The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy. By Robert D. Kaplan. The National Interest, August 1, 2013.
Kaplan:
For
over two years, the civil war in Syria has been synonymous with cries of moral
urgency. Do Something! shout those
who demand the United States intervene militarily to set the situation there to
rights, even as the battle lines now comprise hundreds of regime and rebel
groupings and the rebels have started fighting each other. Well, then, shout the moral interventionists, if only we had intervened earlier!
Syria
is not unique. Before Syria, humanitarians in 2011 demanded military
intervention in Libya, even though the regime of Muammar Qaddafi had given up
its nuclear program and had been cooperating for years with Western
intelligence agencies. In fact, the United States and France did lead an
intervention, and Libya today is barely a state, with Tripoli less a capital
than the weak point of imperial-like arbitration for far-flung militias,
tribes, and clans, while nearby Saharan entities are in greater disarray
because of weapons flooding out of Libya.
The
1990s were full of calls for humanitarian intervention: in Rwanda, which
tragically went unheeded; and in Bosnia and Kosovo where interventions, while
belated, were by and large successful. Free from the realpolitik necessities of
the Cold War, humanitarians have in the past two decades tried to reduce
foreign policy to an aspect of genocide prevention. Indeed, the Nazi Holocaust
is only one lifetime removed from our own—a nanosecond in human history—and so
post–Cold War foreign policy now rightly exists in the shadow of it. The
codified upshot has been R2P: the “Responsibility to Protect,” the mantra of
humanitarians.
But
American foreign policy cannot merely be defined by R2P and Never Again! Statesmen can only rarely
be concerned with humanitarian interventions and protecting human rights to the
exclusion of other considerations. The United States, like any nation—but
especially because it is a great power—simply has interests that do not always
cohere with its values. That is tragic, but it is a tragedy that has to be
embraced and accepted.
What
are those overriding interests? The United States, as the dominant power in the
Western Hemisphere, must always prevent any other power from becoming equally
dominant in the Eastern Hemisphere. Moreover, as a liberal maritime power, the
United States must seek to protect the sea lines of communication that enable
world trade. It must also seek to protect both treaty and de facto allies, and
especially their access to hydrocarbons. These are all interests that, while
not necessarily contradictory to human rights, simply do not operate in the
same category.
Because
the United States is a liberal power, its interests—even when they are not
directly concerned with human rights—are generally moral. But they are only
secondarily moral. For seeking to adjust the balance of power in one’s favor
has been throughout history an amoral enterprise pursued by both liberal and
illiberal powers. Nevertheless, when a liberal power like the United States
pursues such a goal in the service of preventing war among major states, it is
acting morally in the highest sense.
A
telling example of this tension—one that gets to the heart of why Never Again! and R2P cannot always be
the operative words in statesmanship—was recently provided by the
foreign-affairs expert Leslie H. Gelb. Gelb noted that after Saddam Hussein had
gassed close to seven thousand Kurds to death in northern Iraq in 1988, even a
“truly ethical” secretary of state, George Shultz, committed a “moral outrage.”
For Shultz basically ignored the incident and continued supporting Saddam in
his war against Iran, because weakening Iran—not protecting the citizens of
Iraq—was the primary American interest
at the time.
So was
Shultz acting immorally? Not completely, I believe. Shultz was operating under
a different morality than the one normally applied by humanitarians. His was a
public morality; not a private one. He and the rest of the Reagan
administration had a responsibility to the hundreds of millions of Americans
under their charge. And while these millions were fellow countrymen, they were
more crucially voters and citizens, essentially strangers who did not know
Shultz or Reagan personally, but who had entrusted the two men with their
interests. And the American public’s interest clearly dictated that of the two
states, Iran and Iraq, Iran at the time constituted the greater threat. In
protecting the public interest of even a liberal power, a statesman cannot
always be nice; or humane.
I am
talking here of a morality of public outcomes, rather than one of private
intentions. By supporting Iraq, the Reagan administration succeeded in
preventing Iran in the last years of the Cold War from becoming a regional
hegemon. That was an outcome convenient to U.S. interests, even if the morality
of the affair was ambiguous, given that Iraq’s regime was at the time the more
brutal of the two.
In
seeking good outcomes, policymakers are usually guided by constraints: a
realistic awareness of what, for instance, the United States should and should
not do, given its finite resources. After all, the United States had hundreds
of thousands of troops tied down in Europe and Northeast Asia during the Cold
War, and thus had to contain Iran through the use of a proxy, Saddam’s Iraq.
That was not entirely cynical: it was an intelligent use of limited assets in
the context of a worldwide geopolitical struggle.
The
problem with a foreign policy driven foremost by Never Again! is that it ignores limits and the availability of
resources. World War II had the secondary, moral effect of saving what was left
of European Jewry. Its primary goal and effect was to restore the European and
Asian balance of power in a manner tolerable to the United States—something
that the Nazis and the Japanese fascists had overturned. Of course, the Soviet
Union wrested control of Eastern Europe for nearly half a century following the
war. But again, limited resources necessitated an American alliance with the
mass-murderer Stalin against the mass-murderer Hitler. It is because of such
awful choices and attendant compromises—in which morality intertwines with
amorality—that humanitarians will frequently be disappointed with the foreign
policy of even the most heroic administrations.
World
War II certainly involved many hideous compromises and even mistakes on
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s part. He got into the war in Europe very
late, he did not bomb the rail tracks leading to the concentration camps, he
might have been more aggressive with the Soviets on the question of Eastern
Europe. But as someone representing the interests of the millions of strangers
who had and had not voted for him, his aim was to defeat Nazi Germany and
Imperial Japan in a manner that cost the fewest American soldiers’ lives, and
utilized the least amount of national resources. Saving the remnants of
European Jewry was a moral consequence of his actions, but his methods
contained tactical concessions that had fundamental amoral elements. Abraham
Lincoln, for his part, brought mass suffering upon southern civilians in the
last phase of the Civil War in order to decisively defeat the South. The total
war waged by generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant was
evidence of that. Simply put, there are actions of state that are the right things
to do, even if they cannot be defined in terms of conventional morality.
Amoral
goals, properly applied, do have moral effects. Indeed, in more recent times,
President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, rushed
arms to Israel following a surprise attack by Arab armies in the fall of 1973.
The two men essentially told the American defense establishment that supporting
Israel in its hour of need was the right thing to do, because it was necessary
to send an unambiguous message of resolve to the Soviets and their Arab allies
at a critical stage in the Cold War. Had they justified the arms transfers
purely in terms of helping embattled post-Holocaust Jewry—rather than in terms
of power politics as they did—it would have made for a much weaker argument in
Washington, where officials rightly had American interests at heart more than
Israeli ones. George McGovern was possibly a more ethical man than either Nixon
or Kissinger. But had he been elected president in 1972, would he have acted so
wisely and so decisively during the 1973 Middle East war? The fact is,
individual perfection, as Machiavelli knew, is not necessarily synonymous with
public virtue.
Then
there is the case of Deng Xiaoping. Deng approved the brutal suppression of
students at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. For that he is not respected
among humanitarians in the West. But the consolidation of Communist Party
control that followed the clampdown allowed for Deng’s methodical,
market-oriented reforms to continue for a generation in China. Perhaps never
before in recorded economic history have so many people seen such a dramatic
rise in living standards, with an attendant rise in personal (if not political)
freedoms in so short a time frame. Thus, Deng might be considered both a brutal
Communist and the greatest man of the twentieth century. The morality of his
life is complex.
The
Bosnia and Kosovo interventions of 1995 and 1999 are frequently held out as
evidence that the United States is most effective when it acts according to its
humanitarian values—never mind its amoral interests. But those who make that
argument neglect to mention that the two successful interventions were eased by
the fact that America operated in the Balkans with the balance-of-power
strongly in its favor. Russia in the 1990s was weak and chaotic under Boris
Yeltsin’s incompetent rule, and thus temporarily less able to challenge the
United States in a region where historically the czars and commissars had
exerted considerable sway. However, Russia, even in the 1990s, still exerted
considerable sway in the Caucasus, and thus a Western response to halt ethnic
cleansing there during the same decade was not even considered. More broadly,
the 1990s allowed for ground interventions in the Balkans because the
international climate was relatively benign: China was only just beginning its
naval expansion (endangering our Pacific allies) and September 11 still lay in
the future. Truly, beyond many a moral response lies a question of power that
cannot be explained wholly in terms of morality.
Thus,
to raise morality as a sole arbiter is ultimately not to be serious about
foreign policy. R2P must play as large a role as realistically possible in the
affairs of state. But it cannot ultimately dominate. Syria is the current and
best example of this. U.S. power is capable of many things, yet putting a
complex and war-torn Islamic society’s house in order is not one of them. In
this respect, our tragic experience in Iraq is indeed relevant. Quick fixes
like a no-fly zone and arming the rebels may topple Syrian dictator Bashar
al-Assad, but that might only make President Barack Obama culpable in midwifing
to power a Sunni-Jihadist regime, even as ethnic cleansing of al-Assad’s
Alawites commences. At least at this late juncture, without significant numbers
of Western boots on the ground for a significant period—something for which
there is little public support—the likelihood of a better, more stable regime
emerging in Damascus is highly questionable. Frankly, there are just no easy
answers here, especially as the pro-Western regime in Jordan is threatened by
continued Syrian violence. R2P applied in 2011 in Syria might actually have
yielded a better strategic result: it will remain an unknowable.
Because
moralists in these matters are always driven by righteous passion, whenever you
disagree with them, you are by definition immoral and deserve no quarter;
whereas realists, precisely because they are used to conflict, are less likely
to overreact to it. Realists know that passion and wise policy rarely flow
together. (The late diplomat Richard Holbrooke was a stunning exception to this
rule.) Realists adhere to the belief of the mid-twentieth-century University of
Chicago political scientist, Hans Morgenthau, who wrote that “one must work
with” the base forces of human nature, “not against them.” Thus, realists
accept the human material at hand in any given place, however imperfect that
material may be. To wit, you can’t go around toppling regimes just because you
don’t like them. Realism, adds Morgenthau, “appeals to historical precedent
rather than to abstract principles [of justice] and aims at the realization of
the lesser evil rather than of the absolute good.”
No
group of people internalized such tragic realizations better than Republican
presidents during the Cold War. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan
and George H. W. Bush all practiced amorality, realism, restraint and humility in foreign affairs (if not all
the time). It is their sensibility that should guide us now. Eisenhower
represented a pragmatic compromise within the Republican Party between
isolationists and rabid anti-Communists. All of these men supported repressive,
undemocratic regimes in the third world in support of a favorable balance of
power against the Soviet Union. Nixon accepted the altogether brutal regimes in
the Soviet Union and “Red” China as legitimate, even as he balanced one against
the other. Reagan spoke the Wilsonian language of moral rearmament, even as he
awarded the key levers of bureaucratic power to realists like Caspar
Weinberger, George Shultz and Frank Carlucci, whose effect regarding policy was
to temper Reagan’s rhetoric. The elder Bush did not break relations with China
after the Tiananmen uprising; nor did he immediately pledge support for
Lithuania, after that brave little country declared its independence—for fear
of antagonizing the Soviet military. It was caution and restraint on Bush’s
part that helped bring the Cold War to a largely peaceful—and, therefore,
moral—conclusion. In some of these policies, the difference between amorality
and morality was, to paraphrase Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim, no more than “the thickness of a sheet of paper.”
And
that is precisely the point: foreign policy at its best is subtle, innovative,
contradictory, and truly bold only on occasion, aware as its most disciplined
practitioners are of the limits of American power. That is heartrending, simply
because calls to alleviate suffering will in too many instances go unanswered.
For the essence of tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good, so much as the
triumph of one good over another that causes suffering.
