A Pact with the Devil

by Tony Smith

Despite the overwhelming opposition on the left to the war in Iraq, many prominent liberals supported the war on humanitarian grounds. They argued that the war would rid the world of a brutal dictator and liberate the Iraqi people from totalitarian oppression, paving the way for a democratic transformation of the country. In A Pact with the Devil Tony Smith deftly traces this undeniable drift in mainstream liberal thinking toward a more militant posture in world affairs with respect to human rights and democracy promotion. Beginning with the Wilsonian quest to ‘make the world safe for democracy’ right up to the present day liberal support for regime change, Smith isolates leading strands of liberal internationalist thinking in order to see how the ‘liberal hawks’ constructed them into a case for American and liberal imperialism in the Middle East. The result is a reflection on an important aspect of the intellectual history of American foreign policy; establishing how a sophisticated group of thinkers came to fashion their recommendations to Washington and working to see what role liberalism may still play in deliberations in the country on its role in world events now that the failure of these ambitions in Iraq seems clear.

Genres: Nonfiction

255 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Tony Smith is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Iowa State University of Science and Technology

Reviews

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Pact with the Devil is a fascinating, learned, and deeply troubling book. It is now obvious that the neoconservatives and their foolish ideas have done enormous damage to America’s international position, but Smith shows that liberal internationalists―whose ranks include many prominent Democrats―also bear considerable blame for the fiasco in Iraq and other failures of recent U.S. foreign policy.

This impassioned and insightful work demonstrates why America’s liberal ideals must always be tempered by realism, and by a clear appreciation of what U.S. power can and cannot do.

Stephen M. Walt
Belfer Professor of International Affairs/formerly The Center for International Affairs
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

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There is no one better qualified than Tony Smith to trace the intellectual origins of the Bush Doctrine. With his characteristic verve and clarity, Smith shows just how influential liberal internationalist thinking in the 1990s, with its triumphalist overtones, has been in providing the intellectual capital for the Bush Administration’s quest to spread democracy by force of arms. This is a penetrating book.

Robert J. Art
Christian A. Herter Professor of International Relations, Brandeis University

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This is a deeply disturbing and important book. A probing examination of the Bush Doctrine that shows that its roots lie not in a fringe neoconservative movement, but in liberal political thought that is central to much American thought and history.

Smith convincingly argues that liberalism’s optimism, faith in democracy, and expectation of progress have combined with fear of terrorism and America’s excessive power to yield utopian policies that undermine our values at home and abroad.

Robert Jervis
Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics, Columbia University

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With rare courage and devastating insight Tony Smith analyzes how militant liberals―seeking to use American military power to further democratic values―allied themselves with conservative nationalists in a ‘crusade’ of war and aggression that betrayed their own principles. A Pact with the Devil is the ‘J’accuse’ of the Iraq war, and war liberals no less than war conservatives are its target.

Ronald Steel
Professor of International Relations, University of Southern California

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It is rare I am asked to review a book that I think I will dislike but actually ended up rather enjoying. Tony Smith's A Pact with the Devil is his sixth book - and his most interesting. His starting point is the 'certifiably meglomaniac' Bush Doctrine and its 'bid for world supremacy.' But his target is not 'the devil' - the neocons et al - of the title.

Rather, it is the 'pact' made with them by various 'neolib scholars, scholar-activists, and activists'.

It was these men and women - largely Democrat-leaning - that helped generate 'the intellectual underpinnings' of the Bush doctrine and of the Iraq invasion in particular...

Any book written by a liberal scholar containing the line 'it would be a serious mistake to exaggerate the importance of the neoconservatives' deserves a wide readership. If his purpose was to open up, rather than foreclose, debate he has succeeded."

Timothy Lynch
Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London

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A compelling exposé―and biting indictment―of the ideological excesses that have led U.S. foreign policy so woefully off course. Smith spares neither liberals nor conservatives as he explores the intellectual origins of America’s imperial turn.

Charles A. Kupchan
Georgetown University and Council on Foreign Relations
author of The End of the American Era

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Smith is to be commended for unpacking the linkages among liberal internationalism and neoconservative transformational politics. His is a useful corrective to those who wish to pin blame for the Iraq War on neoconservative cronies pouring poison into the ear of a naive President.

Lane Crothers, Illinois State University

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In the course of this provocative polemic, Smith attacks practically everybody who writes about foreign policy in the United States today.

David Fromkin
Professor of International Relations, Boston University

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It will be hard for anyone to say after reading this book, that the mission was just, we simply did not do it right.

Lloyd Gardner, Rutgers University

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Tony Smith holds the Cornelia M. Jackson chair in the Political Science department at Tufts University where he has taught for over thirty years.

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Biography

Tony Smith is Cornelia Jackson Professor of Political Science, Emeritus at Tufts University. His interests include United States foreign policy with special emphasis on relations with Europe.

He has written several books including

America’s Mission: The US and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (1994)
Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of US Foreign Policy (2000).

Smith is also author of numerous articles on third world studies and US foreign policy, many with respect to transatlantic relations.

His book entitled A Pact with the Devil: Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise was published in early 2007.

In early 2009 he published American Foreign Policy in Crisis with Anne-Marie Slaughter and others.

An expanded edition of his book, America’s Mission: the United States and the World-Wide Struggle for Democracy was published in 2012.

He is currently working on a book on American democracy promotion from the first writings of Woodrow Wilson to today.

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Another book which i think should be read with this one is

The Crisis of American Foreign Policy

G. John Ikenberry
Thomas Knock
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Tony Smith

Oliver Stuenkel

Tony Smith argues that the disastrous Iraq War threw the liberal internationalist school of thinking into crisis. President Bush’s famous Second Inaugural Address included the strikingly wilsonian argument that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.”

Smith argues that the intellectual origins of the Bush Doctrine to democratize the world clearly lie in Wilsonianism.

Similar to the Bush administration, imperial adventures marked the Wilson presidency: the US occupied Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, and it intervened in Cuba and Mexico, all engagements with mixed results.

Wilson notoriously proclaimed that he would “teach the South American republics to elect good men.”

The liberals’ dilemma of internationalism vs. imperialism is thus by no means confined to our times, but the United States’ unipolar moment made it much more visible.

Smith asserts that the intellectual trend towards a more assertive foreign policy after the end of the Cold War is a largely liberal construct, giving rise to “neoliberal” policies.

Further complicating matters, many leading liberals supported the Iraq War, even before the Bush administration adopted its wilsonian rhetoric to justify the intervention (which only occurred once no weapon stockpiles were found).

Leading liberal thinkers such as Anne-Marie Slaughter, mostly close to the Democratic Party, have attempted to disassociate liberalism from the Bush Doctrine, yet Smith argues that Bush’s “neoconservative” foreign policy mostly emerged out of liberal thinking, even if the neoconservatives later attempted to claim its heritage.

More counterintuitively still, Smith says there is no serious alternative to the neoliberal Bush Doctrine that stands any chance of finding broad consensus among foreign policy makers (even though Democrats think differently about multilateralism) – a claim that one cannot easily dismiss considering US foreign policy under Obama.

[Ali al khateeb · Rating 5 out of 5]

خدعوك فقالوا : "حرية" من مات في سبيل الحرية في هذا الربيع العربي إنما مات ميتة جاهلية فطيسة
مؤسف جدا كمية المعلومات في هذا الكتاب الواضحة حول الحرية والربيع العربي
مؤسف جدا أن أرى عقولا أكاديمية وللأسف أيضا دعاة ومشائخ يؤمنون بالحرية الملعونة
هذه حرية بوش
هذا ربيع أمريكا يامن فطست وتفطس لأجل الحرية
من يقرأ هذا الكتاب ولا يزال مقتنعا بهذا الربيع فحتما قد طمس الله على قلبه وعقله وسمعه وبصره
قد كنت أحتاط سابقا عندما أتحدث عن القتلى في سبيل هذا الربيع لكن بعد هذا الكتاب أقول
أنتم أشر وأقذر قتلى تحت أديم السماء
السياسة بسيطة والعدو يصرح بمخططاته والأهداف واضحة وما نزال نغمض أعيننا عن الحقيقة
قتلى الربيع العربي الله لا يرحمكو

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helps to be taking Tony Smith's class at the same time.

[Ghada · Rating 5 out of 5]

كتاب رائع جداً أنصح به لمن يريد فهم افضل لطبيعة دائرة صنع القرار الأمريكية و فهم أفضل لتوجهات أمريكا ومنطلقاتها الفكرية لسياساتها الخارجية
مع العلم ان المحتوى نقدي ولكن أراه موضوعي