like that might well wane as American battle deaths were suffered, deemed it wise to configure troop deployments in a manner that minimized American casualties. If that happens, public support may not rise, but attention will wane. The ability to use drones and, as in Kosovo, to fight from distances like 40,000 feet fits this perspective. Militarized interventionist internationalism above a very modest level, then, may well be dead – whether the inspiration for such interventions is liberal or neoconservative. However, it may never have actually been alive either – the public has never really bought the notion that American lives should be lost for humanitarian purposes, to spread democracy, or to make the world safe for others. view of politics as conflict always tending to violence and domination as foundational to the human condition immediately present themselves. When all gestures to what is common have been exposed as expressions of partial wills to power, and when the ethos of baseless suspicion has been unleashed and revealed all ideals, values, laws, and norms, as partial and biased, does that mean that human life has become more truthful, as arriving at the realization of the “reality” of this ontologized state of primordial clashes? On Foucault’s own ontology, “Nietzsche’s hypothesis” would itself have to be unmasked as yet another contender among many to capture the final truth about the human condition, and shown to mask a partial will to power (Milbank, 2006: 282; Oksala, 2012: 27). If one deploys the genealogical suspicion onto the genealogical disposition itself, it is revealed as but one option among others. Reading the genealogical ethos as expressing a distinctive (anti)theological core, one may, with Milbank (2006), ask whether the Nietzschean suspicion that Foucault takes over “is the final and truly non-metaphysical mode of secular reason, or else itself embodies an ontology of power and conflict which is simply another mythos” (2006: 2). One may also follow Milbank in his suggestion that secular discourse of which he reads post-Nietzschean genealogy as a radical exponent of emerged out of an active rejection of some of Christianity’s core teachings. Foucault (2003 [1975–1976]) articulates this rejection when he refers to genealogy as the very opposite of those traditional analyses that try to find beneath the apparent or superficial confusion, beneath the visible brutality and passions, a basic rationality which is both permanent and related, by its very essence, to the just and the good. (2003 [1975–1976]: 269) However, in classical Thomist Christianity, difference does not have to be suppressed, reduced, or subsumed in any kind of dialectical movement. Thus, in contrast to Foucault’s genealogy, “[p]eace no longer depends upon the reduction to the self-identical, but is the sociality of harmonious difference. Violence, by contrast, is always a secondary willed intrusion upon this possible infinite order” (Milbank, 2006: 6). Once one realizes that the ontology of violence is no more than one possible mythos, one can put forward “an alternative mythos, equally unfounded, but nonetheless embodying an ‘ontology of peace’, which conceives differences as analogically related, rather than equivocally at variance” (Milbank, 2006: 279). On the one hand, the reading that Milbank proposes affirms what we find in genealogy, namely “the reduction of substance to transition.” On the other hand, such a reading “questions the transcendental reading of transition as conflict” (Milbank, 2006: 298). So while Milbank retains a differential ontology, he questions whether the elements would have to relate to one another arbitrarily and violently. Milbank puts the crux of the issue thus, The question of the possibility of living together in mutual agreement, and the question of whether there can be a charitable act, […] turn out to be conjointly the question of whether there can be an “analogy” or a “common measure” between differences which does not reduce differences to mere instances of a common essence or genus. In other words a likeness that only maintains itself through the differences, and not despite nor in addition to them. (Milbank, 2006: 290) The point is not necessarily that IR scholarship should embrace Milbank’s alternative vision, but rather to make clear that the genealogical rendition is but one option, no more and no less grounded than ontologies which refuse violence as foundational. Conclusion This article has examined genealogy as a form of critique in IR. The first part of the article demonstrated that Foucault’s genealogy was an important component in the work of the first generation of post-structuralist IR as well as in contemporary scholarship informed by frameworks of governmentality and biopolitics. It was shown that when genealogy is understood as critique, violence risks being inscribed as foundational to global political life. However, despite the fact that it is virtually impossible to understand the meaning of “critical” in this work without a grasp of genealogy, the assumptions of genealogy have been insufficiently engaged. To rectify this, the second part of the article critically examined the philosophical underpinnings of genealogy. Through a close reading of three core texts where Foucault grapples with genealogy, it was shown that genealogy relies on an ontology of forces, which are postulated as arbitrarily and violently related. Genealogy therefore tends to inscribe violence as foundational to social relations. It was further noted that genealogically informed critique brings a peculiar form of suspicion to all that is presented as common, shared, and universal. This suspicion was traced back to Nietzsche and characterized as “baseless,” which again reflects a set of particular ontological commitments idiosyncratic to genealogy. These commitments, which inscribe violence as foundational, were finally contrasted to an ontology which follows the genealogical understanding of emergent forces, but refuses the assumption of them as arbitrarily and violently related. Finally, what are the implications for empirical Foucauldian work for the argument I have pursued in the article? In empirical work informed by governmentality and biopolitics, IR scholars often examine the encounter between Western and non-Western countries. The problem to which I ultimately want to draw attention is not that such scholarship is often critical of military intervention undertaken by Western powers. On the contrary, it is important to bring out and critically scrutinize the paternalistic and indeed hierarchical renditions that no doubt are common in, for instance, the liberal peace project (e.g. Richmond, 2011). The problem is rather that the genealogical ethos risks turning into a global interpretive disposition, with which all global interactions by whatever means are made a priori suspect. Instead of seeking to engage in a careful empirical consideration of the merits of forms of intervention in each case, the generalized genealogical suspicion [prevents] disables any other understanding of global political life than a ceaseless unfolding drama of clashing wills to dominate and conquer. Since the liberal project is exposed as just a particular will to power, it must inscribe a relation of violent hierarchy to non-Western localities, as opposed to an understanding of similar and harmoniously overlapping subjectivities already existing in those places. On such a pre-methodological genealogical disposition, intervention becomes suspicious in whatever form it may take. Whether it is in the form of peacekeeping troops or rule of law advisors assisting local actors in security sector reform, any involvement can only be read as a manifestation of “the West’s” ongoing will to colonize and impose its will on others.