Debating Rand Paul's foreign policy
Daniel Larison raises several good points in response to my initial post on the matter. Let me start by conceding Larison's point that Paul's "sovereignty" message is more politically potent than the anti-meddling one I had talked up in my first post. Larison also writes:
We can argue over how important it was that the U.S. take up those responsibilities at that time, but I think Paul would object to continued membership in these organizations because of the very activist and interventionist role the United States has played abroad in order to fulfill its obligations to them. He might also object to continued membership on the grounds that these institutions no longer need U.S. participation to function, and that whatever extraordinary role the United States may have had to fill after WWII and during the Cold War is now outdated. The non-interventionist appeal that Greg finds reasonable is closely tied to the general aversion to involvement in international institutions.
There's obviously something to this, and I think there's a longer discussion worth having about which institutions are worth reforming and which are worth scrapping. But there's also an issue of agency here that I think is being over-looked. It's true that the U.S. has justified some of its more ill-conceived actions as being consonant with its international commitments, but in many cases (especially our big ticket wars), it was the U.S. pushing these institutions in the direction of activism, not vice-versa. The U.S. "forum shopped" the war in Kosovo, settling on NATO only after it failed to win over the U.N. Security Council. The U.S. was not led off to battle under the authority (or persuasion) of an international body. Ditto the second Iraq war, where the U.S. sought legitimation for an action it had already decided upon. Indeed, the entire liberal internationalist argument in favor of global institutions is precisely their ability to lend international legitimacy to actions the U.S. seeks to take in its own interest.
There are cases, like Somalia in 1993, where you can say that American participation in international institutions led us astray, but on the major issues of war and peace, the U.S. is the one driving the bus. Withdrawing from the UN would not act as a check on interventionism. If anything, given how vociferously hawks like John Bolton denounce it, I suspect it would lead to much more.
UPDATE: Larison responds further here.
