I complained below about Justin Logan’s view that American foreign policy should be organized around the principle of Not Annoying Dictators. It reminded me of this interesting article that Logan published last summer, reflecting on libertarianism and what it suggests as far as foreign policy is concerned—an article that serves as an effective example of what troubles me.
Logan starts out by arguing that governments are self-interested institutions, and their interests are often inimical to the interests of citizens. What’s more, states tend to expand their powers in time of war or the perceived threat of war. So far, so good, but then he continues: the fact that the United States has engaged in military interventions in Iraq and elsewhere has “upset the world’s balance,” which encourages “fear and distrust” in other countries, including in the communist totalitarian dictatorship headquartered in Beijing. And this is a bad thing. The conclusion appears to be—although Logan doesn’t say as much—that we ought not to use our military (or do other things) that will cause communist totalitarian dictatorships to feel “fear and distrust.”
Now, this does not make sense to me. It seems to me to make as much sense as saying that the police ought to refrain from enforcing the law because their doing so causes armed gangs of robbers and murderers to feel fear and distrust, and consequently to do things that hurt people. It seems to me to make about as much sense as to say that we can have peace and international stability as long as we don’t stand up for what is right and oppose what is wrong in the world. It seems to me to make as much sense as to say that appeasement is the key to freedom.
There can be no doubt that the Reagan Administration’s foreign policy caused a great deal of “fear and distrust” that “upset the world’s balance” vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. There can be no doubt that the Berlin Airlift caused Stalin to feel fear and distrust, or that the Kennedy Administration’s blockade of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis caused Khrushchev to feel fear and distrust also.
Is our stand, therefore, to be based on avoiding fear and distrust? Or should our stand be that we support—wisely; usually without military interference—the principles of democratic, constitutionally limited states? Should we not want to cause totalitarian dictators a good deal of fear and distrust? They seem not to be shy of causing us or the other free peoples of the world to feel fear and distrust.
On that last point, a bit further. Is it not far more “disruptive to the international order” for the Islamic Republic of Iran to seek to develop nuclear weapons with which to threaten and very possibly bombard a democratic American ally in the Middle East? Is it not far more of a cause of “fear and distrust” for theocratic madmen like Ahmadinejad to deny the historicity of one Holocaust while he plots a second? If we are to be concerned with international order and the prevention of fear and distrust, shouldn’t we act to stop those whose actions are responsible for fear and distrust in the democratic world? I would think the well-founded fear and distrust of relatively free democracies should count for more than the fear and distrust felt by dictatorships who are wary of losing their oppressive authority.
Here, though, we have the key to Logan’s foreign policy views:
the United States sits unchallenged atop the international order, with an unparalleled ability to shape it and with any potential peer competitor several decades away. This state of affairs is hugely beneficial to us; imperfect though it is, the United States should be working to preserve not overturn, the existing international order.
This is nothing short of an absolutely amoral political philosophy. Because the United States profits from the existing, “imperfect” international order—an order whose “imperfections” include not only the laogai of China, and the brutal, starving dictatorship of North Korea, but the rule of thugs and bigots like Castro, Mugabe, Ahmadinejad, and others—because we benefit from it, we “should be working to preserve” this order! Not just sadly resigning ourselves to it, but working to preserve it. Preserve it because we benefit from it.
We should ignore such paltry issues as justice, and avoid causing “fear and distrust” among said bigots and thugs, so that we might continue benefitting.
One might call this perspective on international relations by any number of names, but “libertarian” doesn’t seem one of them. I would have assumed that the distinctive characteristic of libertarian politics is that it is devoted to the principles of individual liberty—that it assumes at least that all men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that whenever any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. What Justin Logan offers us instead is pragmatism—unprincipled, purposeful ignorance on questions of right and wrong—so that we can “get along” and “benefit” from injustice. H.L. Mencken once sarcastically said that in politics one must learn to rise above principle. Justin Logan says the same with sincerity.
I disagree with this because I believe we ought to be concerned with the right, and because I believe it is impractical not to concern ourselves with the right. When we choose to remain silent in the face of wrong, not merely out of fear, but because we benefit from that wrong, then we are ourselves equally guilty of the wrong. We are complicit in it. We are abetting that wrong. And to do so in the name of a political philosophy that claims a devotion to a principled defense of inalienable human rights is to add a new sin on top of such craven complicity with slavery and murder—it is to add to it hypocrisy.
If the principle “preserve the existing order because we benefit from it” is valid in foreign policy, why is it not also valid in domestic policy? Certainly there are many ways in which we benefit from the existing order in the United States—an order that includes the Drug War, restrictions on employment and property ownership, restraints on free expression and so forth. And yet libertarians work hard to overturn these orders, regardless of the benefits that they derive from many of them. Many good libertarians are troubled even by the idea of accepting government-funded scholarships, because they know that this is money stolen from other people. Should they work to preserve this order because they benefit from it?
And if the principle is valid domestically, is it not also valid in terms of race and class? Should not whites work to preserve those existing orders from which they benefit? Should not workers who benefit from restrictions on immigration and the minimum wage work to preserve those existing orders, because they benefit from them? Logan, ironically, starts out by mentioning public choice theory—but isn’t it just the very point of public choice theory that the polity is harmed by private interest groups who seek to implement and maintain orders from which they benefit, regardless of the effect on the public good?
If America should work to preserve the existing international order—despite its euphemistic “imperfections,” which, I remind you again, consist of torture, murder, enslavement, oppression, and so forth—because we benefit from it, then how can we oppose Costco when it seeks to preserve the existing rules about eminent domain, since after all, it benefits from those rules?
In the end, Justin Logan’s pragmatism is nothing more than the view expressed by the Athenian envoys in the famous Melian Dialogue—that justice is the interest of the stronger.
The choice is not, as Logan claims, between complicity on one side and “radical social engineering” on the other. We can and have been effective spokesmen for the free peoples of this world in the past. And we have a moral obligation if nothing else to speak out for the principles that keep us a free people. Those principles make us free not simply because we choose to believe in them; they make us free because those principles are true—always and everywhere true. (There’s a reason the Declaration of Independence says that the united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.) And if they are true for us, they are equally true for all mankind. It is not our duty to send tanks into other countries’ wars. But it is our duty to speak for freedom when it is threatened. If we remain silent, we are not simply innocent bystanders—we are complicit in the crime. And if we remain silent—who will speak for us, when the time comes? Will we even deserve their voices?
I am reminded of the joke about the two rabbis put up against the wall by the Nazi firing squad. When one ripped off the blindfold and started cursing at his captors, the other said, “Hey, don’t rock the boat.”
In 1977, a ceremony was held in the Katyn Forest in Poland, to commemorate the 1940 murder of some 20,000 Poles on the order of Josef Stalin. No member of the U.N. Security Council attended—except the United States. President Ford made sure to send an American envoy. No doubt this agitated the tyrants of the Soviet Union. And no doubt, to people like Justin Logan, it seemed unwise to make a sentimental gesture about principles in the face of an international order from which we benefitted. But that act of witness was the right thing to do. It was right because Stalin was wrong. It was right because it communicated to the oppressed people of the Soviet Union that we were there, on the other side of the curtain, remembering their suffering. It was right for us to say “no.” It didn’t require tanks. But it did take moral courage. Just as it takes moral courage to say that because I benefit from an unjust order is not sufficient reason to “work to preserve” that order.
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