Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats

by Matthew Yglesias

Fast-rising political commentator Matthew Yglesias reveals the wrong-headed foreign policy stance of conservatives, neocons, and the Republican Party for what it is—aggressive nationalism. Writing with wit, passion, and keen insight, Yglesias reminds us of the rich tradition of liberal internationalism that, developed by Democrats, was used with great success by both Democratic and Republican administrations for more than fifty years. He provides a starting point for politicians, policymakers, pundits, and citizens alike to return America to its role as leader of a peace-loving and cooperative international community.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2008

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 2008, Matthew Yglesias's Heads in the Sand is a young journalist's memoir/ grad student's position paper disguised as an analysis of political discourse during the Bush administration. The Invasion of Iraq is fairly high up on a list of things that I "sort of understand how they happened and yet still can't believe actually happened." For much of my life, I've blamed the Bush administration for the invasion--rightly, btw, as it's an inescapable conclusion from living through that time and from reading Bush's underrated memoir, Decision Points. But in reading Chris Whipple's Spymasters, I began to see that other institutions had also failed to defend public well being. Here, Yglesias points out how badly Democrats responded. I also concluded that either Bush or his advisors mostly outmaneuvered the Democrats throughout his administration. Finally, it occurs to me that I often default to a two position understanding of many policy questions: if one side is wrong, the other is right. (I don't write this to lead to a false equivalence position or a cynical "nothing matters because everyone's bad" position.) I wonder if one would be further ahead operating under the assumption that when things go bad, one should expect a lot of institutions to fail. The jati rises and falls together.

[Andrew Reimers · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a fan of Matt Yglesias and a long time junkie for Bush era foreign policy books. That said, my review of this book boils down to a couple backhanded compliments. Matt has clearly developed into a better writer over time, and while there are good arguments throughout the book, they could have been expressed more coherently and concisely.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ran across this at a book swap and thought I'd take a look back at a progressive-based policy critique from 2008, particularly the idea that the Third Way/centrist/neoliberal/pro-war wing of the DNC has continually fouled things up by becoming to much like the Republicans that they can't actually claim progressive ideals...and that this is why they've had so many electoral losses.

Unfortunately, despite eight years of Democratic governance in the interim (Hillary was thought to be the surefire winner when this was written), the DNC establishment still has its collective head in the sand.

Until we get a candidate through the process who isn't so beholden to the "war, good; socialism, bad" baloney, we're just going to keep losing ground. The Democrats allow themselves to get dragged three notches to the right, then when they're in power, they move one notch back to the left...but it's still two notches too far to the right. Lather, rinse, and repeat enough times and you end up with a party that's so far to the right of its former self that its previous nominees wouldn't believe it was the same organization.

Wake up, populace: Hillary Clinton ran on a platform that was in almost every way more conservative than Richard Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign. The electorate wants a choice that's not in the pocket of the defense industry, the oil industry, or the corporate robber barons. ANY of the primary candidates would do well to hire Matthew Yglesias as an advisor!

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Amazone

The main idea of the book is that America's trend toward unilateralism has been a disaster, and that America needs to recommit itself to internationalism.

..........

John Mearsheimer would probably call that moving from one disaster to the other.

Not to mention his other main book is hoping for a United States with One Billion Population.

The Population Bomb isn't obviously on his reading list

endless wars and endless population
sounds like the book by John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar

[Paul Deaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yglesias book was a timely read in the context of the Trump administration's forays into foreign policy, notably the April 13, 2018 bombing of Syrian chemical weapons capacity. Written before the Obama presidency, the lines of thought and policy started during the George W. Bush administration continue to the present. There is little evidence liberals received the author's message or have done much to support a sustainable, bold foreign policy rather they often co-opt neocon positions.

[Emmet Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty scathing retrospective on the domestic politics surrounding the Iraq war.

[Justin Tapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Matt Yglesias' Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats.

Yglesias turns 30 this week, which means this book was written when he was 26-27. How could a 26 year old know anything? There's a reason that Yglesias' blog is widely read and widely praised on right and left-- he's got a very good sponge for a brain. He mostly posts on economic and (domestic) public policy, but this book is entirely foreign policy-- namely, Iraq. Fiasco (my review) is still the must-read book on the Iraq disaster from the inside, but Heads in the Sand is great on a look at the public politics of the time.

Yglesias is bemoaning the neoconservatives' march to Iraq invasion, and how "liberal hawks" changed their ideology to go along. How a Left who had lost its moorings on foreign policy got trounced politically in 2004.

The author doesn't spend much time examining the roots of neoconservatism, only really examining how liberals adopted similar stances to it after the Persian Gulf War (1991), Bosnia/Kosovo (1999), and, more dramatically, 9/11. His citations read like my RSS reader, looking mostly at the arguments being made via influential print media and working papers by think tanks. He examines speeches by various liberal politicians to show their lack of coherent opposition to neoconservative doctrine of American hegemony. How Howard Dean was ostracized as a left-wing nut, when he was right all along about the Iraq war. John Kerry and other candidates in 2004 were feckless in how to respond to Bush on Iraq and got roundly trounced. Leading candidates in 2007 were making similar errors, but I think Obama has basically fulfilled much of what Yglesias prescribes for the next POTUS.

I think the krux of his book is found on Pg. 187:

"Bush looked at the accumulation of agreements, treaties and institutions that had built up during the Cold War and the Clinton years and saw a United States that had unduly constrained itself...acting from the beginning to...shed international obligations in the belief that U.S. military supremacy could...remake the world. Simply put, it didn't work... [Bush's] embrace of militaristic nationalism has not brought democracy to the Middle East and has not frightened Iran or North Korea out of conducting nuclear research [, etc.]... [T]he United States...cannot effectively tackle large problems except in cooperation with others and cannot secure that cooperation unless it acts in ways that other nations recognize as compatible with their own interests. A foreign policy that accepts more constraints on what we may try to do is likely to broaden the range of things we can actually do."


I lived in a Muslim country in 2003 and remember the run-up to war, listening to Colin Powell's UN speech over a worldband radio and thinking "These guys really believe Iraq is a threat, so I guess I have to trust them. They have more information than anyone else." I also read Tom Friedman's Longitudes and Attitudes, written around that time. Friedman was a liberal hawk who just wanted the Bush Administration to be forthright about invading Iraq to set up a democracy rather than using WMD as the excuse. Yglesias never mentions Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy, which President Bush and Condie Rice were publicly pushing at the time, and basically argues that non-democracies should be confronted with force.

Neocons today argue that Iraq the Model helped spawn the Arab Spring-- seeing Iraqis go to the polls and have great democratic freedoms inspired Tarhir Square, for example. Yglesias responded recently in this post:

"Trying to achieve this by invading Iraq and getting hundreds of thousands of people killed and displaced, rather than just using our financial leverage over Egypt to press for fair elections, was nuts. But here we are."

I think Yglesias might support an argument (mine) that already-observing existing democracy and secularism in an economically expanding Islamic Turkey along with greater interconnectedness through social media combined with certain key events, like Wikileaks' exposing how corrupt and comical people like Hosni Mubarak were to the general public, helped push change along--not the multi-trillion dollar Iraq fiasco. The U.S. abandoning its pursuit of Bin Laden and invading Iraq did little but solidify Muslim suspicions of U.S. intentions and probably fueled their own nationalism. Perhaps the U.S.-led invasion helped solidify the peoples of Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain against their governments, but in a very unintended way.

I give this book 4 stars out of 5. I think Yglesias' neglect of Sharansky's obvious influence was glaring, as well as the rise of Blue Dog Democrats in Red states that pandered to the religious base-- the Christian Right was overwhelmingly pro-war-- which deserves mention in the politics. But Yglesias' elucidation of what a liberal foreign policy should be was very helpful to someone like myself. I am pretty squarely in line with Yglesias' outline.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Matt Yglesias is my favorite writer on the Internet (narrowly edging out Ryan North, I guess, with Dahlia Lithwick, Andy Rotherham, and Jon Weisman in the hunt) and so I was excited to read his book. While I liked the basic thrust of it, it wasn't quite as snappy as his excellent blog.
Partly that's because a lot of the book is a postmortem of the disastrous lead-up to the Iraq War. This section dragged a little for me, though it does serve as a good indictment of the "liberal hawk" mode of thinking.
The analysis is thorough and I think a lot of his prescriptions are right, but the book kept making me think of Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell. I was really moved by Power's book, which I read as in some ways (perhaps?) a call for humanitarian military intervention. I'm not sure whether Power blesses unilateral (or quasi-unilateral) intervention of the kind Yglesias criticizes, and I need to read her more recent writing, but thinking about both books made me wonder how we can find the most just solution for foreign affairs. I think Yglesias is probably more correct -- the unilateralism in Iraq has done a lot of damage and has been destructive to the progress of building a liberal world order -- though I wonder whether there is ever a circumstance (Rwanda in the 90s?) when an intervention would be justifiable even if the UN didn't bless it. More resources for the UN and a clearer sense of mission might make this hypothetical is unrealistic as the UN would intervene for a crisis as dire as Rwanda's, but I'm not sure.
Overall, though, Yglesias's arguments are compelling and do a good job of demonstrating the shallowness of the thinking often done on foreign policy. Glad I read it, and (of course) eager to keep reading Yglesias's blog.

[ProgressiveBookClub · Rating 5 out of 5]

Democrats have a successful foreign-policy tradition to draw on — if only they would!

With his famously sharp mind (and tongue), Matthew Yglesias refutes the two most important misconceptions about recent American foreign policy. The first is that Bush is an idealist. As Yglesias makes clear, Bush is a nationalist plain and simple, as a my-way-or-the-highway agenda takes precedence over any other supposed guiding ideology. The second is that the Democrats don't have a useful foreign-policy tradition when they do. Liberal internationalism may not be exciting or perfect, but promoting global order through international law and stable institutions has brought about a lot more peace and prosperity than imperialism, isolationism, communism or any other way of approaching the world.

So what have the Democrats been espousing instead of liberal internationalism? Not much, according to Yglesias. It's common to read articles by liberals calling for big, bold new ideas, but they don't have any and don't have any explanations for why the old ones won't work. Democrats have come unmoored from their principles on foreign policy out of political opportunism, but this path has failed to give them a decisive political advantage on security issues despite the massive failure of Bush-style nationalism.

As Heads in the Sand makes clear, Americans can no longer support reckless policies from the Republicans and should loudly shout down any Democrat who's more interested in what seems politically safe than what makes the world safer.

To learn more, visit The Progressive Book Club: http://www.progressivebookclub.com/pb...

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a great first pass at understanding the theories and political situations that have defined US foreign policy in the last decade.

Yglesias carefully lays out his argument that Democrats should re-embrace the principled liberal foreign policy that served the US well in the twentieth century, instead of merely griping about mismanagement of the war in Iraq. He argues that this will not only lead to better foreign policy results, but better success in domestic elections.

In one memorable paragraph, he writes: "Better techniques are always welcome, but what the country needs to replace Bush's current failed strategy is a different strategy, no just another way to implement the same strategy."

Yglesias does make reference to several bits of political theory, especially early on in the book - I dug out my notes from my "Theories of International Relations" class. However, you don't need to take a seminar to appreciate his argument. The book is well documented, drawing on policy papers, commentary, and contemporary reportage to look at the implications and results of American foreign policy.

[Benjy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was not the extended blog post I expected, instead it's a capital B BOOK. The best part of it is not the argument he lays out in favor of a foreign policy based on mutually respected rules and institutions among nations -- though that's very well thought out. What's most fascinating and significant, I think, is his explanation of how we got to our current assumptions about foreign policy. In this way it's more a history book than a political tract and the history is one that is not commonly recounted (at least I never read it before). He traces how Democrats gradually become more instinctively hawkish through Gulf War I, Clinton's interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, and 9/11 and how this gradually created an increasingly incoherent approach to foreign policy from the party. It also makes you realize just how important Obama is, who seems to be the antidote to the kind of stale thinking that got us here.

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yglesias pens the best post-mortem of the 2004 election that I've yet to read, despite the fact that he barely touches on domestic policy issues. Overall the book is a stunningly insightful analysis of the politics of American foreign policy under the Bush Administration and a persuasive argument in favor of the time-honored principles of liberal internationalism.

I know essentially nothing about international relations and was almost dreading this book - I only bought it because of loyalty to Yglesias' blog, but it was surprisingly accessible and didn't assume any prior knowledge of its intimidating subject matter. If I had to make one complaint, it would be that it isn't nearly wonky enough - rarely was I driven to Wikipedia while reading like I kind of hoped I would be. Still, highly recommended.

[Ned · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice summary of how Democrats struggled to respond to the neoconservative strategy for US foreign policy, especially failing to develop a sound world-view of their own based on liberal internationalism. Rather than arguing that Bush's strategy of unilateral militarism is bad policy, they instead got caught up in debates about tactics - the invasion of Iraq was incompetently planned and executed, but it still would have been bad policy even if it had gone well. Yglesias proposes that we need to be building international cooperation, not using military might to achieve our goals, as the former method has a much greater chance of success. Mostly written before Obama was the Democratic candidate for president.

Good stuff and recommended.

[The American Conservative]

'Yglesias urges “liberal internationalism”—defined as a policy of “strengthening, expanding and deepening international institutions in order to foster cooperation against common problems and to bring the globe closer to the long held liberal ideal of a world governed by a reasonably just, well-enforced set of rules”—as the cure for our woes abroad. Unfortunately, he barely finds time in this slim volume to argue for this approach or to answer the most obvious objections.'

Read the full review, "Liberalism't World Wide Web," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was useful in that it gave me an overview of the election I missed while I was living in Japan. I felt like I had a better understanding of why Kerry lost the presidential election and why he wasn't able to capitalize on the foreign policy bungles of the Republicans.

That being said, the book was decisively male-centric. Yglesias on several occasions said that candidates should have "manned up" for the challenge. (What the hell does that mean?) He also tended to overuse the words "prescient" and "daft," very annoying.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the persective of a U.S. liberal, this book is a remarkably cogent analysis of what's gone wrong foreign policy-wise in American politics for the past 7 years. Particularly, it does a great job elucidating why the Democrats have failed at being an effective opposition party over that time. Yglesias's recommendations for the direction Democrats should take in the future are wise, but given short shrift. The book really deserves 4.5 stars, but I enjoyed it too much (it's not only insightful, but quite funny at times) to only give it 4.

[Christopher Conway · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as much fun as Yglesias' blog (there's nothing---nothing---on the NBA in here), but a thorough, well-argued, and convincing case for a "new idea" in foreign policy. That idea being liberal internationalism, more or less the standard Democratic approach to foreign policy from Truman through Clinton.

[Naadir · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great introduction into how the Iraq War got started, and shed a lot on what has been going on in the States to an outsider, but there is a danger of seeing the UK's action as simply the result of US domestic politics. What role did UK hawks and doves have in the lead up to and during the Iraq War?

[Damir Marusic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good political book, not the best strategy book. It's my own fault for thinking it'd be the latter. If you like Matt's blog, though, you'll like the book just fine. It's a quick and envigorating read.

[Jon McL · Rating 4 out of 5]

solid foreign policy analysis of the last 7-8 years, that iterates the urgency to return to the foundations of liberal internationalism that the US has drifted from.

[Barron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started off strong but you get this sinking feeling it's missing some meat on its bones.

[Ellis]

I just heard this author interviewed on NPR. He seems like a good thinker and his views seem to be on target.

[graham · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting book--and plausible argument--but I just wasn't into it. Guess I'm not the policy dork I thought I was. Oh well.

[Fletcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well written account of why the past seven years have been so painful for democrats.

[Nikki]

I just tried reading this but I don't think I'm in the right mood for now. I'm going to keep it on my "to read" list because it still seems interesting to me...maybe some day!