Will on Wolfowitz

I’ve commented in the past on Paul Wolfowitz’s intellectual pedigree, as well as on the supposed Straussian influence on the Bush administration.

George Will writes that despite claims that Wolfowitz is a foreign policy Wilsonian (”make democracy safe for the world”), he’s actually a “realist’s realist”:

The sprouting of freedom through the fissures in the concrete of dictatorships began, he recalls, in Greece, Spain and Portugal in the mid-1970s. This, he believes, disturbed Soviet leaders, and should have: It called into question the realism of “realists” who, he says, “were factually wrong” in dismissing the possibility of undermining the Soviet regime with pressures short of force.

Those include pressures for human rights and on economies. In the early 1980s, Wolfowitz was part of the successful resistance to abolishing the State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights.
…
In the early 1980s, Wolfowitz says, when he was Secretary of State George Shultz’s assistant secretary for East Asia, it was the so-called realists who said Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines was a thug, but our thug. Yet the assassination of opposition leader Benigno Aquino in 1983 showed, Wolfowitz says, the limited ability of brutal power to sustain a regime. There in 1986, and the following year in South Korea, U.S. involvement helped enlarge freedom.

There’s something to Wolfowitz’s realistic attitude toward the non-use of force. As his assessment of Ferdinand Marcos indicates, a realist can understand that a regime cannot be sustained on force alone. In this he has the support of that arch-realist, Hans Morgenthau, who similarly argued that a ruler can’t rule by force alone. He needs to induce subjects & citizens to spontaneously consent to the will of the ruler (I’m paraphrasing HM here - I wouldn’t put it in such positivistic terms). Anyway, HM said it was a type of love that induced citizens to consent to the ruler. And don’t forget, HM was no misty eyed utopian.

Wolfowitz’s realism is thus based on a classical liberalism that considers liberty the best way to produce legitimacy for a regime:

They are also about private property as a bulwark of the individual’s zone of sovereignty, and about the hopefulness that depends on the reality of material progress.

As for his supposed Straussianism:

Because he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago during the ascendancy of political philosophers Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, many attempts have been made to trace to them the pedigree of his thinking. He says, however, that to the very limited extent that “academic things” shaped him, they were classes on America’s Constitutional Convention and Lincoln’s political thought, classes stressing that “the foundations of liberal democracy are about a helluva lot more than elections.”

Not just Straussians can agree that liberal democracy is “a helluva lot more than elections.” You can be a Madisonian, Washingtonian, Lockean, Hamiltonian and even Wilsonian. Indeed, if you believe that Straussianism is about having a secret cabal manipulate the masses, you would indeed think that democracy is nothing but elections. Let the people think they’re free, and then go back to ruling them secretly behind their backs when the ballots are in.

UPDATE: Steve Sailer is skeptical.