TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030491/0304640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.2 KB | 141 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 88

Must America Slay All the Dragons?


By Charles Krauthammer


    "Students massacred in China, priests murdered in Central
America, demonstrators gunned down in Lithuania -- these acts
of violence are as wrong as Iraqi soldiers' killing civilians.
We cannot oppose repression in one place and overlook it in
another."

    -- Senator George Mitchell, Jan. 29, 1991

    "So what does this mean, that we want to stop naked [Iraqi]
aggression? Does this mean that the United States will indeed
become the policeman of the world?"

    -- Senator Tom Harkin, Jan. 11, 1991


    Well, gentlemen, which is it? The Democrats first complain
that it is hypocritical to oppose injustice "x" but tolerate
injustice "y". Then they complain that the U.S. has turned into
the world's policeman. How can it be otherwise? If stopping one
injustice morally commits us to stopping all injustice, what
does that make the U.S. if not the world's policeman?

    It does not take a Kissinger to figure that any nation has
to be selective in its attention to the injustices of the
world. Those who imply otherwise have an agenda -- and it is
not to turn the U.S. into the world's policeman. It is to turn
the U.S. into the world's bystander. If opposing injustice
anywhere obliges us to become involved everywhere, then only
a fool would not prefer involvement nowhere.

    This false everywhere-nowhere dichotomy is the moral pillar
of American isolationism. Wherever the American banner has been
raised in the past decade -- Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua and now
the Persian Gulf -- isolationists have demanded to know, How
can we in good conscience oppose bad guys there and not land
Marines in Port-au-Prince or Cape Town?

    The question is posed constantly. Only the place names
change. Mitchell, in his response to the President's State of
the Union address, brought up China, El Salvador and Lithuania.
Mario Cuomo, questioning George Bush's motive for intervening
in the gulf, asks ironically, Was it designed to curb
aggression? Then why not intervene in Afghanistan or Tibet?

    The answer is breathtakingly simple. Why are American
exertions on behalf of the oppressed selective? National
interest.

    Americans, haunted by the stern visage of Woodrow Wilson,
are loath to confess that they do not act for reasons of
morality alone. We would rather not admit that one reason to
resist Saddam Hussein is that we are not prepared to see the
economies of the West wrecked by the ambition of a foreign
tyrant. Indeed, some American critics think it a fatal moral
criticism of the gulf war to say that if Kuwait had only sand
and no oil, the U.S. would not have rushed to its defense.

    The answer to that charge is, Of course not. And, So what?
Foreign policy is not philanthropy. Any intervention must pass
two tests: it must be 1) right and 2) in our interests. Each
is a necessary condition. Neither is sufficient. Otherwise,
foreign policy degenerates into mindless moralism on the one
hand or cynical realpolitik on the other.

    The U.S. does not intervene purely for reasons of morality.
If it did, it would spend itself dry righting every wrong in
the world. Nor does it act purely out of self-interest. If, for
example, a genuine pro-Iraqi coup had led Kuwaitis to join
voluntarily with Iraq, the U.S. would hardly have gone to war
to reverse that action. (During the oil shocks of the 1970s,
suggestions that the U.S. seize the oil fields of Arabia were
never even taken seriously.)

    Every intervention requires a just cause. That doesn't mean
that every just cause warrants intervention. To warrant
intervention, a cause must at the same time be important to the
U.S. The idea that importance ought not matter and that
consistency impels us to intervene against every injustice is
simply American moralism gone wild.

    Life presents us with a hierarchy of evils. Being finite,
we are forced to assign them priority and even, if necessary,
tolerate some lesser evil to fight the greater. Was it wrong
to have blinked at the enormities of Stalin for the four years
that he was needed in the war against Hitler?

    Take a hard case, Lithuania. For the months of the gulf
crisis, until Gorbachev went free-lancing with his peace plan,
there seemed to be a tacit U.S.-Soviet understanding: the
U.S.S.R. would stay within the anti-Iraq coalition, and the
U.S. would go easy on criticizing Moscow's repression of
Lithuania. Is such a deal conscionable?

    One could say that it is foolish, that we are misreading our
interests, that in the long run a freed Soviet empire is more
important to America than a small Arabian principality.
Perhaps, but the critics' charge is not geopolitical. It is
moral. Americans, they maintain, cannot in good conscience
uphold freedom in one place and tolerate repression in another.

    Yes, they can, and sometimes they must. America is not
omnipotent. It cannot be everywhere. It has to have priorities.
One cannot equate the utter devastation of Kuwait with the
cruel but hardly fatal repression of Lithuania. There is no
doubt that under Gorbachev or his generals, Lithuania will
continue to exist as a society. There can be little doubt that
under Saddam, Kuwait will not.

    Foreign policy is an exercise in discrimination. Our
resources, like our stores of compassion, are finite. We take
up arms against those troubles that are both particularly evil
and particularly threatening to us. And we husband our
resources to meet those troubles. That will occasionally mean
having to recruit others to help and having to make moral
compromises to keep that help. Hence our long minuet with the
Soviets over the Baltics.

    After the gulf crisis, we must be equally nimble in
reordering our priorities. We must immediately turn to a
vigorous advocacy of Baltic independence. But it would be
irresponsible to jeopardize the war effort by doing so during
the crisis. War is no time for moral luxuries. The first task
in war is winning it.

    We cannot slay all the dragons at once. There is no dishonor
in slaying them one at a time.