Schwarz - Round Two

Benjamin Schwarz
Round Two - April 11, 2000

I apologize in advance for giving Edward Luttwak such short shrift, but this is because I agree with everything he says. On the other hand, I disagree with most of Robert Kaplan's and David Rieff's arguments -- it seems I usually differ on foreign policy with those with whom I concur on almost every other topic. I do think Kaplan is completely right in saying Washington should recognize that its crusade for a global democratic makeover is often antithetical to its efforts to stanch ethnic, nationalist, and separatist violence. Democracy, which permits, indeed encourages, competition for power and benefits among contesting groups, actually exacerbates internal tensions and conflicts.

From Post & Riposte:
"There is no international community, so there are no shared values, and what is accepted as international justice in the Balkans, Bosnia, and Kosovo is a kind of kangaroo court, where only the Serbs are ever guilty, the Croats are always the saints -- see under Krajina -- and the Muslims are always beyond reproach. Somehow I feel that the Balkan wars of NATO against the Serbs did more damage to the self-esteem of a thinking Western citizen, than anything else."
--Eliezer Ban, "Yugoslavia, War Crimes, and International Justice" (04/06)

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I also agree with Kaplan's assessment of the stringent criteria that have to be met before the American public can be induced to support a humanitarian intervention. But I don't see why these same criteria wouldn't constrain U.S. participation in the international constabulary force he advocates. Kaplan says that this force should be "an outgrowth of NATO" and perhaps of America's East Asian alliances. But this introduces all the collective-action problems that have plagued these alliances for decades. To be sure, Washington has always maintained that these are "partnerships," and it has always wanted its partners to share more of the burden -- i.e., money, and if it comes to it, blood. But Washington, now more than ever, says that America must be the global leader (after all, for more than fifty years one of the basic purposes of U.S. global strategy has been to ensure that Germany and Japan not emerge as truly independent great powers). This means that Washington wants to stick its "partners" with more expenses while really granting them no greater authority or autonomy. Our "partners" have never cottoned to this notion, and have consistently -- and reasonably -- held that if the United States is going to lead, it's going to have to pay the costs and incur the risks that accompany leadership. Washington isn't keen to see, say, Berlin and Tokyo, develop the world-wide "power projection" capabilities that an international gendarmerie would require, and neither the Germans nor the Japanese are eager to supply the bodies -- and body bags -- for the U.S. Navy and Air Force to shuttle around the globe. So, the constabulary force Kaplan recommends would -- like the multilateral forces that fought in the Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf wars -- really be a U.S.-led force and would hence be subject to the same constraints that Congress and the American public impose on U.S. humanitarian intervention today.

Kaplan's position that America, as part of an international force, should intervene rather indiscriminately because we can't usually determine whether, in fact, national interests are at stake seems to be an argument for intervening everywhere because "here and there" we might actually succeed in countering a real threat. This is a pretty inefficient strategy and is a recipe for overextension. Better to have a discriminating foreign policy and only intervene when our (albeit sometimes difficult to define) vital interests are challenged; the costs and dangers of profligate intervention are greater than the dangers posed by a parsimonious foreign policy. I certainly agree that the United States must be wary of "a larger and rising adversary," but Kaplan seems to confuse states that do unpleasant things with states that threaten, or might eventually threaten, the U.S. Throughout the nineteenth century Great Britain was among the very few humanitarian and democratic states. That didn't make London -- whose forces burned down the White House, after all -- any less of a threat to America. Conversely, Slobodan Milosevic is a very bad man, but neither he nor Rwanda's Hutus have the intention or the wherewithal to march on Paris, let alone attack Washington.

I wouldn't draw the same lesson Kaplan does from the "unimpeded rise" of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. I infer that he would have advocated intervention against those states in the 1930s strictly for humanitarian reasons to obviate the need for later intervention on the grounds of national interest. But again he's mixing apples and oranges. The state with by far the most monstrous humanitarian record in the 1930s was, of course, the Soviet Union (Stalin claimed probably 50 million victims, and as many people were killed in the Ukrainian terror famine alone as in the Holocaust of the 1940s). Should we have invaded Russia in, say, 1936? If we had, who would have helped us defeat those terrible Axis powers nine years later? Finally, Kaplan's statement that "power is not power unless it is ... used as a demonstration ... of the will to use it" seems to me, in the context of a discussion of humanitarian intervention, to boil down to the proposition that the United States must show a willingness to intervene in places that don't matter strategically to prove our readiness to intervene in places that do -- a proposition that proved disastrous in Vietnam, among other places. The whole notion that the United States should intervene to prove its credibility and to deter future atrocities or acts of aggression should be laid to rest. Just as Milosevic wasn't deterred by U.S. action against Iraq, Saddam Hussein wasn't deterred by U.S. action in Panama. Nor was Manuel Noriega deterred by U.S. action in Grenada, Lebanon, and Vietnam; nor Ho Chi Minh by U.S. action against North Korea; nor Kim Il Sung and Stalin by U.S. action against Adolf Hitler. An obsession with credibility will doom the United States to a string of military interventions in strategically peripheral regions.

David Rieff's point that humanitarian intervention is linked with "the neo-liberal project of economic globalization" is characteristically insightful, and I hope he develops it further. His argument about "the American temper" and humanitarian intervention I find intriguingly contradictory. Like most internationalists, Rieff asserts that, even if a realpolitik/isolationist strategy were correct, the American public would never tolerate it, since Americans have some "deep bias toward some species of moralizing in foreign policy." Call me a fantasizing Buchananite, but I just don't see it. Take our founding state papers: What could be less sentimental or moralistic than Washington's Farewell Address, the Federalist (see, especially, Number 6), and John Quincy Adams's Fourth of July Address ("go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy")? Where and who are all these Americans urging humanitarian intervention? Of course, the public can be manipulated by the internationalist-oriented media (CNN and the network-news broadcasts sounded to me like NATO propaganda organs during the Kosovo intervention) and by whatever administration is in power (Senator Vandenberg's advice to Dean Acheson was to sell a globalist foreign policy by "scaring hell out of the American people"). And, to be sure, there have always been minority groups -- Latvians, Cubans, Albanians -- pushing for this or that intervention. But I've never seen a really sizeable portion of the U.S. population demanding humanitarian intervention. After all, any people who could have essentially ignored Stalin's depredations and the butchery over the past fifty years in India, Biafra, Indonesia, Nigeria, the Congo, Chad, Sudan, Tibet, Colombia, New Guinea, and Cambodia, to name just a few of the killing fields, can't be said to demand a moralistic foreign policy or to wince at the stark glare of realpolitik.

Foreign-policy mandarins always rub their hands eagerly whenever they mention CNN, saying "the public will demand that we [they mean the U.S. military, to which their sons and daughters don't belong] respond." But in reality most Americans look at CNN in horror, mutter "something should be done," and then, unconsciously and self-servingly calculate what could be done -- and how much blood and treasure they're willing to sacrifice to do it. They then do what non-vegetarians do when told about slaughterhouses -- squirm and put the subject out of their minds. Congress knows the bottom line: senators and representatives are almost certainly not going to be turned out of office for failing to push for a humanitarian intervention, but they almost certainly will be if they support an intervention that goes badly wrong.

Rieff gives a bit too much away when he says that humanitarian intervention is now central to foreign-policy discussions because "other moralizing rationales no longer seem compelling" and that humanitarian intervention sprang from the fact that "some new moral warrant" had to be "devised." Rationales for what? Devised for what purpose? Rieff says that "this is not simply a question of putting one over on the public," although his terms do suggest that there is a good bit of deception going on. Sure, as he points out, policy makers and foreign-policy intellectuals want to feel that when they talk about the need for American moral "leadership," and when they advocate a breathtakingly new and ambitious role for the United States, that they are advancing grandiose principles rather than merely seeking to advance U.S. interests -- the former role, after all, flatters their image of themselves. To understand why humanitarian intervention is being pushed on to an uninterested nation's agenda, readers should turn to the historian Ronald Steel, who reminds us in Temptations of a Superpower that humanitarian intervention is "particularly appealing to those in charge of orchestrating foreign policy. Through their lenses the nation's domestic arrangements often seem to be an annoying distraction from the heady work of running the world. The long decades of the Cold War have bred three generations of strategists -- military, political, and economic -- whose focus starts at the water's edge."

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Benjamin Schwarz is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a book critic for the Los Angeles Times. He's the former executive editor of World Policy Journal and a former staff member of the RAND Corporation and the Brookings Institution.