Responses

...In which case the American left has reason to rethink its moral analysis...

...But since Dissent is a journal of the left, allow me to exhume an additional point from the ancient casket of Marxist theory...

...Yes, emphasizing our responsibility to show solidarity would mean, for many of us, a political turnabout...

...Every cautionary point raised by Stanley Hoffmann is sound...

...But democratic countries should act...

...America's best contribution to world affairs would therefore be to refrain from foreign interventions (except maybe against the devil himself, that is, Hitler, the grand exception), in the hope that smaller nations with higher ideals might profit from the American absence...

...Henry Adams, in his history of the Jefferson administration, ascribed to the ordinary Americans of 1800 a revolutionary belief, according to which America's duty was to support "the overthrow of tyranny, aristocracy, hereditary privilege, and priesthood [read: "fundamentalism"], wherever they exist...

...American foreign policy in the past sometimes was imperialist, especially in Latin America...

...If you accept—as many people used to do—Marx's labor theory of value, you must also accept a corollary added by Lenin in 1916...

...We do remember that much from our anti-interventionist days...

...Let us not invoke a lack of historical ties to such-and-such a region to explain our inaction (even if, in the case of Rwanda, the bloodyhanded French do have a moral obligation to undo their own atrocious policies...

...For here is hell before our eyes, and though the world's greatest collection of planes and tanks and mobile hospitals sits in our military bases, we are doing precious little in response...

...For a long time and for serious reasons, that belief came into discredit...

...That same revolutionary instinct ought now to become the principle of those who wish to continue viewing foreign policy through a lens of moral considerations...

...and during the cold war sometimes it looked imperialist, that FALL • 1994 • 501 is, it was sinister, though motives other than imperialism were at work...

...By the way, something more than national wealth ought to give us a moral basis for contemplating interventions on behalf of the oppressed in other countries...

...But an instinct for international solidarity is inherent in the idea of democracy, and sooner or later the internationalist sentiment bobs back to the surface, sometimes under different names—currently, for instance, under the harmless-sounding labels of "human rights" and "humanitarian aid...

...If we are going to stand aside and gawk while the world's unluckier countries dissolve into mass death, let us at least despise our inactivity, and let us question ourselves, the way a fireman questions himself when he holds back from rushing into a burning apartment house...

...Marx's labor theory of value is, however, wrong—as almost everybody on the left now agrees—which means that Lenin on imperialism must likewise be wrong...

...Let us not confuse the greedy hoarding of our own national privilege with an expression of antiinterventionist, left-wing principles (as some people might be tempted to do) or of sagacious foreign policy theory (as might be the temptation of others...

...We must ask ourselves: what purpose is there in having so much wealth and capability if we do not deploy these things on behalf of people who have plummeted into the ninth circle of absolute desperation...

...We who used to be the party of anti-intervention (because we were anti-imperialists) should now become, in the case of various dictators and genocidal situations, the party of intervention (because we are democrats...

...To wit: the wealth of the wealthy nations derives from the super-exploitation of colonized labor (thus forestalling the business disaster that would otherwise result from the falling rate of profit, as per Marx's theory...

...Look before you leap" should be inscribed on the dollar bill...

...That is disgusting...

...On the day that I write this comment —it was months ago, due to Dissent's long lead time (a product of left-wing poverty)—the news is full of details about Hutu Nazism against the Tutsis and other people in Rwanda...

...We should say: America must avoid foolish actions, and the Marines are not necessarily our international agency of choice...

...But let us not describe any failure of ours to intervene — militarily, or semi-militarily, or in some other forceful way—as morally praiseworthy...

...It is news to drive a person mad...

...Of course we cannot intervene everywhere and solve every problem (and we hardly need to invoke Henry Kissinger to make such a homiletic point...

...Accordingly American wealth must be morally even more suspect than it might otherwise seem, and American actions abroad must be driven by imperialist motives —no matter what the government and its defenders might say...

...The core of modern left-wing thinking about foreign policy has always been (or imagined itself to be) moral...

...Especially rich ones...

...Yet America's wealth derives, by and large, from its own productivity (or self-exploitation), not from colonialist rapacity...