Rethinking Foreign Policy (Part 1)

While the challenges of foreign policy change over time, the principles do not. In this first of three articles written in 1993-94, Roger Donway highlights the difference between government’s role in domestic and international affairs.

Part 2 of "Rethinking Foreign PolicyPart 3 of "Rethinking Foreign Policy

During the almost 50 years of the cold war, most Americans grasped that Moscow was the sworn enemy of the United States and had to be opposed. By focusing on that single truth, U.S. foreign policy maintained a rough coherence—although it was riddled with pragmatism, altru­ism, and compromise. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, this organizing truth of U.S. foreign policy has vanished. The elements of national self-interest that inhered in America's anti-Soviet pos­ture, and thereby leavened all of the country's foreign policy, have diminished greatly, and the formerly diluting elements of pragmatism, altruism, and com­promise have become the policy's main theme.

The results can be seen around the world, in the actions and inactions of the post-cold war Bush and Clinton administrations.

Four Situations

Somalia. In 1990, American television news shows began reporting that hundreds of thousands of people were starving in Somalia because relief supplies were being blocked by local gangsters. During its waning post-election days, the Bush administration responded to a growing public outcry to "do something" by altruistically sending Americans troops to hold off the gangsters while relief supplies went through.

Shortly after the Clinton administration took office, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali convinced it to join the United Nations in preventing Somalia from reverting to its earlier condition of anarchy. This was to be accomplished through something called "nation building," and, to that end, U.S. soldiers were sent to capture one gang leader who was considered a politically disruptive force. When 18 American soldiers were killed in a raid, Somalis gleefully dragged one of the corpses through the streets; and one badly wounded U.S. soldier was subjected to a videotaped brow-beating.

After these scenes were shown on televi­sion, the American public's desire to "do something" in Somalia quickly dissipated, and opinion divided between those who said "U.S. prestige demands we not be driven out," and those who wanted to "bring the boys home."

Haiti. An abysmally poor country, where voodoo is a major religious force, Haiti was ruled by the increasingly autocratic Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier from 1957 to his death in 1971. He was succeeded by his son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, who ruled until his ouster by the military in 1986. After an aborted election attempt, an election, and a series of coups, a radical Roman Catholic priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was chosen president of Haiti in the election of December 1990. Among his most prominent slogans was "Capitalism is poi­son," and he drew much of his support by out-doing the official Unified Party of Haitian Communists in his strident anti-Americanism. In August, 1991, a pro-Aristide mob forced the country's parliament to adjourn when it took up a motion of no-confidence in Aristide's prime minister, Rene Preval. In Sep­tember, 1991, Aristide was ousted by his hand-picked army chief of staff, Gen. Raoul Cédras.

The Bush administration, in conjunction with the Orga­nization of American States, and later the U.N., imposed an economic embargo on Haiti in order to restore democracy—or rather, to restore to power the bitterly anti-American leader of anti-democratic mobs. Asked about using direct military power to achieve this goal, President Bush said "We've got a big history of American force in this hemisphere, and so we've got to be careful about that. But I will see how others feel at the OAS. There might be some talk over there now about a multinational force of some sort."

Eventually, President Clinton did send warships to "en­force" an international embargo against the Haitian regime, "saying that he did not want to use the word 'blockade,' because it would connote an act of war." Thus, a taboo on the use of American forces in Latin America was violated, without the least apparent uproar, presumably because the purpose was so blatantly contrary to America's national self-interest.

But it is not simply the foreign policy actions of America's post-cold war administrations that have left Americans puzzled. The inaction of those administrations is no less befuddling.

Bosnia-Herzegovina. While American administrations are crusading for democracy in Somalia and Haiti, a former communist apparatchik, Slobodan Milosevic, is unleashing a nationalist war of primordial bestiality in Eastern Europe, a mere 300 miles from Rome. Milosevic, the democratically elected leader of Serbia (a rump state of Yugoslavia), has set out to achieve a Greater Serbia, by using his own armed forces and by arming fellow Serbs in neighboring countries. Rape, mass murder, and the starvation of prisoners have been frequently employed by his minions.

The response of the United Nations has been to send defenseless "peacekeepers" and to impose an arms embargo on the victimized Bosnians as well as the aggressor. Diplomats who began by vowing that aggression would not be rewarded have ended up mumbling that "the situation on the ground" must be recognized. In light of such appeasement, a forthcoming target for Milosevic is readily foreseeable in Kosovo, a formerly autonomous region of Serbia. Because Kosovo's residents are nearly all ethnic Albanians, this would probably mean war with Albania, and possibly Turkey. Other Serbian targets could bring war with the autonomous region of Vojvodina, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Greece. And a still wider war is not far­fetched, through the mechanism of a Serbia-Romania-Slovak alliance facing off against a Croat-Hungary-Ukraine alliance.

Iran. The shah of lran was an American-backed autocrat who foolishly followed the dirigiste economic advice of Ameri­can academics. His combination of oppressive politics and failed economics led to a revolution in 1978-79, inspired by the radical Islamic doctrine of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Like others of his ilk, Khomeini argued that the Muslim world had achieved greatness when it had been true to Islam (during the period of the Western Middle Ages). In contrast, since it had absorbed the secular and materialist doctrines of the West, the Islamic world had declined. Obviously, renewed greatness required a return to the true faith.

The success of Khomeini's revolution in Iran—the top­pling of a Western ally and the installation of an Islamic state—convinced many young Muslims that Khomeini was on to something. The seizure of the American embassy in November, 1979, and America's impotence in the face of that action, convinced even greater numbers of the faith's power. World opinion, as represented by unanimous anti-Iran votes at the United Nations, proved to mean nothing. A military rescue mission by the world's greatest power ended humiliatingly in the desert. After the hostages were released in January, 1981, no retribution was visited upon the Iranian regime.

In February 1989, Khomeini struck again. "I inform all zealous Muslims of the world," he said, "that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses [Salman Rushdie]—which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur'an—and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents, are sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they may be found, so that no one else will dare to insult the Muslim sanctities." In the four-and-a-half years since, Mr. Rushdie, a British subject, has been forced to live in hiding. Several people connected with the book and its translations have been murdered. But no action has been taken against Iran, beyond some official statements of American and British “concern.”

These actions, and a number of others, have left Americans puzzled. And that is not a euphemism for saying that Americans simply disagree with their leaders' policies. I think most Americans are genuinely puzzled about the correct courses of action in these situations.

They do not want American soldiers fighting in Somalia or Haiti, apparently on behalf of people who don't want our help; but neither do Americans want to see Somalis starving or Haitians taking to the open seas in rickety boats.

Likewise, most Americans do not want nationalist zealots in Eastern Europe or religious fanatics in the Middle East to get off scot-free when they violate the most fundamental norms of civilized behavior. But neither do they want to undertake the sort of major wars in those regions that might be necessary to uphold such norms and to punish their violators.

Objectivists, too, I believe, are puzzled by these post-cold war situations. Unquestionably, the typical Objectivist knows more clearly than the typical American what are the fundamen­tal principles of ethics and the fundamental principles of politics. But applying these principles to concrete cases can be difficult.

A Pillar of Foreign Policy Collapses

One primary reason is to be found in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Opposition to the USSR was (correctly, I believe) the central pillar of foreign policy for Objectivists, even more than for most other Americans. The deterrence and ultimate defeat of Moscow was so important and so pervasive a value that virtually all other foreign-policy values were either determined by it or at least substantially affected by it.

With the achievement of that overriding goal, therefore, many situations must be looked at in an entirely new light. The four situations described above provide examples. At one point, Somalia was a client state of the USSR and formed an important link in a growing chain of Soviet client-states. Haiti was a more or less pro-U.S. tyranny situated just off the coast of Fidel Castro's militantly pro-Soviet Cuba. The survival of Yugoslavia, an independent communist power, proved it was possible to break with the Warsaw Pact. Iran was a powerful pro-U.S. autocracy bordering the USSR, blocking its access to the Persian Gulf, and offering American intelligence agencies valuable electronic access to the enemy.

Today, the Soviet connection in all four situations is missing. Many other situations also need to be re-thought in light of the collapse of the USSR. For instance, the U.S. alliance with Red China was justified by the leverage it gave us against Moscow. What should be our relationship with Peking now? Or again: With the collapse of the Soviet Union, India has lost its superpower patron and may be seeking friendly relations with the United States. How should it be received after decades of hostility towards us? Or finally: Now that the Sandinistas [in Nicaragua] have lost their link to an international communist movement, how should Washington respond if they seize power?

These questions—and dozens more like them—leap from the pages of our newspapers every day. One might say that they are technical questions, best left to the statesmen, the diplomat, the soldier, and the political scientist. And doubtless there are aspects of such questions that must be so classified. But doubtless, too, there is much the attentive citizen can say about these questions, particularly if he has a good grounding in a sound philosophy.

Criminal Law Writ Large?

Unfortunately, in trying to think about foreign policy, Objec­tivists are often misled into making a close analogy between a country's foreign policy and its criminal law. A state's job, they reason, is to protect its citizens against coercion. The criminal law does so at home; foreign policy does so on the international scene.

Now, there are certainly points of similarity between these two functions of government, but there are also important points of dissimilarity. And I think it is necessary to make clear what those dissimilarities are before trying to develop the positive principles that should govern foreign policy.

To begin, then, the fundamental situation underlying the criminal law differs radically from the situation underlying foreign policy. In the context of criminal law, the parties involved are a citizenry and an institution created by that citizenry to provide a particular service, namely, to protect the rights of every citizen. To serve this end, a government exercises a de jure monopoly on the use of force within its territory, and a proper government will make sure it has a de facto monopoly on the use of large-scale force as well.  Because a government is the institution that frees the people in a particular territory from the horrors of anarchy, it will not allow any citizen or group of citizens to build up a supply of arms that might put in doubt the government's ability to do its job.

Internationally, a government faces a very different con­text. In foreign policy, the parties involved are generally co­equal institutions performing similar functions: two states trying to protect their citizens' rights. Consequently, these two parties stand in a very different moral relation to one another than do the state and its citizens. As many authors have pointed out, states effectively exist in a condition of anarchy vis-á-vis one another. No state has a legal monopoly on the use of coercion, and no state has a de facto monopoly on the use of large-scale coercion, although vast differences exist among states in the amount of coercion that they can bring to bear. As a result, governments often ally themselves with other governments, creating organizations of fully independent coercive institu­tions that have no true counterpart on the domestic level.

Because of these fundamentally different contexts, gov­ernments properly operate by different rules when enforcing the criminal law and when pursuing a foreign policy. Most obvi­ously, perhaps, the criminal law is set down in writing; it gives a precise description of what constitutes a violation of a person’s rights, and it says what will be done to the violator. A government may properly punish a criminal only in accordance with this pre-established code. Moreover, because of the grave danger that government itself will become a major violator of rights, the government must follow closely specified rules when pursuing a citizen who seems to have committed a criminal act. In many cases, the government must seek prior judicial approval before acting against such a person, for example, before install­ing a wiretap. Finally, however desirable the extirpation of crime may be, there are many activities that a government simply should not use for that end: education, for example. A free government is not the appropriate vehicle by which the underlying cultural base of freedom is maintained, even though the strength or weakness of that cultural base may make it more or less easy to protect rights.

Foreign Policy: A Different Context

A quite different set of rules operates in the different context of foreign policy. Historically, at least, countries have not tried to lay down a complete code of those actions by foreign states that would be considered a violation of their citizens' rights, nor have they thought it wrong to punish violations despite an absence of advance notice that such a code provides. In any case, given that no state has an international monopoly on coercion, a state's foreign policy must be more flexible about unleashing coercion than its criminal code: it cannot specify in advance what punishment will be meted out to a violator of rights.

Overall, a state's foreign policy is far less restricted than its criminal-law enforcement. After all, a state that violates its own citizens' rights in the course of enforcing the law is violating a trust, since it is specifically sworn to protect their rights. A state that violates foreigners' rights in the course of protecting its own citizens' rights is not involved in any such contradiction. As a consequence, domestic law-enforcement procedure is precisely and minutely defined, while the constraints governing a state in its overseas operations are largely a matter of general ethical rules and a rough evaluation of acceptable costs.

A derivative consequence is that courts have a much less prominent role in foreign policy than they do in the criminal law. The U.S. government need not "try" Iran in a court of law before bombing its terrorist training camps, nor need it be certain that only the unmistakably guilty are harmed in the course of such a bombing. The responsibility for injuries inflicted on innocent people in such a case lies with the country that makes the action necessary.

Finally, activities improper for a free government at home have legitimate parallels in foreign policy. Thus, though a free government should not strive to maintain its own cultural base, it can use propaganda to educate the people of a threatening power and thereby help weaken the hostile state's efficacy.

These are some of the dissimilarities that exist between foreign policy and the criminal law. In addition, the analogy between those two functions fails because of several similarities that foreign policy bears to what is sometimes called private law or civil law: property law, contract law, tort law, and so forth. When a state wishes to establish the domestic procedures and standards in these fields, it can simply pass appropriate legislation. But as commerce becomes global, international procedures and standards in these fields must be established, and that too is part of foreign policy.

One particularly difficult sub-category in this field con­cerns international commons. Within a country, every piece of territory is either private property, public property (e.g., the White House), or a commons held in trusteeship by the state until such time as a citizen converts it to private property. Internationally, this last category has a parallel in territory that is not part of any state—notably Antarctica, the open seas, and outer space. The rules for using these commons, for protecting users of them, for incorporating them into national territory, and ultimately for privatizing them must be established by a foreign policy that models itself on the legislating of property law.

In sum, then, the context and operation of foreign policy make it a function of government dissimilar from the criminal law in many ways. To understand the principles of foreign policy, therefore, one cannot begin with the principles that underlie the criminal law. One must go deeper, to the ethical considerations that give rise to the institution of government itself. That is what I will do in my next article.

Originally Published in IOS Journal Volume 3 Number 4 • November 1993

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