One of the most popular schools of thought in foreign
affairs goes by the catchy German name of Realpolitik.
Yet it is actually an Orwellian term, because the ideas it represents have little
basis in reality.
Whether you’re
college student taking political science courses for the first time, a professor
of diplomatic history, a State Department staffer or anyone else who is daily
contact with the subject of foreign affairs, you’re going to hear the term ad nauseum. Just because it is deeply ingrained in the
psyche of foreign affairs specialists around the globe doesn’t mean it has any
grain of truth to it though. The
so-called “realist school” closely overlaps the “national style” school of
thought, which claims that America has its own unique methods of operating on
the world stage that spring largely from cultural roots. They create a false
dichotomy between two loaded terms, by lumping all of the Machiavellian
policies they admire under the heading of “pragmatism” on the one hand and all
of the virtues they dislike under the rubric of “idealism.” The latter carries
the subtle pejorative connotation that these virtues are pie-in-the-sky
daydreams, which have no place in the “real world” of power politics.
Yet the realist school is wrong in its very first
principles, because the individual characteristics of the American national
style that they cite have not colored our foreign policy in centuries, if ever.
The world would be a much safer place if the U.S. had historically practiced
half of the virtues that the realists curse us for; in their crusade to
eliminate what few ideals we have left, the realists aim to make us throw our
weight around on the world stage in even more destructive ways than we already
have. There is some variety among scholars in which particular characteristics
they perceive, but the one thing that these elements have in common is that
they usually don’t exist. There is a lot of variety in the degree of adherence
to this school among such scholars as John Spanier[1],
Amos A. Jordan, William J. Taylor[2],
Donald Snow[3],
Cecil Crabb[4],
Frederick H. Hartmann, Robert L. Wendzel[5],
Michael J. Hunt[6], Norman
Gordon Levin[7], East
Asian specialist Akira Iriye[8]
and such well-known names as George Kennan[9],
Hans Morgenthau[10] and
Henry Kissinger.[11]
There is also great diversity in their merit in other areas of foreign policy
expertise. A selective list of national style characteristics gleaned from
their works might include a belief in the primacy of public opinion in
policymaking; dislike of power politics; utopianism; an aversion to violence; a
crusading spirit; distrust of standing armies and a preference for
citizen-soldiers; the promotion of democracy abroad; support of international
law; opposition to colonialism; a belief in American invincibility; a
preference for total war; egalitarianism; and last but not least, isolationism.
Sadly, this is a list of ideals which America’s foreign policymakers have
normally only paid lip service to, while acting on the selfish principles
advocated by the realists.
The Hard Truth about American Foreign
Policy
Believers in Realpolitik claim that these ideals have
failed the U.S., but there is one problem with their argument: they have never
been put into practice. Americans might have believed in citizen-soldiers at
the time of the Founding Fathers, but we had a fairly effective standing army
several decades before the Civil War. After World War I, that small
professional force became a large standing army that has never been downsized;
it is hard to argue that a nation fielding more than a million military personnel
annually is biased against standing armies. If anything, America has been in a
state of perpetual mobilization since the early 20th Century, as
Sidney Lens points out in Permanent War, a book that is still applicable a
quarter century after he wrote it.[12]
Some of the political rhetoric that accompanied the World Wars might seem to
favor all-out conflicts, but the vast majority of our fights have been
small-scale interventions, such as occupations of banana republics. There is no
question that our leaders have preferred surgical strikes over “total war” for at
least the last four decades.
If
anything, America has a pro-military bias and a violent, interventionist
history. One of the most popular myths about our foreign policy is that we have
an isolationist streak, but this concept explains little of our actual
behavior. If it means “no entangling alliances” with European powers prior to
World War I, then it has a grain of truth, but only for the common sense reason
that our borders did not extend to Europe; it would not have made sense for us
to join coalitions with the likes of the Ottoman Empire, Sweden, or Russia for
the same reason that Iceland does not have a strategic alliance with Saudi
Arabia today. That grain is fairly small, however, for we did engage in intense
games of power politics with the European powers who did possess large swaths
of North American land in the 19th Century. We were engaged in a
century-long rivalry with Britain, the main global power, which had possessions
in the Western Hemisphere that posed a significant threat to our interests and
sometimes even our existence. It took complex power diplomacy to enable us to
get the Louisiana Purchase and survive the possibility of dismemberment during
the Civil War, when France and Britain mulled intervening on the side of the
South. Power politics also led us into the Spanish-American War of 1898, after
which the U.S. began to apply its military and economic muscle on the world
stage with increasing frequency. Given the frequency with which we fought
neighboring states in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, not to mention
the Indian tribes we conquered, it is hard to paint America as an isolationist
state even prior to 1898. Following World War I and the passing of the National
Security Act in 1947, the use of our military and economic power on the world
stage increased by several more orders of magnitude. Compared to some of the
powers of Europe and Asia, whose histories go back millennia, we are a fairly
young nation. Yet statistically, America probably holds the record for the most
foreign interventions, given that our soldiers have stepped foot on the soil of
most nations on the planet in the course of hostilities at one point or
another. Many of the remaining states where our soldiers have not seen combat
have been overthrown or destabilized by our intelligence agencies. At some
point, I would like to compile a comprehensive list of every country that has
been the subject of an American intervention of some kind, but have found the
task difficult because they are so numerous; it would be far easier to compile
a very short list of those nations we have yet to fight or attempt a coup
against. For example, we have fought or overthrown the governments of every
single nation in the Western Hemisphere except perhaps for some tiny Caribbean
Islands; that list includes Canada, who we failed to conquer in the War of
1812. Our influence has always been at its weakest in Central Asia, the one
populated part of the planet that is least accessible to us because of its
distance, which is perhaps why we have yet to fight or destabilize India,
Bhutan, Sri Lanka or Nepal, at least that I’m aware of. Our soldiers set foot
in Russia in the midst of World War I, as part of an international force that
tried to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution; it is also public knowledge, but not
well known, that the CIA deliberately manipulated elections in Italy and
Australia during the Cold War. In all of Eurasia, this leaves only New Zealand,
Switzerland, some Scandinavian countries, Ireland, Portugal, Israel, a
shrinking number of new ex-Soviet republics, Malaysia, Burma and a handful of
tiny states, like Andorra, Liechtenstein and a couple of Pacific Island
nations. We have either fought most Middle Eastern and African regimes either
directly or have overthrown their governments through coups and funding of
revolutionary groups. This is how we have built one of the richest empires in
history in a short period of time, one that controls vast territories and whose
power extends to the furthest corners of the globe.
This is a topic unto itself, one that I hope to go
into greater depth with in future columns, but the purposes of most of these interventions
were not pure by any means. The truth about American foreign policy is that it
has been dark, violent and selfish, for the most part. That really shouldn’t be
that surprising, given that the higher you go in politics, the dirtier things
tend to get; the international scene is the highest level, in which survival
and vast sums of money are at stake. The myth our policymakers like to project
is that they are tirelessly spreading democracy and prosperity to the rest of
the world, or otherwise busy doing good for a planet that is sometimes
ungrateful in return. First, the U.S. has only paid lip service to democracy,
while in practice we have traditionally supported whichever despots back our
business interests. Sometimes this has taken the form of killing rebels who
fought for liberty and equality against dictators that we were in bed with, as
in the famous case of Augusto Sandino, who was chased by units of our Marine
Corps for daring to oppose Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza. At other
times it has occurred in reverse, through the destabilization of democratic
regimes who didn’t toe the line, especially those who threatened investments by
Corporate America. Some of the more famous examples include the overthrow of Mohammad
Mosaddegh in Iran (1953), Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), João Goulart in Brazil (1964) and Salvador
Allende in Chile (1973) in addition to many other instances which are public
knowledge but not widely publicized. In the 1980s, the largest portion of the
CIA budget was devoted to manipulating foreign elections, which are still
stage-managed to this day to thwart candidates we don’t like, although our
diminishing power has made this option less viable in recent years. Given the
degree of corruption our own institutions have experienced in recent decades, a
case can be made that America is actually a working plutocracy rather than a
democracy. There is no question, however, that we have long exported plutocracy
in practice, rather than authentic political freedom; our politicians have
always spoken publicly about the value of free elections, but only when it
allows foreign candidates who aren’t opposed to the interests of Corporate
America to take power. Exporting democracy is the last thing on their minds,
perhaps because we can’t teach what we don’t practice at home.
The excuse that realists typically use to justify
such incidents of autocratic intervention, if they bother to address them at
all, is that they constitute examples of America’s crusading zeal to stamp out
Communism and implant its own superior institutions. This argument is a red
herring, however, because the vast majority of democratic regimes and
liberation movements we fought during the Cold War were only nationalists, or
left-wing reformers who favored egalitarian ideologies other than Bolshevism,
or who merely tolerated their Communist enemies out of a democratic spirit. The
entire ideal of anti-Communism sprang from selfish motives to begin with, since
our upper class abhorred the classless society that Marx and Co. claimed to be
working towards - same as they have always hated every egalitarian ideology,
including the distributist economic ideology favored by the Catholic Church for
two millennia. The rich despised the Marxists a hundred years ago for the same
reason that they foam at the mouth with false charges of “socialism” against
“liberals” and “Obamacare” today, for they hate equality, even the crude and
cold brand preached by Marx. Furthermore, as a very practical matter, Communism
directly threatened the pocketbooks of Corporate America from the very
beginning, through the threats of nationalization or other wholesale economic
reforms which might make it possible for them to exploit workers with impunity,
or to invest in the Third World without oversight and regulation. This
dovetails nicely with their entirely selfish motives for spreading American
capitalism abroad, which springs less from hubris and more from knowledge that
this will make it easier for them to profit from the rest of the world’s resources
and labor pool. A quite substantial portion of our foreign policy is geared
towards securing economic privileges for American investors and Corporate
America. As a result, we have helped extend the system of global capitalism
that had been developing for several centuries before the Founding Fathers to
every corner of the planet in our day. We have implanted capitalism through a
wide variety of means, from the training of foreigners in our schools of
economics to the establishment of international banking institutions like the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank under our control. The latter
two have succeeded in keeping much of the developing world indebted to the
richest economies, which in turn provides us with a way to demand supervision
of their national budgets and other encroachments on their sovereignty; as a
result, we can mandate that they lower taxes on the rich, end subsidies for
poverty programs, end restrictions on capital flows and foreign investment and
the like. The capitalist reforms that America pushes are often the underlying
cause of many of the humanitarian catastrophes that fill television ads for
starving children; many of them are in fact starving precisely because
capitalist policies have forced their small farms out of business and reduced
them to landless rural laborers, or because the indigenous institutions they
had developed themselves to deal with famines had been dismantled by
capitalists as obstacles to investment.
Much
of our so-called foreign aid is actually poisonous in the same way, because it
carries restrictions which subvert the economies and institutions of the
recipients. The American public likes to believe that it is supporting most of
the world through its generosity, but this self-serving myth has no basis in
fact. If anything, the rest of the world is being impoverished by the
capitalist institutions we have implanted across the planet, which are designed
to enrich our upper class at everyone else’s expense. Most of our foreign aid
is actually in the forms of guns, not butter, because the people of the Third
World have sometimes fought back. Even the butter is sometimes rancid though.
Our government’s negligible aid to those who are suffering the most from wars and
starvation is sometimes also perverted for nefarious purposes, as in the case
of PL 480 food aid to Guatemalan refugees in the 1980s. More than a hundred
thousand Guatemalan civilians were killed by a bloodthirsty military government
we helped put in power, which prompted countless more refugees to flee; so in
order to keep them away from the influence of rebel groups, we used food aid to
lure them out of hiding to polling stations where they could be accounted for
and included in the puppet elections the U.S. helped finance. Other means of
countering such token resistance to the establishment of global capitalism have
included embargoes and other coercive economic measures against nations that
don’t want to trade on the terms we set. When that line of defense fails, this
neocolonialist system includes violent failsafes, such as funding of brutal
terrorist groups like the Contras in Nicaragua or Renamo in Mozambique, state
terrorism and death squads as in El Salvador and many other Latin American
countries, provoking coups or even direct intervention by American military
forces. A companion myth to the whole Orwellian viewpoint on foreign aid is the
popular belief that American troops have mainly been used to fight evil
dictators and establish freedom and prosperity for the rest of the world. There
is some truth to it when it comes to our most costly conflicts, such as the
Civil War, the World Wars and the current fight against Al-Qaeda; the U.S.
actually has helped save the world by stopping such monsters as Hitler and Bin
Laden, who were bent on global genocide. Yet in pursuit of our own national
idol of capitalism we have also resorted to genocide, first against Native
American tribes in the 19th Century and most recently in the Vietnam
War. The latter conflict met the internationally accepted definition of
genocide, given that the top brass had an explicit plan to forcibly resettle
the entire rural population of the country in “strategic hamlets” and
“agrovilles,” which looked suspiciously like concentration camps at the end. By
that point, the American military had killed some 10 percent of the South
Vietnamese civilian population, by its own admission, and destroyed half of the
homes in certain provinces. Aside from such high profile cases as World War II,
when the U.S. was up against evil personified, the conduct of our foreign
policy has been for selfish purposes, by selfish men, with evil consequences
for millions of innocent civilians across the world who have been killed by our
bombs, disfranchised by our coups and starved by our economic policies. Vietnam
was merely one highly visible instance of this because it was on such a grand
scale. This sort of evil occurs today, at a quieter level, partly through the
unobtrusive but deadly export of crimes like contraception and abortion abroad,
for the express purpose of keeping the population of the planet under our
thumb. For example, the Eugenic Protection Law of 1948 was drafted by racist
American occupiers with the express purpose of reducing Japan’s population; as
a result, about 1 million Japanese babies have been aborted every year since
then, which is beginning to curtail the power this greying nation can exercise
on the world stage. Since the beginning of the Cold War, we have helped
depopulate the entire planet by funding or otherwise supporting contraception,
sterilization and abortion programs with global reach. In the latter case, we
have made ourselves complicit in the greatest genocide in history, given that
abortion has claimed some one billion lives worldwide in the last four decades.
Abortion has something in common with all of these
interventions in the Third World: they are all motivated by the love of money,
our national religion. One seeks to save money by killing off a big lifetime
expense, while the other redirects wealth to the U.S. and other leading
capitalist countries through a variety of clever means, but the end is the
same. Physical security has always come first as a determinant of American
foreign policy, for the obvious reason that a nation cannot accumulate and
spend wealth if it no longer exists. If we want to explain why nations act as
they do on the international stage, the realist prism is of little use and can
safely be ignored. Under the principle of Occam’s Razor that the simplest
explanation which covers the greatest number of facts is likely the correct
one, the foreign policy behavior of many nations can be explained much more
accurately by a simple three-tiered hierarchy of goals. Most states put
physical security first, followed by economic security second, then any
cultural or ideological goals which might conflict with the previous two. At
times, these “national style” elements might complement the first two
priorities nicely, in which case they can coexist. For example, when the Soviet
Union fomented Marxist revolutions abroad, or when Iran supported Muslim
fundamentalist movements, they also believed themselves to be securing their
physical and economic security by extending their spheres of influence and
subtracting from those of their enemies. Similarly, there are times when
America’s physical, economic and idealistic goals have all overlapped, such as
in their support for the democratic movements that eventually toppled the
Berlin Wall. Democracy was historically resisted by the U.S. in the Third
World, however, because it threatened our investments, although we might
occasionally support elections if we thought capitalist candidates would win.
In such cases, ideologies do not drive foreign policy, but are seen as merely
another strategic asset that can be used to extend a nation’s security and
economic power. Pursuit of wealth can also be used to bolster physical security
in the long run, since weapons cost money, which usually requires a sound
technological base, industrial capacity and other prerequisites. The difference
between American and modern China (which practices dog-eat-dog capitalism
despite being ruled by an organization falsely labeled as the Communist Party)
is that the former pursues wealth as an end in itself, as long as it does not
conflict with our security, while the Chinese are using capitalism as a means
to finance their own idol, xenophobic nationalism. As I have discussed
elsewhere, America is a commercial civilization in which the love of money take
precedence over almost all else. China, however, is motivated by a
nationalistic desire to get revenge for the “100 Years of Humiliation,”
beginning with the Opium Wars of the early 19th Century, which
augured a long string of defeats that almost led to the partition of the
nation. Domination of international trade is just a way for them to make money
to finance their goals in power politics. In this way, there are some
differences in the way that the great powers approach foreign policy, but
normally, ideals are sacrificed in favor of more pressing matters like
economics and security. America and China represent unusual cases, in the sense
that their leading ideals themselves revolve economics and national power
respectively; what this means, in essence, is that if neither had to worry
about economic power and physical security, America would still pursue wealth
obsessively while China would still seek to augment its national power.
Public Rhetoric and Power Politics
The ideology of the class of people that makes
foreign policy is what really counts in any country and in our case, the ruling
class is overly enamored with wealth, just as China’s is obsessed with national
greatness. The ideals that the common people believe in are only secondarily
important, such as democracy, which can be sacrificed if it happens to conflict
with the primary idol of the ruling class. Other goals, such as genuine
equality in income or before the law, are repugnant to them because they represent
the exact opposite of the class prejudice that motivates them. There might be
some Americans left who really do prefer small standing armies,
citizen-soldiers, democracy, international law and non-interventionism, but
they are not the people who actually formulate our foreign policy; the core
values of this group of people are actually directly contrary to them, as well
as to the whole list of national style elements that the Realpolitik school
mentions. What fools the realists is the rhetoric of politicians, which as a
matter of common sense tends to be false. In order to drum up support for a
particular cause, the foreign policy establishment will always have to appeal
to higher ideals, since the common people are generally less corrupt than the
ruling class in any age and in any country. The realists are unrealistic enough
to believe that we actually live in a functioning democracy, where the
government is influenced by the public rather than the other way around. When
public opinion is at odds with the ruling class it may act as a kind of crude
veto, but even this is apparently a weak check, given the length of time it
took the government to end the Vietnam War even after it was clearly deeply
unpopular. Most of the time the ruling class can simply manufacture public
opinion simply by appealing to popular ideals, while actually acting out of
more selfish motives; in between such highly visible crises, where most of the
day-to-day operation of our foreign policy occurs, even this fig leaf is
unnecessary. Since the Wilson Administration pioneered certain highly effective
propaganda techniques to drum up support for World War I, public opinion is
been seen as a thing to be molded, not listened to. Most of the time the
foreign policy establishment, consisting of everything from the top military
brass to State Department officials to academic think tanks to the NSA to
Congressional oversight committees, has a fairly consistent internal mindset
and usually gets its way. All of these occupations are necessary and valuable,
but they carry with them certain temptations – such as attracting people who
have seen one too many spy movies, or who think in paranoid us vs. them terms,
or those who take their appreciation for the military to the point of idolatry.
Most of them are likewise powerful men who spend most of their lives
socializing with fellow powerful men, many of whom are wealthy businessmen and
corporate officials. They are not having beers at the bowling alley with the
Average Joe from the working class. That is why we end up with policies that
are sold to us in the language of the working class, but quite often go against
the interests of the common people.
This viewpoint really isn’t a matter of debate,
because we have incontrovertible historical evidence of precisely why the
foreign policy establishment has made many of its most heinous decisions.
Detailed records exist, for example, of how many American corporations were
involved in quite illegal attempts to bring down Allende’s government. As far
back as the late 1800s, we have documentary evidence of the National
Association of Manufacturers (NAM) openly demanding that the U.S. forcibly open
new Third World markets. Given the time and resources, it would certainly be
possible to compile a systematic list of every foreign intervention and the
documentary evidence demonstrating explicit prodding by some segment of
Corporate America or another. One of the worst examples was the
Spanish-American War, which the devotees of Realpolitik often cite as a result
of mob hysteria after the Maine accidentally exploded in Havana’s harbor.
Actually, archival evidence shows that we were already planning to go to war
with Spain in order to prevent rebels from taking power in Cuba, which would
have harmed our business interests, as well as to seize the Philippines and
other coaling stations as stepping stones to the fabled China Market. In his
much-read but bungling classic American
Diplomacy, George Kennan ignores all of this evidence and simply quotes
selectively from the lofty public speeches of American policymakers, in order
to prove his contention that we went to war out of some misguided and naïve
moral motivations, to save the beleaguered Cuban people from oppression. The
common people may have had high-minded motives, but it is a fact that the
people who directed the war did not. To date, the only example I can find in
which such blatantly selfish motivations were not cited in the internal
discussions of policymakers was the U.S. intervention in Somalia from 1992 to
1994. Perhaps this is due to a lack of archival evidence, but it is more likely
that the intervention was genuinely motivated by humanitarian concerns – which
is precisely why the nutty fringe of the Republican Party despised it so much.
This unselfish motivation may have also been what led us to withdraw after a
mere 18 casualties, despite the fact that the mission succeeded in saving
hundreds of thousands of Somali lives; it is was an instance of genuine heroism
which could not be justified to our villainous ruling class. Ordinary Americans
might have humanitarian motivations or utopian visions, but the handful of
Americans who actually set our policies are generally at ease with inhuman,
dystopian viewpoints.
The people who actually make our foreign policy want
to hear excuses that tell them what they want to hear, that it is perfectly
moral to bomb, rob, swindle, cheat, steal and enslave foreigners when it suits
their purposes. They are human beings with consciences that must be appeased,
which is where the Realpolitik school come sin. Our intelligentsia expends much
of its time and energy making up excuses for the ruling class in other fields
of study, so it is natural that some of the most damnably false logic would be
on display in the realm of foreign affairs, where six billion lives and the
trillions of dollars in wealth that they produce are at stake. Every thinking
occupation has its function in today’s Orwellian system, which is devoted
towards serving the capitalist class. Economists tell capitalists that Adam
Smith’s Invisible Hand will take care of the marketplace, if only every sane
governmental regulation is done away with. Historians no longer correct the
rest of academia because they accept a primarily economic interpretation of
humanity’s past, which fits the mindset of our commercial civilization. The
discipline of philosophy no longer speaks at all, let alone to boldly correct
these errors, precisely because it sits at the pinnacle of human knowledge. Psychologists
tell them that any kind of strange behavior they want to engage in is healthy,
as long as it is popularly accepted. Biologists and psychiatrists imply that
man is just another animal and that his thoughts are merely the product of
neurochemical reactions; therefore ethical responsibilities are a human
construct which can change with time. When the rich and powerful among us
violate those responsibilities, our lawyers can redefine justice for them. Our
physicists tell us there is no need for a Creator. Our modern priests and
ministers water down what the Creator said in order to make the ruling class
comfortable, just as they once did for the Pharisees and Scribes. Political
science and the other academic disciplines involved in foreign policymaking
carry a commensurate potential for corruption, precisely because there are so
many lives and so much money at stake, which certain powerful people have
strong interests in taking. The Realpolitik school represents the same kind of
smoke screen to cover their misdeeds that we see in other academic disciplines,
except applied to foreign affairs.
A Return to the Only Realistic Ideal
The Big Lie put out by the devotees of Realpolitik is
an echo of Machiavelli’s false theory that if only our policymakers would act
more with self-interest in mind, the whole world would function better. This
serendipitous logic sounds as self-serving as it is. What this implies, at
heart, is that acting selfishly will benefit the greater good, which sounds
eerily similar to some other messages concocted by academia in recent centuries
that pull rabbits out of hats, like the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith or the
creation of life by preposterous accident put forth by Darwin. Social Darwinism
never went out of vogue, for modern capitalists still believe that they are
furthering Progress and human welfare by oppressing the poor; they even have
new twists on that old idea, such as former President Reagan’s ridiculous
Laffer Curve and trickle-down economics. The complement to this idea in foreign
affairs is the concept that acting immorally will in the long run lead to
better moral outcomes. Most of the believers in Realpolitik start off saying
that power is amoral, which is true in the sense that a hammer is amoral;
whether or not you use it to build a house or crush a skull is what imbues it
with its ethical value. The trap they fall into is to take this argument
another step forward, to the assumption that conduct itself can be amoral, if
policymakers only try not to upset the balance of power and follow principles
of self-interest. Unfortunately, this argument falters on the same grounds as
the modern idea of moral relativity, for it is impossible for any human action
to be devoid of moral meaning. Like a magnet, our every thought and act is
either negatively or positively charged; to try to pick a third way is like trying
jump, but neither up nor down. Self-interest, i.e. selfishness, is not merely
the absence of evil, but evil itself; there is no other kind. Acting selfishly
and expecting things to work out for the best is foolish, for as St. Paul warns
us, we cannot do evil and expect good to result. As his boss, a certain Jewish
carpenter, once said, a bad tree does not produce good fruit and vice versa.
The Realpolitik school has never produced good fruit.
First, the philosophy is false, for it teaches us to reject ideals that we
haven’t even put into practice yet. And that falsehood is actually a lie, since
it is designed to conceal two sins: the misbehavior of our upper class in the
realm of foreign policy and the concomitant misdeeds of our nation. The foreign
policy establishment is riddled with false patriots, who wave the flag precisely
because the wealth and power that the U.S. exercises reflects well on them,
since they are Americans. Genuine love always goes hand-in-hand with truth; if
they cared about the U.S. at all for its own sake, they would recognize the
many evils pointed out here in order to fix them. Authentic patriotism, like
any other love, is a fantastic thing; the false patriotism that many flag
wavers exhibit is actually worse than idolatry, since when they look at that
shining idol, they are actually looking for their own reflections. Furthermore,
these self-serving lies were produced by trees that have historically begotten
rotten fruit. Many of the writers in the Realpolitik school that I mentioned
earlier may be fine people except for this one mistake, but the school itself
has origins in unsavory characters like Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898). Like
most Machiavellian leaders, the architect of the German Second Reich was a
brilliant political strategist who could deftly manipulate power politics, but
that doesn’t make him a good person. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger,
an admirer of Bismarck, was anointed long ago by the media as our official
foreign policy guru, perhaps because of his sophisticated-sounding European
accent. His deeds were sometimes foul, however, including his unpunished
complicity in Watergate-era wiretap scandals. Kissinger and Kennan alike
represent a section of academia which is very good at reciting facts, but is
incapable of putting them together in a honest and accurate way – so by
default, they end up tying them together haphazardly in order to please people
of influence. Their explanations are articulate, lucid and peppered with
interesting facts, but have this fatal flaw, in that they obscure the truth
rather than revealing it in greater detail. This may be why the policies of
Realpolitik gurus like Kissinger and Kennan have normally failed. Kennan is
credited with inventing the policy of containment of the Soviet Union, but it
led to a simplistic and counter-productive fanaticism among policymakers, who
tended to see every Cold War event through a Cold War prism – as if there were
nothing else going on in the world in the 20th Century except that
superpower rivalry. Enemies have always tried to contain each other since time
immemorial, almost by definition; Kennan’s error-riddled thesis merely ended up
prolonging the rivalry by sharpening it. Kissinger was likewise inept as a
Secretary of State in many ways. He is credited with defrosting relations with
China in order to get back at the Soviets, but it was actually Chinese dictator
Mao Tse-Tung who played America off against the USSR. On other occasions he
made stupid blunders, such as prolonging the Vietnam War unnecessarily for many
years and even bringing us to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviets over
the Yom Kippur War of 1973. In the latter incident, Israel, Syria and Egypt all
outfoxed their superpower patrons into taking extreme stands that had nothing
to do with their national interests, out of a myopic us-or-them mindset.
Millions of lives could have been lost because of Kissinger’s stupidity. As a
result of the mistakes of these three icons of Realpolitik, millions of other
men paid the ultimate price for no really rational reason.
So much for the so-called “rational” theory of
international politics. If such so-called “pragmatism” were actually pragmatic,
it would produce more security, but it never has. The state that Machiavelli
was so ardently devoted to no longer exists. The balance of power that Bismarck
worked so tirelessly to maintain and exploit collapsed just a decade and a half
after his death, into the conflagration of World War I. The balance of power
has never been maintained for long throughout history, so slavish devotion to
it is foolish. Policymakers need to be aware of it, for it constrains the
choices that they make, but that is as far as the argument goes. An artist must
always be conscious of the limits of his canvas; whether or not he paints
beauties or blasphemies after that is a different matter. A chemist must be
conscious of what mixtures he concocts, otherwise he may blow himself up;
whether or not he uses his skills to produce poison after that is a separate
question. The realist school is only correct to the point of belaboring the
obvious, that nations only have a limited degree of power, which is further
limited by constraints like the balance of power. It is only useful in
correcting madmen who are blinded by devotion to a single cause, or those who
have no sense of restraint. In doing so, the realists often go off the deep end
in a different direction, by legitimizing the numerous crimes that are
committed every day in the name of power politics and wealth. Sometimes they
even take their devotion to the extreme of unconsciously undermining our
physical or economic security, which is precisely what Kennan and Kissinger did
by thinking in terms of power politics rather than morality. Kennan’s bipolar
view ended up lending itself to extreme ideas like the domino theory, which
sucked America into needless wars and violated a cardinal principle of power
politics, the conversation of enemies, by alienating potential allies.
Kissinger likewise got outplayed by a client state in a weak position, to the
point of putting our nation at risk of thermonuclear war just for a temporary,
narrow, superfluous advantage in power politics.
The only pragmatic, realistic, rational course for
humanity is to find an escape from the curse of power politics. The followers
of Realpolitik like to paint idealistic values as naive, but they represent the
only hope for humanity to avoid eventual destruction, for the balance of power
is doomed to fail us again in the future. It has never held for long and cannot
be relied on to provide security in the future. Scholars like Morgenthau (who
is normally brilliant) believe that there is already a contest between
Realpolitik and Idealpolitik, but there isn’t, since our policymakers don’t pay
attention to our ideals.[13]
It is up to us to start one. To bring about lasting change, our ideals must be
good; make no mistake about it, one of the most tragic evils in the modern
world is wholehearted devotion to evil causes, which is what made both Bin
Laden and old time mafia dons so dangerous. To avoid self-destructive
fanaticism, we must be in love with not just one good ideal, but all of them,
in the right time, place, proportion and manner. This, in a nutshell, was the
moral philosophy of the medieval Thomist philosophers. The millennium between
the fall of Rome of the age of Machiavelli is a time that has been forgotten,
perhaps half-deliberately, by humanity, a time when certain rulers actually
tried to put that broad Catholic philosophy into practice. Once we start
talking about changing humanity by applying many ideals over wide lengths of
time, there is no recourse left to us but to enter a discussion of religion. As
in all other academic disciplines, this is where discussion tends to stop cold,
because secularism has made the topic verboten. That is why we have forgotten a
time in history when saints could actually serve as kings. Martin Luther King
Jr., the Kennedys and other such modern political heroes can’t hold a candle to
medieval saints like St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. Stephen, St. Louis, who
actually put Christianity into practice while holding high offices. They did so
by applying a theory of life which taught men to act against their
self-interest, which is something that animals cannot do. Humans can never act
like animals, because we have souls; we can only act worse than them, like
Hitler, or better than them, like Mother Teresa. Once humanity is fully
conscious of that fact again, we can be ruled by men who put self-interest last
in foreign affairs, like saints. Then our foreign aid will actually be
generous, rather than manipulative; then our soldiers will always fight to
protect the innocent and downtrodden, as they did in Somalia; then the popular
myth that America has acted out of a spirit of sloppy sainthood will actually
have some truth to it. The only cases in human history in which Idealpolitik
might have motivated foreign policy came from a place and time that was soaked
in Catholicism, the most complete system of ideals humanity has ever enjoyed.
Realistically, it is America’s best hope.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in
journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at
Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in
U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a
paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate
in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has
been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to
psychology to economics since age 9.
[1]
Spanier, John, 1973, American Foreign Policy Since World War II. Praeger
Publishers: New York.
[2] Jordan,
Amos A. and Taylor, William J., 1984, American National Security. Johns
Hopkings Press: Baltimore.
[3] Snow,
Donald M., 1987, National Security. St. Martin’s Press: New York.
[4] Crabb,
Cecil, 1988, American Foreign Policy in the Nuclear Age. Harper and Row:
Philadelphia.
[5]
Hartmann, Frederick H. and Wendzel, Robert L.,
1988, Defending America’s Security. Pergamon-Brassey’s International
Defense Publishers: Washington, D.C.
[6]
Hunt, Michael J., 1987, Ideology and U.S.
Foreign Policy. Yale University Press: London.
[7] Levin,
Norman Gordon, 1983, Woodrow Wilson and America's Response to War and
Revolution. Oxford University Press: New York.
[8]
Iriye, Akira, 1965, After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far
East, 1921-1931. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts and Iriye,
Akira, 1967, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian
Relations. Harcourt-Brace and World: New York. Aside from the whole Realpolitik
diversion, Iriye’s works are worth reading. One of the worst examples of this
whole study of mentalities and ideologies occurs in another book on America’s
East Asian policy, by Reed, James, 1983, The Missionary Mind and Ameircan
East Asian Policy, 1911-1915. Council on East Asian Studies: Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Another particularly bad one is Thomson Jr., James C.; Stanley,
Peter W. and Perry, John Curtis, 1981, Sentimental Imperialists: The
American Experience in East Asia. Harper & Row, Publishers: New York.
[9]
Kennan, George F., 1984, American Diplomacy.
The University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
[10] pp.
110-118 – Morgenthau, Hans J. and Thompson, Kenneth W., “A Realist Theory of
International Politics”, pp 110-118 in Levine, Herbert M., 1989, World
Politics Debated. McGraw-Hill: New York.
[11] Kissinger,
Henry, 1994, Diplomacy. Simon and Schuster: New York
[12] Lens,
Sidney, 1987, Permanent War: The Militarization of America. Schocken
Books: New York.
[13] p.
110, Morgenthau and Thompson.
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