How Not to Run the World

I am happy that I achieved one thing in my debate with Steve Hayward on last week’s episode of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour: he was forced to call out the Straussian reinforcements! But, as far as I know, Leo Strauss wrote little to nothing about foreign policy, and his intellectual descendants appear to share no established school of thought on the question. In the 2000’s, Bush critics accused Straussians as the theorists for a neo-conservative effort to spread democracy throughout the Middle East. Today, Steve Hayward, and now our friends Hadley Arkes and Michael Deis, apparently think Straussian approaches lead to the opposite policy: American retreat from the international order that it successfully built and led since 1945.

They seek inspiration from Angelo Codevilla, my friend and sparring partner during Claremont Institute fellow programs, who had a distinguished career as a Naval officer and national security official in addition to his academic positions. Codevilla stood out as different, as he did in so many dimensions, in developing a foreign policy that sought to draw on Straussian themes. For him, the nature of the regime should dictate its foreign policy. He believed that Secretary of State John Quincy Adams had things about right. Adams famously said that the Declaration of Independence was “the only legitimate foundation of civil government” and that the government by consent had “demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all government founded upon conquest.” At the same time, however, Adams declared that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” In Codevilla’s account, the United States should preserve its natural rights paradise at home, cheer on from afar the struggles of other peoples to become free, but to follow a general policy of non-intervention abroad unless our security is directly threatened.

Steve believes that Codevilla had found the right combination of Straussian focus on the nature of the governing regime and a more modest, restrained foreign policy. In our podcast episode, I criticized this view for making the mistake of attributing war and peace to the nature of the state. I invoked Kenneth Waltz’s classic, The Man, State, and War, which grouped the thinking of political theorists on the causes of war into three “images”: those who think war is caused by individuals and human nature; those who think the nature of the state causes war; and those who think war is caused by the anarchical nature of the international system. I would have thought with all of those “natures” at work, Steve would have been immediately persuaded!

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