Easier said than done, of course. Still, I have a paragon before me: I am in the midst of writing a biography of John Quincy Adams, a thoroughly astringent soul who, as a diplomat and then as secretary of state, admonished everyone around him of the potential calamities lurking beneath noble prospects. In his famous July 4, 1821 oration -- the one where he warned against going abroad "in search of monsters to destroy" -- Adams predicted that a policy of foreign intervention, even on behalf of the Greeks then struggling for independence from the Ottoman Empire, would corrupt the nation's republican spirit and alter "the fundamental maxims of her policy ... from liberty to force." If I had been around at the time, I'm sure I would have thought, as did Henry Clay and a great many other of the proto-liberal internationalists of the day, that President James Monroe should have spoken up for Greece. Adams persuaded him not to. And Adams did a magnificent job of advancing America's national interests.
Still, I tend to think of my bias towards hopefulness as not only a glandular condition but a conscious choice. Journalists are afraid -- almost terrified -- of being accused of naiveté. It was, for example, almost an article of faith in the media in 2007 that President George W. Bush's "surge" in Iraq would fail, disastrously; but I don't recall any of the naysayers being taken to task as harshly, for example, as were the sorry folk who predicted in 2003 that regime change would lead to a better, less brutal, Iraq. Courting accusations of naiveté can thus be its own form of journalistic integrity.
Early in the 2008 presidential campaign I wrote an article about Barack Obama's worldview. He had a worldview, I concluded; and it was the right one. Wrong, said my editor: The story is that he has a worldview, and nobody's buying it. That is what it looked like in September 2007. Of course he was the one who was wrong. (But he still made me change the piece.)
I do not, that is, want to be entirely cured of my folly; I am wary of John Quincy Adam's wisdom. Were he around today, Adams would have warned against the intervention in Libya, and would have advised the president to stand by the devils he knew. And yet I'm glad Obama stuck his neck out in Libya and elsewhere, and still wish he would take stronger steps in Syria. Last week, I wrote that Obama's extreme caution in Syria might come from over-learning the lesson of American limits. Pundits can over-learn lessons, too. Peter Beinart, an all-in supporter of the war in Iraq, repented of his folly by writing The Icarus Syndrome, a book that made the idealistic tradition in American foreign policy sound so reckless that he was rebuked in the New York Times Book Review by, of all people, the arch-realist Leslie Gelb. Yes, idealism can breed "hubris"; but it's hard to accomplish fine things without unreasonable expectations.
Reviewing my 140-odd columns has given me many opportunities for mortification. I haven't even mentioned my extremely premature congratulations to ECOWAS, the West African organization, for restoring democracy in Mali in the aftermath of a coup (though, with Mali's government remaining hapless, the U.N. Security Council has just authorized ECOWAS to oust Islamist rebels from the country's north). It's been a salutary exercise; if I was chastened before, I am yet more so now. We are all more or less chastened after a decade of seeking monsters to destroy. So yes, let us practice humility rather than hubris. Let us lower our expectations. But not too far.
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