One thing you can usually expect from the Cato Institute’s foreign policy experts is that America shouldn’t use military force to defend freedom against tyranny in other countries. While I often find myself disagreeing with that position, it’s at least one that reasonable people can take in various cases. What I find much harder to take is the idea that the United States should not even cheer on freedom’s defenders from the sidelines, or speak up for the rights of democracies to do perfectly innocent things. I noted last year Ted Galen Carpenter and Justin Logan making a really deplorable argument that it is somehow “antagonistic” to the People’s Republic of China for Taiwan to seek to change the name of its airline to “Taiwan Airlines” or to put “Taiwan” on its passports. For Carpenter to say that these things are “antagonistic” to the PRC is nothing short of taking the side of a totalitarian communist dictatorship against the perfectly legitimate rights of a democracy that has never for even a minute of its history been governed by the PRC.
Well, here we are again: Logan argues that “President Obama should keep quiet on the subject of Iran’s elections.” Not that the United States should hold off from intervening in any direct or military way—again, a reasonable position—or that the United States should be wary of Mousavi, who is probably not the “moderate” he’s called on CNN. No, Logan’s argument is that the United States should “keep quiet” while a totalitarian theocratic dictatorship sends its masked thugs to shoot and beat demonstrators who seek some minor degree of political freedom. This he characterizes as “narcissism,” and he ridicules the idea of “anoint[ing] from afar one side as the ‘good’”—a word he puts in scare quotes.
Obviously a president ought to be prudent when making pronouncements on foreign policy. But wisdom means calling things by their right names. And as the President of the United States, Obama has a moral obligation to say that we are friends of freedom throughout the world, and we believe in the rightness of free and fair elections and constitutionally limited states.
I think it was Christopher Hitchens who recently said that speaking truth to power isn’t that big a deal—power already knows the truth. What you need to do is speak truth to the powerless, or rather, speak truth in a way that the powerless can hear it and know that someone speaks for them. That alone is worth a great deal. Pretending to be above it all—to be too sophisticated to apply words like “good” without scare quotes—and accepting the false moral equivalence of dictatorships and free societies...well, that’s all that tyrants ask of us, isn’t it?
What were America’s great moments in the Cold War? There were three: the Berlin Airlift, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall” speech. In each case, what was called for—and what American presidents provided—was moral clarity and a willingness to speak on behalf of freedom and to tell the world’s dictators “no.” The oppressed in other countries long for us to say “no.” I’m not talking about tanks; I’m talking about words. Nothing is more valuable than words.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is a merciless theocratic totalitarian state; a brutal, militaristic dictatorship which is an enemy of its own people, is led by a fanatical anti-Semite, and for three decades has served as the headquarters for a multinational war against the West, and particularly against the United States. The leaders of Iran do not mince words about their hatred of the United States; why should we hesitate to speak up for freedom?
How sad that libertarians, supposedly America’s most consistent defenders of liberty, are so eager to avoid the possibility of military confrontation that they will adopt and even encourage cravenness and appeasement to the egos of totalitarian dictators. We should reject that approach. John Quincy Adams famously said we were “friends of freedom everywhere; defenders only of our own.” We may disagree at times over the second half of that proposition, but we should never waver on the first.
Update: Christopher Smith argues that, as a matter of prudence, it’s wiser for the Obama administration not to make comment. But as David Bernstein observes, “Just for example, a simple ‘America is always on the side of free elections, freedom of expression, and individual liberty’ without further comment would have sufficed.”
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