In Character is having a debate centered around the question of "should the United States act with humility in international affairs."
Not surprisingly, John Bolton weighs in on behalf of "no." He writes:
Assigning human characteristics to political organizations, however, is essentially false and misleading, and often dangerous. All nations have interests, and some have values, and their respective interests and values frequently conflict. Some, like Woodrow Wilson and his followers (Barack Obama comes to mind) see essentially all conflicts as resolvable through diplomatic means, essentially advocating humility as a way of international life, especially for the most powerful, like their own country. Others, notably Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, see conflict as a more inherent human quality, to be avoided when possible but accepted when the costs to core values and interests would be too high. The Wilsonians see this as the sin of pride replacing humility, with necessarily adverse consequences, although they cite no evidence that humility ever deterred belligerence. Indeed, in the international arena, humility can be fatal.
And this is the real question: both the Wilson-Obama and Roosevelt-Reagan schools want international peace and security, but they diverge significantly on methods.
I think Bolton's response captures the essence of why U.S. foreign policy has been so adrift these past 20 years: we continue to talk about means and not ends. To Bolton, humility is defined by how the U.S. pursues a set of interests, presumed to be universal and self-evident. But shouldn't humility characterize how the U.S. defines those interests in the first place?
The trouble is less that Bolton takes such a dim view of diplomacy, but that the range of nations to which diplomacy is supposedly ineffective is so large as to become unsustainable. Humility is really a question of first-order priorities, not how the U.S. decides to meet those obligations.
And as an aside, a "humble" nation with a more discrete set of interests to defend would not be averse to using force (or hording power). In fact, its threats would be more credible because the world would understand that the United States would not issue them lightly. The end result of Boltonism - whereby all potential foes are threatened with the "last resort" tool of military force - is a loss of credibility.
