February 17, 2003

THE HORSEFEATHERS DOCTRINE: FOREIGN POLICY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

GRATEFUL? YOU MUST BE JOKING!

The United States is the most generous, magnanimous nation in history. In the twentieth century we paid billions of dollars to support World Wars One and Two. “Give us the tools and we will do the job.” We gave the Brits the tools Winston Churchill asked for, but they couldn’t do the job, not without us. We might easily have hung back in Europe, as many of our military leaders advised, and sent the majority of our resources to the Pacific to fight the Japanese. But our sentimental hearts would not let the gallant Brits fight the war themselves. So we pitched in and lost our blood and treasure—three hundred thousand men and trillions of our hard earned dollars—to save the West Europeans for the second time.

Then in the most selfless national act in the history of Western Civilization we created the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe. The U.S. taxpayer—all those cowboys and rednecks, all those simple, tasteless, vulgar guys who won the war for them, reached into their wallets and gave all the countries of Western Europe—friends and enemies alike—money enough to rebuild their homes and industries. Those silly, materialistic Americans couldn’t bear to see German kids eating rat sausage, and the poor Frenchman having to sip chickory coffee in his local café, so they gave the Europeans 12 billion dollars to help them recover. Twelve billion dollars in 1948 dollars is the equivalent of one or two trillion dollars today. That was in addition to the military aid we gave to France and England in order to keep the Red menace from oozing into Western Europe. That was in addition to the cost of keeping an army of American forces in West Germany at the ready to face down the Soviets during the cold war for the past fifty years—until the Soviet threat disappeared.

Back then in 1948 those simple, impulsive cowboys rode to the rescue and saved the two million citizens of West Berlin from having to learn Russian. In response to the Berlin Wall and the Soviet blockade of West Berlin by land and water the United States instituted the Berlin Airlift in June of 1948. We flew food and fuel to the isolated West Berliners until the Russians gave up the blockade in September of 1949. During that period we flew 277,000 flights into Templehof Airport, twenty-four hours a day, sometimes at three-minute intervals, so that our de-nazified brothers could feel warm and cozy and full during that winter.

What have we done for them recently? Well for sixty years Joe Taxpayer has been footing the bill for the defense of Europe. This means that the welfare states of Europe used the money that they would have had to pay for their own defense in order to have free medical care, early retirement, long skiing vacations, short work weeks, and several weeks of annual paid sick leave. Paradise at our expense.

THE HORSEFEATHERS DOCTRINE

What the history of the twentieth century—the century in which the United States became a super-power among the nations of the world—suggests is that we have been too moral, too magnanimous and, above all, too sentimental about our relations with other nations.

Throughout the last half of the twentieth century the U.S. guided itself by a foreign policy which seemed to serve its purposes. We formed alliances with our “friends,” first to beat the Axis powers and then to win the cold war against Soviet-led communist expansion. In addition to the use of alliances, pacts, and agreements between friendly powers, we came to depend on the use of “personal diplomacy”—the friendships between certain pairs of leaders who seemed to be unusually simpatico with one another. Churchill and Roosevelt had this kind of relationship, and a generation or two later Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher seemed to show this ability to the mutual benefit of both nations.

The arrival of the new millennium has brought with it major changes in the way the world impacts the United States. In the past two years we have been shocked by the open-throated declarations of war against America by millions of Muslims all over the world and, recently, equally shocked to find that nations with whom we have been allied for fifty years—South Korea, France, West Germany and others—refuse to return our favors and give us support when we need it.

Two other important changes have occurred in the last decade. The first is that the central powers of Europe have decided to unite in order to oppose U.S. interests in the world—to become powerful rivals. The second important change is that America won the cold war and has become the world’s most economically successful and militarily powerful nation in history. We are also the world’s oldest and most stable democracy, demonstrating that political and economic freedom work—not perfectly but better than anything else.

Now we must awaken from our romantic foreign policy dreams and face the hard realities of life in the twenty-first century.

The first reality is that nations are not people. Nations do not and cannot have relationships like people. We can no longer believe in the fantasy that we have “friends” among nations. We have political and economic interests and those interests will be more or less frustrated by other nations who have different economic and political interests. From time to time one or another nation may aid and abet us in our designs because their interests coincide with ours, but that situation can never last for very long. Neither altruism nor sentimentality can have a place in foreign policy. We may have shared many cakes and much ale with our English-speaking “brothers” but it is clear that the anti-American press and impressive anti-war rallies in Canada and London mean that Tony Blair’s good intentions notwithstanding, he may not be able to deliver on his promises.

The second reality is that we live in a Hobbesian world. Out there life is nasty, brutish, and short. Within our country, and within a handful of other modern countries, life is not perilous and can be lived with considerable freedom to pursue individual happiness, but what goes on outside of these is neither predictable nor safe. The laws and style of the jungle prevail. If you don’t believe me try living or getting around from place to place in the second and third world.

Thus the third reality. There is no meaningful concept of laws or morals between nations. Laws and morals have meaning only within a coherent, enduring social structure. We have our laws and morals in America, and these may be similar (but not identical) to some other western countries, but what about Pakistan, or Tanzania, or Saudi Arabia. You can be sure that the men who attacked us on 9/11 believed that they were doing the right and moral thing. What Hitler did to the Jews was legal in Germany. And the morally superior French passed their own laws enforcing roundups and deportations to “the east.” It is foolish and maladaptive to think about trying to do the right or moral or legal thing in the affairs of nations—there is no such thing. The only rule that one can expect to find operating between nations is the rule of self-interest. As it operates today in the United Nations where an elaborate façade masks the hypocrisy.

The nations of the world may be divided roughly into three groups: those who have overtly and covertly declared war on us and our political and economic interests; those who are not our enemies but who are our rivals and trading partners; and a third group who are weak and underdeveloped. Some of these latter may also be the harborers of our enemies.

With the first group, our enemies, the only aim we can have with such peoples is to destroy and defeat them wherever they may be and if necessary to defeat those nations who support them.

With the second group—our rivals and trading partners—we must learn to play a winning game. It’s poker and business rolled into one. We have to make winning deals but at the same time keep them as good customers—an art best left to poker players and businessmen.

It is important to remember that the underdeveloped and impoverished nations of the world elected to become independent, chose their fate. Before they chose independence many of them were much better off as colonies of developed nations—Sudan, for example . In general the colonies of the British were better off than the colonies of the French, who in turn were better off than the colonies of the Belgians and Dutch.

The U.S. has no national moral obligation to be altruistic to these nations, although individual Americans and organizations may feel deeply obligated to help these impoverished peoples. Nationally, it is possible to formulate methods that may benefit these nations without being foolishly altruistic as we have in the past—a policy that has never led to anything but making corrupt leaders wealthy and tyrannical. The details of such programs require a blog with a different focus.

THE HORSEFEATHERS DOCTRINE IN A NUTSHELL:

We live in a Hobbesian world without legitimate morals or laws.

Our only guiding rule must be enlightened self-interest.

Our enemies must be destroyed.

We must help our businessmen to win out over our rivals in the great game of commerce.

We must not continue to feel morally obligated as a nation to give cash grants to underdeveloped nations. We can help such people in better ways.

The only public opinion that should matter to us is our own. We must learn to ignore what the headlines in Paris or Tokyo say, or the name-calling in other countries. In five years nobody will remember what the shouting was about.