Ideals have a very real place in the making and executing of foreign policy. Even ideology in and of itself is not necessarily bad. When, however, the dictates of ideology--any ideology--suppress a careful calculation of the realities resident in a situation, the consequences are most likely going to be poor, even disastrous.
In this context it is utterly essential to remember that governments are not moral beings like individual humans. Governments are impersonal constructs which function as agents on behalf of the nation, the society, or, more properly, that component of society which functions as the polity. It is the polity which sets the pace. The polity determines the nature of national interest. The government functions as the agency which seeks to advance or protect the national interest.
Government is to polity as a lawyer is to the client. That analogy is not precise but it is close enough to the reality of global life to serve as a quick guide.
National interest is composed of concerns or values widely shared within the polity. Some of these are long-lived, virtually permanent features on the national landscape. Others are evanescent, driven into existence by a high profile event, acted upon and then flicker out as new events, new concerns flash across the horizon of the polity's awareness. Still others, arguably the most filled with potential disaster, are the result of a specific ideology.
Stepping back in time a bit, for the first century and more of its existence, the US had little in the way of foreign relations. The men who founded this country were practical politicians and realists. Their view was simply that the US had only one true, compelling national interest--survival. They realized that this new nation was a very small fish in a large ocean populated by sharks with long, sharp teeth.
Despite some horrid miscalculations early in the Nineteenth century, which included almost getting into simultaneous wars with both England and France, the US played a cautious, highly conservative, and ideologically flat role in the world through and beyond the War Between the States. Even our advance into the colonial adventure at the bitter end of the Mauve Decade was justified as conservative--a defensive action needed to assure that our long standing national interest of open, free maritime commerce and access to foreign markets remained intact in the Pacific and Asia.
The first real excursion into an ideologically driven policy came at the bitter end of the Nineteenth century when John Hay announced the famed "Open Door" policy with respect to China. This policy was of the declaratory sort which meant it had neither legal standing nor an inbuilt capacity for enforcement. It is doubtful that any country among the collection of raptors who regarded China with appraising eyes saw any need to heed the new US policy--including the US itself.
On occasion, declaratory policy is harmless, a kind of feel-good move in keeping with the prevalent opinion within an influential segment of the polity. The Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact is one example. No one took this measure seriously beyond a few really sincere peace advocates. Others such as the Open Door policy or the Monroe Doctrine come to be enshrined as national interests worthy of implementing unilaterally if necessary--by force of arms if that is required.
We got away with the Monroe Doctrine in largest measure because the British saw no profit in challenging it. We did not escape unscathed from the Open Door because the Japanese saw great profit in challenging it. So embedded had the Open Door become that the US had no wiggle room for negotiation when the Japanese started to close the door--firmly and permanently. The result was in all the media a few years back. It was called World War II in the Pacific.
Ideology went front and center in both the definition of national interest and the conduct of foreign relations during the years of Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson was a Christian man, a very Christian one, who had strong views on international morality. He saw nations as being bound by the same moral codes as operated on individual people. And, just as a person who violates the moral code may be subject to either punishment or some other form of correction, so should a state which he saw as a bad actor.
Acting on a moral base and totally overlooking the reality that governments are agents not principles, Wilson sought to "teach the Mexicans to elect good men," using Marines and, later, the Army as instructors. Horrified at the submarine's necessary sneakiness and apparently believing that the presence of an American civilian on a British ship (even one which was legally a warship) rendered that boat immune from attack, Wilson worked with vigor and effect to guide the US into war only months after he had been re-elected on a "he kept us out of war" platform.
It is always important to keep in mind that the US had no national interest, nothing which directly, substantially, and materially affected its status in the world, its prosperity, its security in issue on the battlefields of the war. Further, at the time Wilson was spinning his moral distaste with the submarine and the Kaiser for whom they sailed into a full-bore crusade to "make the world safe for democracy," and to wage a "war to end wars," the belligerents on both sides of No Mans Land were on the ropes, approaching collapse economically and psychologically.
A peace of exhaustion was in the offing. This peace would have come even allowing for the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent offensive on the Western Front. The German offensive ran out of human steam well short of a meaningful end. It was not a war-winner let alone an attack defeated by the efforts and losses of the recently arriving American "doughboys."
Had the US stayed on the sidelines, the war would have ended in mutual exhaustion. Arguably the peace would have proven both more equitable and much longer lasting than did the one hammered out (to the accompaniment of the disillusionment of Wilsonian ideals) at Versailles.
Wilson's ideals--including the League of Nations--were ideologically driven pure and simple. While they were momentarily popular with the common folk of Europe, they foundered not only on the cynicism of European leaders, but more importantly, on the bedrock of nationalism throughout the continent--and in the US. The outcome of the ideologically predicated, completely unnecessary American involvement in WW I and the peace process was highly negative to all parties. Its effects linger on even today to the continued vexation of US interests in the Mideast.
In a rational world, the lessons of the Wilson misadventure would have resounded loudly down through the years. This world being marked by an absence of rationality, they did not.
The aftermath of WW II which was called into existence by the unintended by well neigh onto certain merging of the effects of the Open Door and the Versailles Treaty was marked by another burst of idealism and ideology.
The UN was FDR's genuflection before the alter of Wilson. The systemic flaw--that the architects of the UN deemed any and all "nations" to be fully functional "nation-states" in which the large and the small, the mature and the juvenile, the democracies and the autocracies were all seen as equal--constituted a fatal flaw. This flaw was joined by a second. The misplaced belief that the US and the USSR possessed a broad spectrum of coinciding national interests regardless of the vast gulf of history, values, and sense of security which existed between them.
Then there was the Cold War and the concomitant militarization of the doctrine of containment. The Soviet Union represented a massive political threat to Western Europe, particularly France and Italy in the closing years of the Forties, but it was no military threat. Nor would it become one for many, many years--if ever. The US in particular mis-read the blustering rhetoric of the Stalin regime and constructed a bogeyman of gargantuan proportions.
The false image of Soviet military expansion linked with the rise of domestic anti-Communism to create an atmosphere in which the ideology of opposing Communism, assumed to be a global conspiracy of super-human brilliance and persistence became the defining American foreign policy force. This, in turn, produced NSC-68 and the resulting arms race which was, unsurprisingly, mirror imaged in the Soviet Union.
There is not sufficient space here to trace the several historical trajectories and political agendas which resulted in this ideological dynamic. But, you can trust the Geek; he is a doctor. Suffice it to say, the Soviet Union was a hostile entity; it held no brief for the US; it would seek political advantage anywhere in the world where it could do so without running any real risk of a direct, military confrontation with the US which it (correctly) saw as technologically, economically, and culturally superior to itself.
But, rather than playing the Game of Nations as it was, rather than defining our national interests realistically and narrowly, we chose to play the game as our defining ideology feared it might be. This meant that we had to involve ourselves directly and substantially in the affairs of countries in which we had no genuine national interest in play. It also meant we fought a long, and, finally, lost war which was neither necessary nor in our interests.
While the game which we played during the Cold War had some good outcomes such as the success of Apollo in 1969, overall the consequences were far from beneficial to our longer term interests. One of those fields which suffered during the Cold War with results which still detain us at length is found in the incorporation of ideologically derived features into the overall definition of national interest.
Consider democracy. Consider the infinitely amorphous area termed, "human rights." Both have become permanent, central features whenever US policy and national interests are discussed. Such was not the case in past years, way back in the distant decade of the Seventies, remember them? Disco, gas shortages, stagflation, Jimmy Carter? Yeah that was the Decade From Hell.
It is also the decade when the US discovered support of democracy, and focusing on human rights to be central to our national interests. Before the epiphany of that time the US had mouthed much on democracy and done little. We had been content to cozy up with any dictator even the most unseemly if that regime gave the appearance of short-term order (which we cheerfully and quite improperly interpreted to be the equivalent of long-term stability) so as to keep the commies out.
Similarly we were remarkably indifferent to human rights (whatever the term might mean in any given context.) This unengaged attitude applied not only to the actions of "our" dictators but operated with respect to Moscow or Beijing as well. We were silent to all but the most egregious Soviet acts unless there was immediate propaganda hay to be made as in the case of the Berlin Wall, the crushing of the Hungarians in 1956, or the Prague "Spring" eleven years later.
All this changed when the tsunami comprised by Watergate, the debacle in Vietnam, the revelations of the Church and Pike committees, and the revulsion over the Pinochet coup in Chile rolled over the domestic political landscape. Politicians as dissimilar as Scoop Jackson (the senator from Boeing) and Jimmy Carter waved the banner of "human rights" as the Europeans held a mighty convention which gave forth a document on human rights signed by all, including the Soviets, which promised a new day for humanity not unlike the Soviet Constitution of 1937--and was equally a dead letter before the ink was dry.
The Reagan administration raised high the battle flag of democracy--at least rhetorically and joined in the human rights hymn. So well was the imagery of democracy and human rights portrayed that almost no one questioned the relevance of either to the requirements of American national interest. After all, who could be against either?
Both are good in principle, in the abstract. But, neither necessarily protects or advances our national interests such as global stability, open commerce, an absence of war, or economic success. And, each brought with it the potential for ideologically driven interference in venues both remote and tangential to national interests. Further, both carry with them automatically the potential for expansiveness of application which violates the constraints of realism.
The fact that democracy in and of itself brings no guarantee of either stability or peace is seen in the blunt fact that Hitler came to power via an election which met the tests of transparency, fairness, and inclusiveness used even today by Jimmy Carter and others of the election-fairness community. The reality that democracy does not bring leaders agreeable to American national interests is seen right now in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. The reality that democracy does not lead to the sort of stability best for the US is dramatically apparent in Iraq.
Basing any aspect of foreign policy on human rights is to base it on the most slippery of slopes. There may be a Universal Declaration of Human Rights signed by all the member countries of the UN, but there is no one universally accepted protocol for defining, let alone enforcing this international version of declaratory policy. There is no practical mechanism for holding each and every country to a single standard in any area of human rights. That is self-evident in the differing fashions in which women are treated in Muslim as compared with non-Muslim countries or the vast gulf in the free exchange of ideas between China on the one hand and the US on the other or the exploitation of children in both industry and warfare.
Human rights and democracy are matters of aesthetics or sensibilities; they are not national interests. The same may be said regarding "humanitarian crises."
Consider Somalia in December 1992. Starvation was real, widespread in that geographical expression. International food aid through either the UN or the plethora of non-governmental organizations concerned with such matters was impeded or stolen by assorted gangs of thugs, various gunslinging bands of diverse warlords. It was not getting to the starving people clustered in camps.
This was disturbing to say the least. It made for images of compelling anguish on the TV screens of the developed world. It was a macabre spectacle of the best sort. But, was it a matter of such compelling US national interest that it merited the deployment of American troops?
George H.W. Bush thought so. For whatsoever constellation of reasons the recently defeated president sent the Marines ashore. He assured We the People the mission would be short, successful and, above all, the right-thing-to-do. Of course, it was longer, bloody, unsuccessful and set the stage for both the emboldenment of al-Qaeda and the concomitant hesitant policy of the Clinton administration in meeting the jihadist challenge.
Overall, the Somalia deployment was a bad thing for American national interests. But, it was neither the last nor the worst conflation of the ideological or the idealistic with the realistic requirements of American national interest.
That point came with George W. Bush. Flagrant idealism caused the mission leap in Afghanistan from a punitive expedition clearly in American national interest to the goal of "nation-building"--a clear impossibility given the history, demographics, and culture of that place. Worse, pure, unadulterated ideology aiming at the chimera of planting democracy in the Arab Mideast caused the invasion of Iraq. This action above all others taken by the US in the past quarter century if not more was the most harmful to US national interests both in the region and around the world which can be seen in the historical record. It was as if Dick Cheney took his famed shotgun and blasted the face clean off Uncle Sam.
Now, as has been noted in many, many posts, the post-modern, multi-cultural, community organizing on a grand scale ideology of President Obama is with us. So far the results have been as can be expected from history--a failure harmful to the real world interests of the US. Once again events are proving that when realpolitik is kicked aside in the interests of ideology, only disaster can be expected.
The question is this. Will the disaster be on the scale of Bush in Somalia or Woodrow Wilson in and after World War I? Well, bucko, only time will tell.
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