A central problem of America’s post–World War II foreign policy has been that it finds itself with the responsibilities of empire, but without the self-justifying ideologies of the old imperial powers. Or, as Henry Fairlie put it in a comparison of the fall of Dien Bien Phu and the fall of Saigon, when Americans find themselves dodging the bullets of natives overseas, they cannot say to themselves, as the imperial armies of the Old World could, that they are merely defending what is theirs. Take away the idea of ownership, take away colonialism, and how do you justify foreign intervention?
One would have thought that Woodrow Wilson had solved the problem early in the century, when he transcended the quasi-imperial notion of Manifest Destiny in favor of a crusade for democracy. It was under the banner of democracy that the United States was brought into World War I and, irrevocably, into balance of power politics. It remains under that banner now.
The idea of self-government does seem a wholly natural underpinning to American interventionism. But there are problems. One is historical. Wilson’s choice of conflicts for first invoking the idea tarnished it. Whatever World War I was, it was hardly a war for democracy. Wilson used the democratic idea as the ideological justification for fighting a war where democracy was only remotely the issue. The cynicism that has greeted subsequent invocations of the democratic idea to justify other faraway fights is also often deserved. In other American interventions abroad—for economic, territorial or purely geopolitical reasons—democracy has often been used as a flag of convenience.
The other problem is logical. There seems to be something self-contradictory about intervening on behalf of self-government. It is a lot more straightforward to intervene the old-fashioned way: on behalf of the alleged superiority of the metropolitan civilization. At best, to intervene on behalf of democracy means leaving quickly. Occupation mocks the idea of self-government. As it was with the recent US experience in Grenada, we have to be thinking of going home from the day we land the Marines.
Still, these are not insuperable obstacles to a theory of intervention based on the notion of promoting democracy. First, there is no reason why past sinfulness should paralyze us now. If in 1954 we overthrew the freely elected Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, we now support the freely elected Jose Napoleon Duarte in El Salvador, whose land-reform policies are not very different from Arbenz’s. Should the sins of 30 years ago in one country discredit our policy today in another? By that logic the Catholic Church’s support for Poland’s Solidarity and other social democratic movements is equally suspect, given the church’s historical record on democracy. To admit that the democratic idea has been abused in the past is to say no more than that democracy, like equality, fraternity and other good causes, has a long history. It is reason for vigilance, not for surrendering the idea.
The second obstacle must be acknowledged directly: Although democracy can be brought at the point of a bayonet, it flourishes best if the bayonets are quickly removed. Yet sometimes they cannot be. Take cases, successful cases, which is where a theory of intervention should begin. Our bayonets, nuclear tipped, are still in Germany and Japan 40 years after the end of the Second World War. And though many Americans object to the cost, and some to the danger, there is no real opposition on principle. There is no real case to be made that it contravenes our values to be stationing troops on German soil. Yet Germany is not ours. We have no colonial claim. Still, we do have a persuasive reason: We are needed to defend a democracy.
But justice is not enough. Intervention needs a further justification: strategic necessity. To intervene solely for reasons of democratic morality is to confuse foreign policy with philanthropy. And a philanthropist gives out his own money. A statesman is a trustee. He spends the blood and treasure of others. On the other hand, to act purely for the reasons of strategy—to act imperially—is not only corrupting, but, for a democracy, unsustainable: A people committed to democratic values and exposed to the free flow of information will not long stand for costly intervention for antidemocratic objectives.
It is true that strategic necessity itself has a moral or at least an ideological foundation. American strategy has one overriding objective: to secure the safety of the United States and of the Western alliance. That alliance, in turn, is not capriciously cobbled together, but based on certain values. Protection of that alliance, and thus those values, from a rival power or bloc of powers inimical to both requires the exercise of realpolitik. Or, to put it another way, the struggle between the democracies and the chief threat to their survival, the Soviet bloc, hinges on many things. One of them is the fate of the unclaimed territory between them. The struggle between the blocs can be won (in the nuclear age, it must be won, because there is no alternative) by indirection: by surrounding the other side, stripping it of its outer defense, and ultimately putting it in a position where it must bend its will to the other. Containment was invented to prevent just that from happening.
Western realpolitik does, therefore, have a moral foundation. But that does not mean that anything goes. There may be extreme circumstances (Hitler, for example) under which one may ally oneself with a monster (Stalin). But a sustainable theory of intervention cannot argue from the extreme. It cannot, for example, address itself only to ends. It must ask not only “What does this intervention do for the alliance?” but also “What does it do to the country where the intervention takes place?” The Kantian injunction to treat individuals as ends must have application to nations as well. An intervention must not only defend the perimeter or sea-lanes or chromium mines of the alliance; it must better the condition of those on whose behalf we intervene.
Two criteria, then: Intervention must be both morally justified and strategically necessary. If these criteria appear too general and all-encompassing, let me point out that they exclude, and are meant to exclude, considerations that tend to dominate American debates over intervention: international law, world public opinion and the public sentiments of our own allies.
I argue instead for a kind of global unilateralism in the moral arena. We should be confident enough of our own values, and of our own ability to discern what actions abroad will promote them, to act accordingly without being bound by the verdict of others—like the World Court, whose composition and ideology is far less democratic than that of the United States Congress; like the UN, according to which the fight against racism should have taken us by now to the beaches of Tel Aviv; or like the Organization of American States, once aptly described by Irving Kristol as “a kind of mini-United Nations where we can be voted down in only three languages, thereby saving translators’ fees.” We did not need any of these agencies to help us decide on the nature of the Coard regime in Grenada. And we can debate the nature of the Duarte and Ortega regimes in El Salvador and Nicaragua quite adequately without either their advice or consent.
What about our allies’ views? Some, like Robert Pastor, a Latin American scholar and NSC aide in the Carter administration, argue that it is a contradiction of the democratic idea for the leader of an alliance of democracies to act alone; global unilateralism defeats its own democratic purposes. There are two answers. First, our allies, particularly our smaller allies in the Third World, are not free agents. They are bound by weakness and fear. They are subject to the kinds of threats and blackmail from which the United States, owing to its power, is immune. Which of Nicaragua’s neighbors can say in public what it tells our congressional delegations in private?
Moreover, global unilateralism is not really a choice; it is an existing reality. The European democracies, exhausted by two world wars, depleted and turned inward, did decide to place the ultimate responsibility for their safety in the hands of the United States. It is a fact, unpleasant perhaps, but a fact nonetheless. The United States would prefer otherwise. It constantly tries to change that fact by urging the allies to do more for their own defense. The results of these attempts are well known.
An American foreign policy should be confident enough to define international morality in its own, American terms. Is that parochial? I think it is parochial to do otherwise. If we take our own ideas about democracy, rights and self-government seriously, then it is the height of parochialism, and worse, to believe that these values are applicable only to a few largely white Western countries. We used to hear arguments about what a luxury democracy was in India. It took 30 years for Western intellectuals to realize what the Indians knew on day one: It is a boon. One hardly hears the luxury argument made about India these days. That kind of talk has rotated to places like El Salvador. If democracy succeeds there, it will rotate again to other unfortunate places. If we believe democracy is good for us, then we must believe it will be good for others.
Everywhere? The usual charge against moral unilateralism is that it is hypocritical. If, for example, the US is really trying to overthrow the Sandinista government for the reasons it states—i.e., to create a genuinely pluralist democracy—then why has the United States not created a contra force in Haiti? Why not support the ANC in South Africa?
The reply is clear. Moral justification is a necessary condition for intervention. It is not sufficient. Again: Foreign policy is not philanthropy. One doesn’t intervene purely for justice. One intervenes for reasons of strategy, and if justice permits. Neither Haiti nor South Africa is about to allow itself to be used for the projection of Soviet power; the same cannot be said of Nicaragua. (It is true that the oppression of the South African and Haitian regimes may ultimately produce successor regimes hostile to the United States; dealing with the long-range threat requires a different strategy, which is discussed below.) We should commit ourselves only in those places where our interests are threatened—with a severe constraint: that any form of intervention should conform to our notions of democratic morality.
But how to define strategic necessity? It depends, of course, on where one locates the perimeter of American interests and on what one thinks is the nature of the threat to those interests. But strategic arguments are not wholly arbitrary. We can start with areas of consensus. Even those dreaded San Francisco Democrats place NATO, Japan, the Persian Gulf, Israel, Central America and the Caribbean within the Western perimeter. Even during the 1984 Democratic presidential primary campaign Gary Hart expressed willingness to use force to defend the Persian Gulf. And Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale later declared that a Soviet base in Nicaragua would warrant an American quarantine. At the time of the false MiG alarm in Nicaragua, there was much talk of air strikes and little dissent even from congressional Democrats.
The heart of the argument over strategy is less “What is worth defending?” than “What kind of regime in those agreed places worth defending is compatible with our interests?” In a place like Central America or the Caribbean, where our principal aim is to keep the Soviets and the Cubans out, the question becomes “Who is most likely to keep them out?” A coalition government in Salvador? A treaty-bound Ortega in Managua? A Coard-Austin junta in Grenada? The strategic question translates ultimately into a political question. It requires a political answer.
The best political answer is that in much of the Third World the most reliable repository of American strategic interests is what is sometimes called the third force—local centrist parties supportive of democracy and opposed to both right-wing strongmen and anti-Western revolutionaries. True, sometimes, as in Iran in 1979, the third force is an illusion and an excuse not to support the lesser of two evils. But our choices are not always so meager. The degree of success we have seen in El Salvador, for example, is all the more remarkable because of the weakness of the Salvadoran political center and the improbability that a viable third force could be found. The United States should desperately be seeking to support and promote the democratic opposition in places like the Philippines, Chile, South Korea and South Africa; the democratic opposition in Nicaragua; and the democratic government in El Salvador. It does not matter whether our thugs or their thugs are in power. We have learned through bitter experience in places like Cuba and Nicaragua, as we may soon learn in Chile, that our thugs are a fragile vessel for American interests, and their tactic of attacking the center to preserve themselves can only smooth the way to ultimate power for the extreme (and anti-American) left.
A third-force strategy is not a prescription, but a guide to thinking about American strategic needs. Even more important, perhaps, it may be a way for ideological adversaries at home to work toward a new consensus on how and to what end the United States should intervene in the affairs of other states.
The New Republic, May 6, 1985
How do you distinguish a foreign policy “idealist” from a “realist,” an optimist from a pessimist? Ask one question: Do you believe in the arrow of history? Or to put it another way, do you think history is cyclical or directional? Are we condemned to do the same damn thing over and over, generation after generation—or is there hope for some enduring progress in the world order?
For realists, generally conservative, history is an endless cycle of clashing power politics. The same patterns repeat. Only the names and places change. The best we can do in our own time is to defend ourselves, managing instability and avoiding catastrophe. But expect nothing permanent, no essential alteration in the course of human affairs.
The idealists believe otherwise. They believe that the international system can eventually evolve out of its Hobbesian state of nature into something more humane and hopeful. What is usually overlooked is that this hopefulness for achieving a higher plane of global comity comes in two flavors—one liberal, one conservative.
The liberal variety (as practiced, for example, by the Bill Clinton administration) believes that the creation of a dense web of treaties, agreements, transnational institutions and international organizations (such as the UN, NGOs, the World Trade Organization) can give substance to a cohesive community of nations that would, in time, ensure order and stability.
The conservative view (often called neoconservative and dominant in the George W. Bush years) is that the better way to ensure order and stability is not through international institutions, which are flimsy and generally powerless, but through the spread of democracy. Because, in the end, democracies are inherently more inclined to live in peace.
Liberal internationalists count on globalization, neoconservatives on democratization to get us to the sunny uplands of international harmony. But what unites them is the belief that such uplands exist and are achievable. Both believe in the perfectibility, if not of man, then of the international system. Both believe in the arrow of history.
For realists, this is a comforting delusion that gives high purpose to international exertions where none exists. Sovereign nations remain in incessant pursuit of power and self-interest. The pursuit can be carried out more or less wisely. But nothing fundamentally changes.
Barack Obama is a classic case study in foreign policy idealism. Indeed, one of his favorite quotations is about the arrow of history: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He has spent nearly eight years trying to advance that arc of justice. Hence his initial “apology tour,” that burst of confessional soul-searching abroad about America and its sins, from slavery to the loss of our moral compass after 9/11. Friday’s trip to Hiroshima completes the arc.
Unfortunately, with “justice” did not come peace. The policies that followed—appeasing Vladimir Putin, the Iranian mullahs, the butchers of Tiananmen Square and lately the Castros—have advanced neither justice nor peace. On the contrary. The consequent withdrawal of American power, that agent of injustice or at least arrogant overreach, has yielded nothing but geopolitical chaos and immense human suffering. (See Syria.)
But now an interesting twist. Two terms as president may not have disabused Obama of his arc-of-justice idealism (see above: Hiroshima visit), but they have forced upon him at least one policy of hardheaded, indeed hardhearted, realism. On his Vietnam trip this week, Obama accepted the reality of an abusive dictatorship while announcing a warming of relations and the lifting of the US arms embargo, thereby enlisting Vietnam as a full partner in the containment of China.
This follows the partial return of the US military to the Philippines, another element of the containment strategy. Indeed, the Trans-Pacific Partnership itself is less about economics than geopolitics, creating a Pacific Rim cordon around China.
There’s no idealism in containment. It is raw, soulless realpolitik. No moral arc. No uplifting historical arrow. In fact, it is the same damn thing all over again, a recapitulation of Truman’s containment of Russia in the late 1940s. Obama is doing the same, now with China.
He thus leaves a double legacy. His arc-of-justice aspirations, whatever their intention, leave behind tragic geopolitical and human wreckage. Yet this belated acquiescence to realpolitik, laying the foundations for a new containment, will be an essential asset in addressing this century’s coming central challenge, the rise of China.
I don’t know—no one knows—if history has an arrow. Which is why a dose of coldhearted realism is always welcome. Especially from Obama.
The Washington Post, May 27, 2016
The flurry of bold executive orders and of highly provocative Cabinet nominations (such as a secretary of education who actually believes in school choice) has been encouraging to conservative skeptics of Donald Trump. But it shouldn’t erase the troubling memory of one major element of Trump’s inaugural address.
The foreign policy section has received far less attention than so revolutionary a declaration deserved. It radically redefined the American national interest as understood since World War II.
Trump outlined a world in which foreign relations are collapsed into a zero-sum game. They gain, we lose. As in: “For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries” while depleting our own.
And most provocatively this: “The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world.” Bernie Sanders believes that a corrupt establishment has ripped off the middle class to give to the rich. Trump believes those miscreants have given away our patrimony to undeserving, ungrateful foreigners as well.
JFK’s inaugural pledged to support any friend and oppose any foe to assure the success of liberty. Note that Trump makes no distinction between friend and foe (and no reference to liberty). They’re all out to use, exploit and surpass us.
No more, declared Trump: “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America First.”
Imagine how this resonates abroad. “America First” was the name of the organization led by Charles Lindbergh that bitterly fought FDR before the US entry into World War II—right through the Battle of Britain—to keep America neutral between Churchill’s Britain and Hitler’s Reich. (Then came Pearl Harbor. Within a week, America First dissolved itself in shame.)
Not that Trump was consciously imitating Lindbergh. I doubt he was even aware of the reference. He just liked the phrase. But I can assure you that in London and in every world capital they are aware of the antecedent and the intimations of a new American isolationism. Trump gave them good reason to think so, going on to note “the right of all nations to put their own interests first.” America included.
Some claim that putting America first is a reassertion of American exceptionalism. On the contrary, it is the antithesis. It makes America no different from all the other countries that define themselves by a particularist blood-and-soil nationalism. What made America exceptional, unique in the world, was defining its own national interest beyond its narrow economic and security needs to encompass the safety and prosperity of a vast array of allies. A free world marked by open trade and mutual defense was President Truman’s vision, shared by every president since.
Until now.
Some have argued that Trump is just dangling a bargaining chip to negotiate better terms of trade or alliance. Or that Trump’s views are so changeable and unstable—telling European newspapers two weeks ago that NATO is obsolete and then saying “NATO is very important to me”—that this is just another unmoored entry on a ledger of confusion.
But both claims are demonstrably wrong. An inaugural address is no off-the-cuff riff. These words are the product of at least three weeks of deliberate crafting for an address that Trump’s spokesman said was intended to express his philosophy. Moreover, to remove any ambiguity, Trump prefaced his “America First” proclamation with: “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land.”
Trump’s vision misunderstands the logic underlying the far larger, far-reaching view of Truman. The Marshall Plan surely took wealth away from the American middle class and distributed it abroad. But for a reason. Altruism, in part. But mostly to stabilize Western Europe as a bulwark against an existential global enemy.
We carried many free riders throughout the Cold War. The burden was heavy. But this was not a mindless act of charity; it was an exercise in enlightened self-interest. After all, it was indeed better to subsidize foreign armies—German, South Korean, Turkish and dozens of others—and have them stand with us, rather than stationing even more American troops everywhere around the world at greater risk of both blood and treasure.
We are embarking upon insularity and smallness. Nor is this just theory. Trump’s long-promised but nonetheless abrupt withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership is the momentous first fruit of his foreign policy doctrine. Last year the prime minister of Singapore told John McCain that if we pulled out of the TPP “you’ll be finished in Asia.” He knows the region.
For 70 years, we sustained an international system of open commerce and democratic alliances that has enabled America and the West to grow and thrive. Global leadership is what made America great. We abandon it at our peril.
The Washington Post, January 27, 2017