September 24, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Excellent article by William Saletan
Excellent article by William Saletan on the differing views of human nature that animate Bush's foreign policy vs. Gore's:
The party of good will, led by Gore, believes that the behavior of foreign peoples and governments toward the United States is driven by whether they like us. If we're nice to them, they'll be nice to us. If we're mean to them, they'll be mean to us. "It is impossible to succeed against terrorism unless we have secured the continuing, sustained cooperation of many nations," Gore asserted. By angering these nations, he argued, a unilateral American attack on Iraq would jeopardize that cooperation.Believers in good will tend to talk about foreign peoples and leaders the way you talk about friends, colleagues, or neighbors. Other nations will be friendly to us if we treat them as "equals," said Gore, but Bush treats them with "disdain." Instead of being "calmed down," they're suffering "apprehensions" about us. As Gore sees it, after Sept. 11, 2001, "We had an enormous reservoir of good will and sympathy and shared resolve all over the world. That has been squandered in a year's time and replaced with great anxiety" about American adventurism. "Look at the entire German election campaign," said Gore. "It revealed a profound and troubling change in the attitude of the German electorate toward the United States."
The party of fear, led by Bush, takes a different view. It believes that the behavior of foreign peoples and governments toward the United States is driven, as President Reagan put it, not by whether they like us, but by whether they respect us. Terrorists don't think the way your friends or colleagues do. They're "a bunch of killers," Bush declared Monday. As for our allies and potential allies, they respond more to forcefulness than to pleading. Lead, and they'll follow. Punish an upstart, and they'll fall in line. "Either you're with us or you're with the enemy," said Bush. It's "necessary to send a message to friend and foe alike that we're plenty tough, if you rouse this country." The Germans don't like us? Screw 'em. A few good slaps, and they'll come around.
I don't know if I buy the idea that this is actually what's animating their foreign policy, though I think the fundamental distinction is sound. Bush obviously draws starker rhetorical lines than he does in practice. And while I think that the Clinton administration was, disastrously, more interested in building up goodwill with Europe than in deterring nations who took restraint and amity as a sign of weakness, they did after all send troops a number of places. But rhetorically, this is certainly where they've positioned themselves.
So why do I think that Bush's view is the nearer correct?
I don't, globally. I don't think that we need to invade China to gain advantage in the region; we'll do far better trading with them. I don't think we need to arm up in Europe to ensure that the Belgian Menace is contained. But I do think that in the case of Iraq, the stick is more appropriate than the carrot. Why?
The kind of regime we're dealing with. It isn't that it's a dictatorship; so is China, or near enough. It isn't even that he's crazy; so are half the leaders in teh world, so far as I can tell, and we all seem to get by. It's that on international terms, the carrot must be predicated on an exchange of value. We give countries aid because we hope it will make them rich and they'll invent or produce stuff we want, and we'll all get richer selling stuff to each other. We trade with countries because it makes us both better off. We enter into alliances because they make both nations more secure.
Iraq has nothing to offer. Oil, of course. But the oil doesn't really seem to improve things in the Middle East. And the money we give him to buy oil buys the arms with which he threatens his neighbors, and the bounties he pays the families of suicide bombers.
Aid might alleviate some poverty at the margins, but only at the expense of sending an immense amount of money into Saddaam's personal coffers. Giving aid to dictators like him is a net destruction of value.
He might, in exchange, give up his territorial and munitions ambitions. But he isn't interested in that sort of exchange. He's interested in the sort of exchange where we give him stuff, and he pretends to give up his nasties until we get tired of listening to France whine.
The Iraqi economy is not so constituted as to develop the kind of mutual ties with the rest of the world that foster the goodwill approach. When they trade with us, it doesn't make them a prosperous nation with a broad middle class; it makes them Zimbabwe with mineral deposits. It doesn't have to be this way; there's nothing intrinsic to the Arab soul that makes this so. But it is this way currently, and until we get rid of the corrupt system that suppresses economic development, there is no way to develop the economic interdependance that makes military threat less necessary.
Posted by Jane Galt at September 24, 2002 9:46 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>