In his blog yesterday on this site, former Senator Gary Hart called on President Bush “to explain to the American people what our policy is, why that policy is in our best interest, how that policy conforms with our traditional ideals and principles, and how we intend to pursue it.” That is a reasonable request, and Senator Hart is right that discussion of American interests has generally been drowned out recently. However, the Senator only posed the question — a challenge to President Bush, really.

Last week, though, Madalene O’Donnell blogged about the answer. Her post started from the premise that the President has, in fact, answered exactly those questions with the National Security Strategy document. But she still criticizes the administration. She takes the President to task for failing to implement the NSS: the NSS talks about failed states as a serious threat to the U.S., but, she argues, the U.S. has not invested much to fix the failed state in Somalia. The NSS talks about the importance of democracy, but the U.S. seemed surprised when Palestinians elected Hamas, voting against the corrupt Fatah government.O’Donnell would have preferred a more aggressive American anti-corruption campaign before the election. Presumably, she has the same view on Lebanon: stronger U.S. nation-building effort might have allowed the Lebanese government to suppress Hezbollah or to convince Hezbollah to disarm and join the democratic government. Overall, O’Donnell traces the failure of American foreign policy to insufficient nation-building. She thinks that the American national interest calls for an expensive plan to create well-functioning institutions all over the world — for example, using American aid in some (unspecified) way to fight corruption.

I disagree with both Hart and O’Donnell. President Bush has a clear view of American national interest, and he is working diligently to implement it. He has a vision for transforming the world — both out of altruism (people in other countries would be better off if they lived in democracies) and out of self-interest (democracies around the world would not start wars or support anti-American terrorists). And he believes that U.S. power, often military power, is an effective tool — both for directly taking power away from America’s enemies (by killing them or removing them from resource-rich government posts) and also for intimidating others into complying with our wishes (because weaker countries or non-state actors, he thinks, tend to acquiesce to threats). According to Bush, it’s worth spending a great deal of money on this effort (and lives, too — some American and many locals in the countries we are “helping”).

Most of the time, Bush’s grand strategy seems far too aggressive and idealistic to me. I doubt that democratic institutions necessarily will make other countries pro-American, and I doubt that “toughness” attracts people to join the American bandwagon to the extent that Bush seems to think.

O’Donnell shares President Bush’s idealism in principle, but she prefers handouts to bodyblows as the means of spreading democracy and other good values. Her view is still quite activist — she’s looking for a short- to medium-term improvement in the quality of government around the world — and she knows it would be expensive. But she thinks better nation-building aid policies would be effective and worth the cost.

Leaving aside the question about whether spreading democracy and building nations is really in the national interest, O’Donnell’s proposal suffers acutely from our inability to figure out how to give aid effectively. In fact, while providing relief fits very well with American values (almost everyone is willing to help out after natural disasters, at least to restore people to the situation they were in before calamity struck), providing aid does not.

Foreign aid creates dependency. We don’t have many perfect tests to determine whether aid can help — the effectiveness of aid in the past has been undercut variously by Cold War politics, colonialism, bad economic ideas, and other problems that convince people that “good” aid might work in the future — but we do know that in many contexts, a “free lunch” weakens individual initiative and incentives to work hard. In domestic politics, Americans are troubled about welfare “handouts;” it’s no surprise that they are even more troubled about handouts to people in far-away places.

Foreign aid for nation-building is worse than that, though. In places with weak institutions, especially in conflict-ridden areas, aid contributes resources, pouring gasoline on the fire. Local groups struggling for power naturally struggle to control the aid. Aid increases the stakes for them, and so it increases the intensity of the local conflict. Aid also increases the resources with which to fight. Even “non-military” aid is fungible: political groups can spend more of “their own funds” on fighting or other irresponsible behavior, because they don’t have to spend as much on food, clothes, medicines, etc. I remember a problem on an exam in my introductory microeconomics class that made this theoretically clear, but the problem is really brought home in Fiona Terry’s recent book, Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action, which won the 2006 Grawemeyer Award, a $200,000 prize for the most important recent book on “world order.” Terry gives great, hands-on examples of the problems from her experiences as an official with the aid organization, Doctors without Borders.

So where does this critique leave me on Lebanon, President Bush, and the American national interest? Well, on this one, I think Bush has it about right. The U.S. State Department lists both Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations. We can quibble about definitions and / or the completeness of the list. But it seems reasonable to me, whether you believe in the idealist rhetoric of the NSS or not, that the U.S. should oppose having terrorist organizations control territory (e.g., Hezbollah’s de facto control in south Lebanon) or serve in government. The U.S. isn’t good at orchestrating a particular replacement for their control, and we are not actually always in position to attack the terrorists ourselves. But we don’t need to come to the aid of the terrorists, either, when their power is threatened. Even a thug in control, or religious mullahs that don’t preach attacks on the United States, would be better than terrorists in power.

Relief for the civilian population of Lebanon is one thing — for example, helping refugees who leave the area of the conflict. But the U.S. should not feel obligated to impose a cease fire with all deliberate speed. Someone else (Israel) is attacking someone we don’t like (terrorists, according to our legal definition).

On the other hand, the U.S. should not be hostage to Israel’s decisions about its own interest. Left to its own devices, Israel might fight on for longer than the U.S. would prefer (if it starts to alienate too many “bystanders”) or use tactics that hurt American interests. Israel has its own choices to make about the costs and benefits of various strategies and tactics. Right now, Israel may be finding that its military cannot accomplish as much as it would like — or perhaps Israel may be learning that it made a mistake by escalating so strongly (Juan Cole has an interesting blog on this with some good links). But the U.S. doesn’t necessarily need to do anything.

In fact, if Israel or Hezbollah or Hamas or Syria or Iran really believes that the U.S. will act sometime soon, that changes their incentives to make responsible decisions. Perhaps what we really need now is a commitment from the U.S. not to ride to the rescue too quickly. The locals, who really have something important at stake, need to face reality with all of its costs and benefits — and to make some decisions of their own.

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