Michael Ignatieff and Warrior Intellectuals

Timothy Brennan’s article exposes the vanities of the new breed of warrior intellectuals who have signed on to the 21st century imperial project. Whatever their intellectual and ideological origins, and they are various, Michael Ignatieff, Niall Ferguson, Robert Kaplan and Thomas Friedman, among others, are self-proclaimed guardians of civilization against the onslaught of the new barbarians. What unites these thinkers is more their tone of studied hardness than any intellectual consistency. In their approaches to the challenges of failed states, terrorism, and Islamic jihadism, they have contempt for those they see as soft liberals who hope for a world in which tolerance, the rule of law, greater social equality and peace might be sought without the power of empire to sustain them.

When he is asked tough questions about why he supported the American-led invasion of Iraq, Michael Ignatieff quickly mentions that he has been shot at. Apparently this arresting fact is among his qualifications to lead provincial Canadians who understand little of the real world. The fact that most Canadians were right that the invasion of Iraq would make the world a less safe place and that he was wrong doesn’t come into it. It’s matter of tone, of pose.

It’s much the same when Niall Ferguson dares to challenge political correctness by quoting Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” approvingly. How better to shock us into realizing that despite the blots on its record, such as the massacre of hundreds of civilians by British troops at Amritsar in India in 1919, the British Empire was a good thing on the whole. His message is that the world needs America to take up where the British Raj left off.

Robert Kaplan, in a characteristic phrase, declares that “Machiavelli says, good men bent on doing good must know how to be bad.” The realists love pithy, epigrammatic phrases that highlight their toughness.

Not all has been going well for these thinkers, however. The debacle in Iraq has been prompting some to leave their ranks. With his recent book, America at the Crossroads, Francis Fukuyama, whose The End of History and the Last Man, proclaimed that the American way of life would become that of the whole world, has abandoned the cause. He has written that the invasion of Iraq was a foolish error that America could ill afford and has announced his departure from the ranks of the neo-conservatives. Lately too, as a candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party, Ignatieff has tried to put his pithy past behind him.

Rather than converging for underlying intellectual reasons, I believe these thinkers adopted a common muscular tone when it was opportune for them to do so. Now that the winds are less favourable for empire, these thinkers are likely to be blown to quite disparate destinations.