We Aren't the World: Americans no longer have a rosy view of other nations. As a result, it's almost possible to conduct intelligent debates on U.S. foreign policy
Codevilla, Angelo M.
Angelo Codevilla Aren't the World Americans no longer have a rosy view of other nations. As a result, it's almost possible to conduct intelligent debates on U.S. foreign policy. N HIS 2005 INAUGURAL ADDRESS,...
...Even most of the media understand that either the potentates with whom our government deals control terrorism or they do not...
...Americans are no longer shy about the need to defend the national interest, by war if necessary...
...Besides, everyone knew that if there were ever a real war, it would involve the total, undifferentiated destruction of mankind...
...Students flocked to major in International Relations, not game theory or conflict resolution...
...If we do well, we can deal with our end of the problem—manage our interest, not the world's...
...When agreements and intentions do not match, agreements are futile...
...Neither hawks nor doves, these best, brightest, dispassionate, self-styled "owls" set the tone for American foreign relations for more than a generation...
...No change in the American people's outlook, however, is clearer than with regard to "World Opinion...
...Still, faith in talks and peace plans died hard...
...Henceforth, instead of war unto victory, there would be conflicts scientifically managed unto mutually satisfactory conclusions...
...So, just as sounds associated with food conditioned Pavlov's dog to salivate, the correlation between "talks" and war—in Vietnam, Israel, Colombia, and Northern Ireland—have conditioned Americans toexpect that conferences, peace plans, and peace processes produce violence...
...And: "Who is the enemy in Vietnam...
...foreign policy after World War II consisted of America's unilateral extension of protection to much of the world...
...Being so unsophisticated, Americans did not go along...
...foreign relations will be published by Yale University Press...
...And, as President Bush's speech shows, there is still a long way to go...
...The equality, or at least the moral identity, of the aspirations of the world's peoples had been perhaps the hardiest legacy of the late progressive era...
...JULY/AUGUST 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 31 WE AREN'T THE WORLD Item: Who does not remember how hard we were all bludgeoned with the notion that the more the world's peoples got to know one another, the more exchanges and cross-cultural pollination took place, the more we would all banish the illusion of international enmity...
...It is difficult to overstate the reliance that American statesmen of the 20th century placed on JULY/AUGUST 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 35...
...True, the ideology of diversity now demands the unquestioning, equal valuation of differences and inequalities that we are now obliged to deem inalienable...
...Still, the supposed universal aspiration to freedom and decency was an obligato of Cold War thinking...
...One can hear their echo in Lyndon Johnson's memorable words, "There is no victory in Vietnam, for anybody...
...Nevertheless, America's discourse on foreign affairs is sounder today than it has been in some three generations...
...A half-century's experience has also changed the American people's view of "the allies" (a.k.a...
...But though tenured, these are few...
...But coming down from this intellectual intoxication has been slow and painful...
...Thus, despite the fact that Americans discuss foreign relations in more or less reasonable terms, we tend to mix those terms in unreasonable ways...
...After Woodrow Wilson, American elites ceased to think of their duty as primarily to the American people...
...Polite opinion regarded Taft as a backwoods extremist, a fit object of tricks to deny him a presidential candidacy, a dangerous throwback to Henry Cabot Lodge, whose refusal to put the interests of humanity ahead of America's—everyone knew—had caused World War II as much as did Hitler...
...Sure...
...BY ANGELO M. CODEVILLA 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2005 A few years later, Hans Morgenthau wrote a powerful essay in defense of the national interest, pointing out that while subordination of one's own individual interest to that of others may be morally meritorious for individuals, for those who take jobs as stewards of their fellow citizens' interests to confuse those interests with those of other peoples is downright improper...
...Everybody except the unwashed knew that war had been almost banished in 1919, and definitively done away with in 1945...
...World War II and the subsequent spread of Communist slavery from Stettin to Shanghai began to shake the American elites' focus on world order and turn them again toward the natural ends of states-manship "interest guided by justice," as George Washington used to say...
...In fact, the Bush administration's declaratory position (in practice it acted contrary to it) hearkened back to the Founders' small regard for treaties in general...
...That was the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat...
...And, in a different way, of the Bushie 41 ideology of the New World Order...
...But the perverse confusion and humor of this escapes few...
...When intentions match agreements, the agreements are superfluous...
...Yet common parlance tends to confuse justice with benevolence, and war with forcefully reforming foreigners...
...You see, it was supposed to be an illusion, a bunch of misunderstandings born of ignorance...
...Police Actions...
...Item: In 1951, Robert Taft published a little book, A Foreign Policy for Americans...
...At the very least, we have as much right to our way of life as anyone else, and as much right as anyone to use that four-letter word...
...Item: Once upon a time, not so long ago, Americans debated treaties on arms control as if they mattered...
...e Aren't the World Americans no longer have a rosy view of other nations...
...But then in 1975 that North Vietnamese tank in fact pushed through the gate of the U.S...
...To sharpen the image d'ëpinal, when today's Americans look at the world, including Western Europe in real time, more often than not they see the snarling face of enmity directed against us...
...This has been orthodoxy from Henry Kissinger's time as the U.S...
...This was never a secret...
...would be worth the paper on which they are written...
...If they do, they are the enemy and any concession to them is harmful...
...And if there is such evil in the world, then surely we need not have much patience with those who tell us that there is so much wrong with us that we dare not uphold our way of life, that we must adapt to the ways of others...
...Today, the questions raised in talk shows about the War on Terror are usually just right: Whom do we kill, and what good will it do us...
...Polite America tittered at the dinosaur's ignorance, and shuddered that he had exercised such great influence...
...These "allies" demanded that Americans imitate them, and decrease their own security in exchange for the privilege of continuing to protect them...
...And, as George Washington counseled, we are bound to try to behave justly...
...Nevertheless, they always gave the impression that the talks in themselves had been valuable as substitutes for violence...
...After Munich, Western participants were ashamed to proclaim "peace in our time...
...In 1989-91 the Soviet empire—whose eternity had been a cardinal point in polite America's creed—died when its armed forces would not shoot...
...Americans did not have to learn about the Oil for Food scandal to view the U.N.'s Kofi Annan as just another Third World animal...
...Suffice it to note that, in the pinch, the palimpsests of collective security so discredited themselves in the eyes of the American people that the May/June 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs—not Rush Limbaugh—ran as its lead item, "The U.N...
...Item: One reason why it is no longer politically incorrect to speak of the national interest is that it is no longer possible to speak with a straight face about "Universal Human Aspirations...
...Item: In 1951 Douglas MacArthur told a joint session of Congress: "In war, there is no substitute for victory...
...Item: Some American schools still teach (and the State Department invariably practices) a diplomatic technique called "creative ambiguity...
...The (very) little history this generation knows is enough to confirm that what used to be called "man's inhumanity to man" is, as Nietzsche used to say, "human all too human...
...Then, in the 1970s and 1980s Americans who watched the news began to see the likes of German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who specialized in telling us how dangerously unsophisticated we all are, and in our time the French 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2005 ANGELO M. CODEVILLA yuppie Dominique de Villepin, whose demeanor added to this that Americans are insufferably out of touch with all that is cool...
...The American people grasped the sense of this because most of a century's bitter experience with agreements concerning armaments, had taught them that, paradoxically, the only means of enforcing deals meant to avoid war is war itself...
...Because according to progressive orthodoxy, even the semblance of agreement, regardless of what the sides really intend, brings upon both sides the pressures of domestic and world opinion that must force them to live up to the agreement...
...Hence there is a new, healthy skepticism in America about deals with enemies...
...My class of inductees as Foreign Service An awful lot of people around the world like slaughter, and do hate passionately, meanly, and promiscuously...
...would be worth the paper on which they are written...
...Or is it...
...The benevolence and power of world opinion is the key...
...These people were in the line of President Coolidge and his secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, who founded the world order of the 1920s and 1930s on a set of arms limitations arrangements...
...Michael Glennon on the End of a Grand Experiment...
...The media treated this as a radical departure...
...True, some of today's most ardent advocates of the national interest confuse it with a global meliorism worthy of Wilson...
...Such is George W. Bush...
...What this means is two sides appear to agree on a point, while actually holding contrasting or even mutually exclusive views about it...
...Indeed, these were the only objectives that they really had any authority or power to pursue responsibly...
...Thank (well, thank something...
...Why value diplomatic pretense...
...making a century ago...
...Once upon a time, Americans saw the good Adenauer, who rebuilt and reformed an enemy into a faithful guardian of the front lines of the Cold War, and the proud de Gaulle, a pain in the neck to be sure, but a hero among heroes in the War, and someone who would be with us when the chips were down...
...But when, for example, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the State Department staff in 2005 that "we just have to believe" that the world shares our aspirations for democracy and decency, she made no attempt to persuade anyone that this belief is warranted...
...The New York Times editorial page fought this, but not too strenuously...
...The "owls" notwithstanding, as the 1970s turned to the 1980s, in Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, and all around the world, international relations was being played for keeps...
...mandate, America's "Coalitions of the Willing" are a dangerous innovation crashes against the fact that no one has cited, can cite, any historical examples of coalitions of the unwilling...
...Intellectually empty appeals are a long way from the full dress arguments that people like Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler were world opinion...
...But by the 21st century, almost a half century of squalid, predatory, hypocritical, criminal behavior—and of enmity to America—had made these men objects of disgust...
...And it isn't just a consequence of September 11...
...They were intoxicated by the idea that international affairs are a set of procedures that, if improved, could banish the scourge of war, and lead each nation to contribute to the good of all...
...But "the national interest" is no longer a dirty word...
...His intellectual history of U.S...
...Item: The fruit of the progressive generation's labors, the League of Nations, rose from the ashes of its own misconception when, after World War II, Woodrow Wilson's successors placed the notion of "collective security" at the heart of America's declaratory foreign policy...
...It is easy and inconsequential to pin that label on those who are willing to kill us...
...establishment's font of wisdom...
...The rearguard accusation that, by acting without a U.N...
...Few self-deceptions, however, can survive consistent contradictions from reality...
...In 1972 President Nixon and his dime-store Metternich concluded an arms control treaty with the Soviet Union that they and their successors for a generation deemed the cornerstone of strategic stability...
...Item: In the aftermath of World War II, much as before, America would buzz at reports of high level conferences...
...Only in 2002 did President Bush dare defy the consensus of polite opinion and, in theory at least, recognize that arms control treaties cannot do the good expected of them...
...Events will make sure it does...
...This logic recognizes why we have no arms control with Britain and Canada and that anyone who wants nuclear weapons will not tremble before pieces of paper...
...The enemy is poverty, ignorance, disease...
...The unhappy result is that the right tends to endorse a half-forceful, benevolent imperialism, the left wants wholehearted benevolent involvement without force, and the American people would prefer that this confusion go away...
...But it did not survive the 1990s—when whole peoples from the former Soviet Union to the Balkans to Africa and especially the Muslim world perversely (to our way of thinking) cut off their respective noses to spite others' faces—often ours...
...Hence they sensed that such agreements disarm and debilitate the peaceful while strengthening aggressors...
...U.S.- Soviet "Summit Meetings" had the same air as Chamberlain's and Daladier's meetings with Hitler in 1938...
...But the combination of terrorism and instant, worldwide TV reporting has rubbed Americans' noses into the dirty fact that an awful lot of people around the world like slaughter, and do hate passionately, meanly, and promiscuously...
...Fred Ikle's 1963 classic How Nations Negotiate had spelled it out...
...Angelo M. Codevilla, professor of international relations at Boston University, fellow of the Claremont Institute, and senior editor of TAS, was a Foreign Service officer and a staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee...
...Serious students of statecraft always knew this was nonsense...
...The media routinely refer to "the first" violations of cease-fires, taking for granted that there will be seconds and nths...
...And foreigners are people different from ourselves in ways beyond our capacity to change—ever...
...Now there were only U.N...
...power...
...No change in the American people's outlook, however, is clearer than with regard to "World Opinion...
...After much experience, even Charlie Brown does not really expect that Lucy will be holding the football for him to kick...
...Americans' admiration for the nobility of the President's words was tempered by much skepticism about the very notion of reforming the world...
...The present generation of college students, however, has no doubt that, here and now, the enmity of Arabs for Jews is no less real than was the Nazis' enmity...
...Though the questions are much better than the answers, that is still, well, progress...
...After each side debated the meaning of the other's gestures, we each were given the code...
...But then, a generation later, in the aftermath of America's shocking defeat in Vietnam, Irving Kristol started a sister journal to his Public Interest...
...Its very name, the National Interest, stated that the American people had legitimate, identifiable interests abroad as well as at home...
...American elites would teach Americans, as well as others through American example, to substitute arbitration for force, collective security for alliances, and world opinion for national sovereignty...
...Today's problem is not, as it was circa 1925-50, a coherent set of nutty beliefs as much as it is confusion induced by the Progressivist hangover, combined with low intellectual standards...
...Officers had to play a game in which its two halves communicated simple friendly messages to one another through silent, strange, possibly threatening gestures...
...In reality, of course, U.S...
...Nor, in our time, is the mind of the American public anything like what it was 60 years ago, when the campaign for the United Nations echoed the aspirations of church congregations and Rotary Clubs...
...The Communist side would invariably validate reality by using negotiations as means of conflict rather than as substitutes for it...
...Indeed in the 1980s American statesmen masked the failure of negotiations to resolve conflicts by having negotiations produce not peace but Peace Processes...
...N HIS 2005 INAUGURAL ADDRESS, President George W. Bush stated that America could remain free only if all the world's other peoples were to become free, and promised that America would spread freedom and prosperity to the globe's farthest reaches...
...Who believes that arms control with Bin Laden or Iran or North Korea, et al...
...Only academic freedom protected Morgenthau from opprobrium for opposing the Last Best Hope of Mankind—the recognition that the national interest is a reactionary concept, that all in the world share the same goals, etc...
...Far from having ended, history was much more interesting than polite, academic America had imagined...
...These arrangements turned out to be the political and military bases for the Western democracies' impotence in the face of Nazi, Soviet, and Japanese challenges...
...If they do not, then talk with them is useless...
...Apparently, who shoots whom matters a lot...
...That is a big change...
...THE HANGOVER FROM THE 20TH-CENTURY'S progressive intellectual binge is wearing off slowly and unevenly...
...Then even more amazing things happened...
...The fad was so strong in the 1950s that even Henry Kissinger, who saw Metternich whenever he looked in the mirror, put on the conflict manager's white coat...
...The notion has penetrated American society that when foreigners' purposes differ from our own, our own willingness to exchange concessions for talks and promises engenders contempt...
...Item: Yes, Virginia...
...The point of the article is that collective security was a bad idea whose time is past...
...that Truman had fired that throwback...
...Consequently, we must somehow and forever live side by side with differences, problems, enmities, that may go away or worsen, but on their own...
...In short, appeals to "world public opinion" nowadays run into a solidifying wall of American opinion that considers it chimerical, impotent, and usually malevolent...
...They believed that sovereign governments do what JULY/AUGUST 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 33 WE AREN'T THE WORLD they will in pursuit of their own interests, and therefore agreements will be adhered to only insofar as they reflect actual intentions...
...Americans were fortunate that the dying Soviet Union could not take advantage of the opportunities that the arms control treaties gave it...
...It pleased America's best and brightest to pretend otherwise, that America actually derived benefits from its regional alliances comparable to what it was putting into them, that the United Nations provided at least moral cover for American security efforts, and that, in a pinch, both regional alliances and the U.N.'s "Collective Security" would prove their worth...
...Today, people argue about what the national interest is, not whether America has a distinct one or we have a right to it...
...Others disagreed, and the debate went on until the pinch came on September 11, 2001...
...The book was in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt's comparison of those who profess equal love of all nations with men who love all women as much as they love their wife...
...As the movie On the Beach would illustrate, and as Harvard's mathematician-songster Tom Lehrer was to croon, "We will all go together when we go...
...Despite all the purges of the language police, despite unanimous indoctrination in moral equivalence from the commanding heights of society, instruction in "criticism and self-criticism" of Western values, the present generation has no trouble with the word "evil...
...Anyone who remembers the 1960s has vivid images of American statesmen treating the dictators of what came to be known as the "Third World" with the obeisance due to moral icons...
...Our experience with terrorism has contributed to it...
...Of course it endures most among second-rate intellectuals and bureaucrats...
...This skepticism contrasted sharply with the uncritical, even enthusiastic reception that Americans had given to similar high-minded talk about world affairs since the 1920s...
...It explained that while America's leaders might benefit the world in many ways, they were responsible above all for the American people's safety and interests...
...A few convince themselves that the snarls are directed only at retrograde fellow Americans, not at themselves...
...Who believes that arms control with Bin Laden or Iran or North Korea, et al...
...During World War II American opinion makers made brief exceptions for the Germans and Japanese...
...The lesson: regardless of how distasteful or dangerous the foreigner might appear, once you get to know him you will see how much like you he really is...
...Harvard's Thomas Schelling started a major academic industry and condemned two generations of graduate students to game theory when he schematized international relations and emptied it of substantive content...
...Here are some examples...
...Hence an American elite consciousness has begun to grasp the truth that once fully illuminated the statecraft of America's Founders: Foreign affairs are about dealing with foreigners...
...It is difficult to overstate the reliance that American statesmen of the 20th century placed on world opinion...
...What looked like a victory in the 1991 Gulf War turned out to have been defeat, because although a lot of people were shot, the ones that mattered were not...
...The Europeans...
...embassy in Saigon, as that last helicopter fled from a nearby roof with Marine rifle butts smashing the fingers of 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2005 ANGELO M. CODEVILLA doomed American allies trying to hang on to the skids...
...Indeed they know that in Iraq, in the Balkans, in Africa, and in much of Asia, slaughters of the kind that marked 20th-century Germany and Russia are routine...
...They wanted to know who would win, who would lose, and why...
Vol. 38 • July 2005 • No. 6
