Grow Up About Dictators, America!

For foreign-policy mavens, the primary race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination hasn't been especially edifying, mostly because the subject has received relatively little attention. Even so, the recent squabble over the candidates' attitudes toward autocrats has been a new low. I refer, of course, to the charge that Bernie Sanders is an apologist for dictatorship because he told an interviewer that Fidel Castro's Cuba had some genuine educational achievements, as well as the parallel attack on Michael Bloomberg for saying that China's Xi Jinping was "not a dictator." As Daniel Larison later noted, "[T]oo much of the foreign policy section was consumed by this 'denounce a dictator' exercise and many other issues were neglected as a result."

I like liberal democracy as much as anyone, and I'm grateful that I live in a country where those values are still (mostly) respected. But this reflexive need to offer full-throated attacks on authoritarianism is symptomatic of a long-standing pathology in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy; namely, the tendency to see someone's moral vision and commitments as the most important (and maybe the only) criterion by which their foreign-policy competence should be assessed. It is an enduring manifestation of what realists have long criticized as America's "legalistic/moralistic approach" to foreign affairs, an approach that overlooks the political and moral complexities of statecraft and has consistently led policymakers astray.

Moral considerations are hardly irrelevant in the conduct of foreign policy, but the simplistic moral litmus test on view in the recent Democratic debate mostly reveals that the United States remains, as I wrote back in 2005, "a remarkably immature Great Power—one whose rhetoric is frequently at odds with the reality of its own conduct and one that often treats the management of foreign affairs as an adjunct to domestic politics."

Why is a politician's willingness to denounce dictators a poor litmus test for his or her fitness for office? For starters, it's too easy: Anyone running for president knows that you're not supposed to say too many nice things about foreign despots, and even Donald Trump offered only mild praise for people like Russia's Vladimir Putin when he was on the campaign trail in 2016....