Intervention and U.S. politics
Much of the discussion of late on this blog has been about when to intervene and under what authority. On that score, I agree with Jordan Tama that legitimacy – as amorphous a concept as that is – makes more sense than legality.
But we must also recognize that the determining factor in many cases is not the efficacy of the UN or the conclusions of international commissions – it is a domestic political decision taken within the United States. President Clinton wanted to intervene in Kosovo and President Bush wanted to intervene in Iraq – so they did, whether those actions were legal or legitimate or not. In other cases – Rwanda and Darfur come to mind – neither President (or Congress), had much stomach to make a case for intervention to the American people. And more often than not, absent U.S. leadership, robust intervention to stop genocide or stem humanitarian disasters does not take place.
The transcript of the first Gore-Bush debate in 2000 crystallizes this problem in an intriguing way. Of course, the now infamous Bush line from the debate is “The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of our troops. He believes in nation building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders.” Bush also defines the circumstances for deploying troops very narrowly – certainly not offering a definition encompassing a principle of a responsibility to protect (or spread democracy). Perhaps more enlightening is this News Hour summary of a later Bush-Gore back and forth on intervention.
The point is that the U.S. has no political consensus – no center – on the question of intervention, so the pendulum swings in strange ways. When then-Governor Bush came out against nation building and humanitarian intervention, I’m sure a huge majority of GoP members of Congress firmly lined up behind him – those same members now make soaring speeches about the need to stand up for our values abroad. Flip that around and you’ll probably find a similar switch on the Democratic side.
But the standard by which to judge whether or not to intervene should not just be: what party is the President who is making the decision? The U.S. does itself, the UN, and the world a huge disservice if there is no predictability, no clear political consensus, about what constitutes a legitimate intervention. Both parties do agree on one thing – they want the U.S. to remain the sole superpower. But for that to work, people in both parties need to come together to figure out what that means with regard to intervention.
I agree with that last two sentences wholeheartedly. If the US is to be the world’s only superpower, then grave responsibility comes with that. The argument against any intervention is just as fallacious as an argument for intervention that is totally based upon self interest. The argument against any and all intervention really means complete abdication of superpower status because unused power fades and becomes stagnant and the world will evolve on its own without the involvment of that power (for good or for bad). Many past superpowers have risen and then stagnated, medieval China, the Ottoman Empire, the Hapsburg Empire and they were all eclisped by a world that went on evolving. One could realistically also include Rome/Byzantium in this list and there are others. A superpower that never intervenes has no power except self defense and will eventually isolate itself from world affairs as the world moves on without and beyond it. The term power used in this sense can only mean power over other people and power over the cultural development of humanity or a great portion of it. So a non-interventionist superpower is not a superpower at al.
Intervention by a superpower can also only mean one thing and that is to use its power to shape or control a portion of humanity into its own image or field of influence. Superpower intervention therefore has almost supernatural qualities in that if that influence is maintained for a sufficient length of time, the worldview of those who are the subject of that intervention will be affected for centuries or millenia.
The interventionist actions of a superpower can and, from historical times up to the present, have usually been based totally upon self interest. All interventions have been based solely on decisions that will increase the power and wealth of the superpower. That is the norm and history is bulging and overflowing with precedent for it. But the selfish use, or if I may say misuse, of such absolute power will eventually result in the same end as the complete absence of use of that power.
A superpower that acts only out of self-interest will never be received as wise, only as powerful. Such power can be increased at will especially in third world areas where there is little opposition. If pure power is the only goal then is it better to be feared than to be loved. But history show us that where self interest is the only motivation for the use of absolute power, the costs of controlling an empire (and the use of absolute power for solely self interested reasons can only be deemed to be empire building) become an increasing burden on the empire. Subjected peoples will always resent the centre of the empire and, if history is right, contolling and empire becomes synonymous with engaging in a never ending war of attrition. Like a large animal being attacked by a pack of wolves the empire must never sleep and must always be on guard for the latest attack and the newest coalition of insurrgents. And again if history is right, sooner or later an alternate power base arises to challenge the centre (from the periphery to the centre) and that alternate power base becomes the champion of all who oppose the empire. The empire then has two choices, total absolute brutality on a massive scale that today could mean the deaths of hundreds of millions or negotiation and acceptance of alternative power and gradual decline, stagnation and eventual disollution.
However there is a third alternative which is morally and ethically focused intervention designed to “pull” the world in more positive directions. We don’t have to look far back in history to see both positive and negative uses of American power, but in doing so, the assignment of postive or negative status will be arguable I suppose. It would be very hard to deny the positive use of American power in WWII. Europe was crumbling after decades of constant war that resulted form a world power being challenged by alternate power bases in Germany and Japan. If a tree is to be judged by its fruit then the status of the world in the secon half of the twentieth century is testimony to the fact that America’s intervention in the world was positive.
But also during that last half of the twentieth century, America also intervened in a different way to stop the expansion of another power base, the USSR, in the Cold War. It was successful and again to judge a tree by it’s fruit, the galloping desire of post Soviet European satellites to join the Western alliance proves that America’s second great intervention was positive and again that part of the world affected by America’s intervention has prospered and lives in peace.
The crucial two questions now are whether American intervention can and will be positive and precisely what form should that intervention take. America’s first intervention was military and there was much blood shed, but the blood was already being shed in massive amounts before America intervened and so the intervention simply matched the situation that was already in play. The second great American intervention was of a vastly different sort. The Cold War was not a bloody war because America, in effect, returned to previous European methods of a balance of power. The 18th and 19th century European balance of power eventually did lead to a bloody war but it did hold for a long time. WWI and WWII were probably inevitible because of the world views of the day about power itself. There always had to be a winner and a military winner at that.
So America’s two great interventions into the world have both worked and, although America’s personal (ie as a country and superpower) both been positive more for it’s own people than anyone else, it would be difficult to argue that the world is not a better place for those interventions. Again you judge a tree by it’s fruit.
So where does this put us now? There are many who hold that the time is ripe for a third American intervention into the world. But is it the time and what kind of intervention is right. We cannot judge the tree by it’s fruit if the tree has not been planted yet, but we do live in a different world than before. We can alter genetics and we can huge portions of the cosmos and we can build military weaponry that is so vastly superior to anything that went before that we are quite literally creating our own world and such creative power increases each day. But not everything. We still cannot accurately predict the weather or the outcome of a baseketball game or many other things but we are getting better at it. That is why the Cold War produces a lot less bloodshed than WWI and WWII, at least in the battlefield. It was because we could predict human behaviour, espcially economic behaviour and cost analysis etc. The Cold War was a more intelligent war (more dangerous yes because of nuclear weapons but more intelligent because it was a war fought more in the minds of men and women and less on the battlefiels) and the catostrophic effects of actually allowing it to explode into full battle were avoided. And this intelligence existed on both sides.
Was there not an intellectual evolution from the first half of the twentieth century to the last half? Despite all the proxy wars and espionage and blustering and massive arms buildups, did the world (or at least the Northern Hemisphere because that who was in conflict really) not find a way to establish winners and losers withough massive amounts of blood. Is there no direction here? Although teleological thinking is designed to apply the past to the present and is more appropriate to fields such as law and evolutionary biology, can we not attempt to see where the future lies? Over that past half century history has been galloping forward exponentially. Can we not use our increasing powers of prediction to even hazard a guess at what kind of fruit will grow from the trees we are planting today?
In the two models mentioned above, alternate power bases developed because of myopic use of power. Is that not happening again today? The myopic and econommically cripplinig use of American interventionist power over the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in an already defeated and crumbled Iraq and the obsession with the remote possibility of the development of one or two weapons of mass destruction in an isolated and paranoid Iran seems to be the sole focus of US foreign policy while the rest of the world does what? And let’s not forget the seemingly endless battle with ghosts for control of the remote mountains of Afghanistan. While American military power remains probably omnipotent it probably doesn’t seem that way to most of the outside world.
America is the world’s sole superpower and that fact is beyond doubt but one wonders if that opinion must not be changing the world over. Without going into well worn comparisons to Vietnam, America has taken on the image of an aging neighborhood bully who can still dominate his foes but grows weaker by the day as younger challengers bide their time until the day that the bully can only fight one challenger at a time and then a brawl ensues until a new champion rises to the top. Would WWII have been necessary of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill not bankrupted the British Empire in their conquest of the Middle East from the Ottoman Turks? There was no reason for that horrendously expensive conquest of the old world of empires as the Sick Man of Europe was already dying.
The world needs America to lead the world more than it ever has, because we now live in one world, unified in so many ways. But a world leader must not only think of itself that way but must also been seen that way by the world. America must become the philosopher king, reluctantly accpeting a role unwanted by others because it is the only solution. Since the early days of Ronald Reagan, America has been attempting to push the world and force it to comply, but like attempting to push a piece of string, the only result has been knots and a complete lack of direction.
I don’t envy Barak Obama his future job. I don’t see how he can possibly undo the entanglements and knowts of 30 years of Straussian insanity. But that appears to be his destiny and he appears to be prepared to accept it. America needs him as much as the world needs a rational and moral America.
Comment on June 24, 2008 @ 8:39 am