I am an advocate of what Michael Walzer calls the “default” left position on foreign policy: minimal engagement, at least until we get democracy right here at home. Still, self-interest and moral obligation require some attention to the world beyond our borders. So I was hoping that his “A Foreign Policy for the Left” (Dissent, Spring 2014) would guide me to a more nuanced approach. It did not.

Walzer complains that leftists lean too heavily on “shortcuts”—simpleminded assumptions, such as “America is always wrong,” that they can apply to any foreign conflict in which the United States is involved. Instead, he tells us, we should do our homework: pay “close attention to local circumstances and particular histories.” Only then can we identify our true comrades—“the men and women who really believe in, and who practice, democracy and equality.”

We should all be better informed. But as the article also reminds us, it is a very complicated world. And there is no way that even engaged, thoughtful, and sleep-denying activists—on the left or the right—can possibly learn enough to make their own well-researched, objective judgments about the large number of complex local circumstances in which the American governing class has involved us, often in ways invisible even to themselves. Indeed, the U.S. government, with its thousands of smart analysts and vast human and electronic spying apparatus, is notoriously inept at reading the political intelligence it gathers.

Walzer chides the left for losing interest in Syria, in part because it requires “a close reading and sharp critique of Islamic politics.” No doubt he is better read than most of us, but even he seems to have no answer to the question of which of the shadowy figures in that murky killing field are our comrades who really ”believe in and practice democracy and equality,” and what we can do to make things better.

By default, most of us rely on shortcuts—the press and punditry—to help us through these foreign policy thickets. The question is: who among them is more reliable? Walzer is right: left-wing commentators tend to be too cynical about U.S. humanitarian aid, not cynical enough about the UN, and too willing to give a pass to authoritarians from our side of the ideological street. But, as he acknowledges, the default anti-imperialist position has a pretty good track record, including on Iran, Viet Nam, Central and South America, Iraq, and a variety of colonial wars. I would add to the list Indonesia, the settlements on the West Bank, and Afghanistan.

Yet the left has little traction in shaping foreign policy. In contrast, the right’s default position of “America can do no wrong” dominates the debate and, as disaster follows disaster, continues to fuel misadventures that add to the world’s suffering. The problem for the nation is not the left’s lack of sophisticated information, but rather its lack of influence. So at this stage of our history, as unbalanced and knee-jerk as the left default view may sometimes be, it serves an important purpose: opposition.

“Dictators and terrorists are never our comrades,” Walzer writes. Amen. But this hardly completes the list of global bad guys. Most on the left would certainly include the gangster oligarchs of Potemkin village democracies supported by the alliance between the U.S. Government and multinational capital. Walzer chides the left for its “infatuation” with Hugo Chávez. Yet Chávez was elected twice in votes considered fair by international observers and was the target of an attempted coup encouraged by our government. Certainly he seems to have done more for Venezuela’s oppressed than the plutocrats Washington openly favors to topple his successor ever did, and probably ever will. One can make a case against the Bolivarian revolution, but dismissing it as a “dictatorship” without reference to “local circumstances and particular histories” seems like the kind of intellectual shortcut the article criticizes.

In any event, because the world is so complicated, the imperial reach so wide, and our access to information and our capacity to process it so limited, the minimalist default position still makes the most moral and political sense. The physicians’ rule applies here: first, do no harm.

 

(For full discussion, see:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-foreign-policy-for-the-left-defending-the-default-position)