This year's presidential election provides voters with a choice between two men with very different approaches to foreign policy decision-making. Where John Kerry is pragmatic, George W. Bush is an ideologue. While Bush's approach to the war on terror appeals to many voters because it seems to be grounded in a comprehensive underlying vision, in reality ideologues have a difficult time learning from events, making them both unrealistic and dangerous.
Ideologues approach policy-making with an abstract, internally consistent vision, and they analyze events in terms of this overarching vision. By contrast, pragmatists believe reality is too complex to be explained by any one theory or model. Accordingly, pragmatists employ multiple models to understand events, and they judge the utility of any given framework by its empirical accuracy.
Ideological visions provide ready-made interpretations for events. For a president like George W. Bush, who came to office with no foreign policy experience, an ideological vision provides an appealing substitute for detailed knowledge.
In Bush's vision, liberty is God's gift to the world, and the United States is His instrument for the elimination of evil. We must defeat not just Al-Qaeda but all terrorism everywhere. Iraq is the frontline in the war on terror, even though there were no terrorists there before we invaded, because we must bring democracy – by force if necessary – to the entire Middle East. Iraq is the demonstration project for this democratic crusade, merely the first of many countries that will jump at the chance to embrace our political and economic values. Never mind that we have little or no previous experience in overthrowing dictators and creating democracies in places like Iraq that have no previous history of self-government.
When their grand schemes go awry, ideologues consistently find ways to dismiss unwanted facts. They do this because they are so dependent upon their ideological vision to understand events. Evidence that runs counter to cherished preconceptions does not merely suggest that a change in policy is warranted. Rather, it suggests that the ideologue's whole way of looking at the world is flawed. Without their ideological vision, they are intellectually empty-handed. They persist in defending failed policies because they cannot afford to part with their ideological vision of the world.
This explains President Bush's response to the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The first response was to insist that it was only a matter of time before the weapons would be found. When the passage of time proved instead that the weapons were nonexistent, the president produced a new justification for the war rather than admit his mistake: The world is a safer place with Saddam gone, and it's our mission from God to extend democracy throughout the world. We must maintain a steady course. There's nothing wrong with the underlying vision; victory is just taking longer than we thought.
Ideologues are dangerous for another reason. They believe unwanted problems can be solved, finally and completely. Where a pragmatic leader hopes to mitigate problems that never fully go away, the ideologue promises to eradicate unwanted problems altogether. Hunting down the members of Al-Qaeda, killing or capturing them, and making an example of them in order to deter other terrorist groups from attacking us might seem a worthy, focused, and manageable goal to a pragmatic leader. To the ideologues within the Bush administration, however, that is not enough. Rather we need to "eliminate evil" through a global war on terror that will go on until the last terrorist anywhere is eliminated.
The idea that we can eliminate problems once and for all is both unrealistic and dangerous. Terrorism is the weapon of the weak against the strong. In a world in which the technology needed to manufacture explosives is universally available on the Internet, there will be terrorists as long as there are malcontents.
John Kerry recognizes this. Kerry was quoted in a recent edition of the New York Times Magazine as saying that we need to get back to where we were before the events of 9/11, when terrorism was a nuisance that did not threaten the fabric of our lives. Predictably, President Bush attacked Kerry on this point in the third presidential debate, mocking Kerry for calling terrorism a nuisance and for equating terrorism with organized crime and prostitution. But Kerry's comment should not be misinterpreted. What Kerry recognizes, and Bush does not, is that government action can never completely eradicate problems like terrorism. All we can realistically hope to achieve is to make terrorist attacks isolated and rare.
The president's determination to pursue an open-ended war to eradicate terror ignores two important realities. The first is the economic concept of opportunity costs. Resources devoted to the pursuit of one end (the war in Iraq, for example) are no longer available for the pursuit of other ends (nation-building in Afghanistan, or the hiring of more inspectors to check containers coming into our ports).
The second reality is the economic law of diminishing returns, which applies to the war on terror just as it does to anything else. While we may substantially reduce the threat of terrorist attacks, absolute security is unattainable, and the misguided effort to achieve it results only in a waste of resources that might better be devoted to other ends.
When a president is dependent on an ideological vision for guidance, he is not free to judge the merits of policies by their empirical consequences. He cannot admit mistakes and change course where policies are not working. America needs a president whose understanding of the world is not threatened by reality.
October 29, 2004
