According to Foreign Policy on Wednesday, the contentious decision by the Joe Biden administration to give Ukraine cluster munitions is a revealing example of liberalism’s shortcomings as a framework for US foreign policy.
“The administration’s rhetoric extols the superiority of democracies over autocracies, highlights its commitment to a ‘rules-based order,’ and steadfastly maintains that it takes human rights seriously. If this were true, however, it would not be sending weapons that pose serious risks to civilians and whose use in Ukraine it has criticized harshly in the past,” said the report.
“But as it has on other prominent issues, those liberal convictions get jettisoned as soon as they become inconvenient,” it noted. “This behavior shouldn’t surprise us: When states are in trouble and worried that they might suffer a setback, they toss their principles aside and do what they think it takes to win.”
Therefore, when it comes to foreign policy, liberals have a propensity to categorize the world into good states (those with legitimate governments founded on liberal values) and bad states (everything else) and place the blame for the majority, if not the entirety, of the world’s problems on the former, it added.
However, liberalism has at least two serious flaws: universalist pretensions and the brittleness of liberal convictions, which have prevented the success rate of U.S. foreign policy from improving. Liberalism allows Americans and their closest allies to convince themselves that what’s good for them will also be good for everyone else.
