The Immorality of Foreign Policy Moralism
Here’s a snippet from a BloggingHeads episode I recorded with Jon Chait late last week, but that only just recently went up on their site. We’re talking about the Russia-Georgia situation:
I sort of prefer to express myself in writing, so to reiterate my idea here the point is that I think a lot of people have a tendency to wave the flag of “morality” or “idealism” in foreign policy as a way of evading responsibility for the consequences of their ideas. At the extreme, I think everyone agrees with this. There would have been nothing “moral” about it if Dwight Eisenhower had taken an “idealistic” stand over Hungary in 1956 and wound up causing a nuclear war. Nor would the fact that the resulting war would, in an important sense, have been the result of immoral Soviet actions really done a great deal to exculpate Eisenhower. There’s nothing new about this idea, it’s all in Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” where he says that in the political domain we need an ethic of responsibility, where you put forth initiatives that actually lead to good consequences.
In foreign policy, this is the animating ideal behind Lieven & Hulsman’s concept of Ethical Realism which despite some disagreements on policy specifics, I think is generally the right way to think about this stuff. When I say that maintaining a good relationship with Russia and China so as to allow for progress on nuclear proliferation, climate change, and international terrorism rather than a new era of cold wars and proxy conflict is so important that we need to let some other stuff slide, I’m not saying we need to set morality aside in order to pursue our interests. I’m saying that, morally speaking, the one course is better than the other. Trying to promote a world in which peaceful cooperation and commerce predominate over coercion and violent conflict is a profoundly moral approach, even if it at times requires people to temper the natural human instinct toward moralistic posturing.
39 Responses to “The Immorality of Foreign Policy Moralism”
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August 26th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Good for whom? Waging senseless wars can be a good way to look tough at home and an excuse to call your opponents “appeasers” or “traitors” or “objectively pro-Saddam.”
These are all “good” outcomes, from a Republican perspective, regardless of the damage to the US.
.
August 26th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
For starters, how badly would Russia have to behave, in your opinon, before that bad behavior outweighed the benefits of letting it slide? It sounds like you’re advocating a strictly utilitarian calculus, where we count (dead) heads on one side of a policy argument and heads on the other, and whichever action would lead to fewer deaths and less destruction wins. But there are a lot of problems with that. In the first place, it’s very hard to do. We don’t know with any precision what the chance is that our not working with Russia might result in the wrong guy getting his hands on a nuclear weapon, or how many lives will be saved if we work with them on terrorism and climate change - we just know the possible extent of loss of human life, but have no real idea on what the odds of the worst-case scenarios actually happening really are. Working with them could save no lives and it could save millions. People of your ideological persuasions will stress the potential millions, people of Kagan’s will minimize future risks and stress the loss of life that’s happening right now, and we’re left with the argument we started with. Secondly, if you say, “better that we save the planet from climate change and dirty bombs going off in Times Square than save Georgia,” you could also make that argument for much larger nations, because climate change and nuclear terrorism are going to trump almost anything. Certainly they’re bigger issues than the survival of any of the former Soviet states or members of the Warsaw Pact. But there’d be something patently ridiculous about an argument that said it’s somehow moral to let Russia have virtually any territory it wants because getting in their way might enhance global warming.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
In addition, the inclination to use moralistic rhetoric that is not backed up when called can be a source of greater instability in international affairs (Matt has written about this as well)
August 26th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Is this just utilitarian versus deontological ethics all over again, or am I missing something?
August 26th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
I think Chait summed up the entire point when he said Georgia was ‘a democracy threatened by a hostile aggressive power’. Putting aside the fact that Iran is a democracy threatened by a hostile, aggressive power, I’m not clear that Russia is particularly hostile, aggressive or, for the matter, undemocratic. (Russia is not a model democracy, and neither is Japan.) Meanwhile, Georgia is not a model democracy either.
If you buy the idea that Georgia is pure as the driven snow and Russia is black as pitch, then tradeoffs hardly matter in that context, do they? HITLER HITLER HITLER!
And further to that point, your remark about Kagen being accurate that Russia has violated all international norms is, I think, wrong. The basis for the entire argument is that Georgia has ‘internationally-recognized borders’. But that claims seems to be based on thoughtless acceptance of pre-existing Soviet borders cobined with rejection of Abkhazia’s and South Ossetia’s claims to their old borders. Which makes no sense. Georgia hasn’t possessed those territories for a long time, and I don’t think they have a good claim to do so; Russia was peacekeeping the frozen conflict there, and Georgia launched an aggressive attack, although they claim to have started a classic neo-con pre-emptive war.
If the Serbians had launched an offensive against US peacekeepers in Kosovo, the US would have hit back hard, of course, but I think the Serbian claim to Kosovo (based on the preexisting WWI treaties) would have been far better than the Georgian one, but I don’t think that would have justified launching an aggressive attack on US peacekeepers. (If there had been a justification for such an attack it would have to be based on the Serbians living in northern Kosovo. I think the Kosovars had a decent claim to the Albanian parts of Kosovo based on self-determination and the sins of WWI, and a not very good at all claim to all of Kosovo based on the previous existence of the ‘Autonomous Sub-Province Kosovo’, but once you get that far down in the weeds, the Abkhazian and South Ossetian claims look golden.)
max
['You have to hit them where they live.']
August 26th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Well, I doubt anyone’s crazy enough to advocate a foreign policy based on deontological ethics. But depending on what kind of utilitarian model you use you’re going to come up with very different answers. For instance, do you give greater weight to present costs/benefits of a policy than future ones, or do you treat them equally? Do you multiply risks out by the probability of their actually occurring, or do you say that some disasters are just too big to risk whatsoever? How do you measure the cost in misery and unfreedom of an oppressive regime?
August 26th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Of course it’s utilitarianism, AndyB. MY’s point is that in international affairs, utilitarianism is the only moral framework that makes sense. This is correct.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
For starters, how badly would Russia have to behave, in your opinon, before that bad behavior outweighed the benefits of letting it slide? It sounds like you’re advocating a strictly utilitarian calculus, where we count (dead) heads on one side of a policy argument and heads on the other, and whichever action would lead to fewer deaths and less destruction wins. But there are a lot of problems with that. In the first place, it’s very hard to do.
First, Matt isn’t making a “strictly utilitarian calculus”. He’s simply saying that when one speaks about a moral foreign policy, there is more than just one way to think of that morality. In other words, just because Jonathan Chait says, quite absurdly, we are all Georgians, doesn’t make it so, and when pursuing a policy objective of driving back the Russians, the U.S. might be sacrificing other moral values.
The refrain that if one doesn’t share a particular view of a moral foreign policy (namely, intervention) that one has somehow dodged a tough moral choice is tiresome and wrong.
While a lot of people like to comment on foreign policy without any understanding of the crisis du jour. I would prefer a Russia that was not antagonistic toward its neighbors. I would prefer a United States that did not invade countries halfway around the world. Those are my moral judgments.
Just cause they don’t align with Jonathan Chait’s doesn’t make them, in fact, moral. It just makes them different.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
True, it’s probably more damaging to make threats without action than to make none at all. And one has to make painful realistic choices about what can be done diplomatically, economically, militarily to restrain bad actors.
However, you utterly void your argument of any intellectual content when you restort to logical fallacies — in this case, using ad hominem semantics to tar the opposing argument. When you say, “requires people to temper the natural human instinct toward moralistic posturing” you make two ad hominem attacks on your opponent, 1) arbitrarily labeling opposition to international bad actors as mere “posturing” without substantive value (you give no rational argument why this is should be so a priori or otherwise; 2) that your opponents must be resorting to these actions out of “intemperate instincts” rather than on rational grounds - again you give no argument (other than a vain implication of false consciousness). These tendentious characterizations of your opponent’s position give the impression that you have little interest or confidence in arguing the issue on the actual merits.
Your argument claims that your position is moral because the outcome is moral, but you specifically void your position of any morality or rationality when you insist that opposing wrongs is not moral but mere posturing. Perhaps opposition to a bad actor must be curtailed for realistic reasons, but this does not make your silence or the bad act thereby good, merely an unfortunate, unavoidable, but immoral reality.
You also make a generic implied assertion which is demonstrably false historically, that “maintaining a good relationship” will inexorably or even predominantly lead to cooperation and commerce and away from violent conflict. These kinds of things need to be decided case-by-case, on the merits, and can never be decided with certainty. Taking a stand, symbolically, diplomatically, or economically, is not always mutually exclusive with “maintaining a good relationship.” Depending upon its effects on opposing regimes, it may or may not be effective, while “maintaining a good relationship” may or may not turn out to incite conflict more directly. Likewise military intervention is sometimes the path to the least overall violence. It depends.
Since these outcomes cannot be known — either way — in advance, it is wise to be cautious. But your dogmatism on which choices are generally optimal regardless of context, made plain by your unwillingness to state your argument merely in rational terms, totally ignores the fact that there are also moral costs, and often long-term costs to “peace and commerce”, to saying and doing nothing (be it symbolic, diplomatic, economic, or even military).
At least try to state your argument in ways that appeal more directly to reason and less to tendentious semantics.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
MY’s point is that in international affairs, utilitarianism is the only moral framework that makes sense. This is correct.
I don’t think he’s saying that and if he was, it would certainly be incorrect. He’s talking about letting some other stuff slide and he is not saying we need to set morality aside. Utilitarianism in a narrow sense isn’t really a moral framework and it only really works if it has a strong foundation in moral values, and that would be human rights in this case, else it is just a fancy excuse for egotism and greed. The decision to let some things slide and not others has to be reevaluated constantly.
August 26th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
In our own lives we try to follow moral codes and yet must consider the impact of our actions on those around us.
The supposedly moral hawks show no such consideration of these matters — invade Burma, overthrow Zimbabwe, attack Sudan, you know, just because it’s right and they have bad governments and if the consequences of those ill-thought actions happen to include cataclysms for the populations we’re trying to help, well, f*** them, because this isn’t about them, it’s about our ability to assert our moral values loudly.
Pondering the consequences of our actions? Why, that’s for the little people, somewhere. We Moral Hawks must busy ourselves with high-minded declarations.
August 26th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
An extension of what Yglesias was saying is to not go and start stupid wars on hypocrisy. If Mexico had sent troops into Puerto Rico, or to Texas a breakaway region of Mexico what do you think the US would have done? If Ireland had sent troops into Northern Island, what would Britain have done.
It’s about being real about power and recognizing that great powers would use force in their immediate geographic sphere. It’s not really a moral issue either.
August 26th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Asher and Q are fundamentally right, MY doesn’t seem to understand the argument he’s making. Plus making those issues paramount in the China and Russia relationships makes the cost of their compliance go inexorably up. If they know they can act in any other sphere with impunity, they will do so.
The CAP paper earlier in the week on China was much better in that it started from a position of acknowledging the uncertainty surrounding China’s future direction. Both those who claim that China is inevitably on the march to a middle class free market democracy or worldwide conflict with the US are blowing smoke out of their asses. We need to maintain a balance in these relationships to guard all of our interests, morally based or not. And more to the point, we need to maintain a little humility and flexibility in policy making, which seems to apply to both MY and Chait.
August 26th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
But that claims seems to be based on thoughtless acceptance of pre-existing Soviet borders cobined with rejection of Abkhazia’s and South Ossetia’s claims to their old borders. Which makes no sense. Georgia hasn’t possessed those territories for a long time, and I don’t think they have a good claim to do so
Georgia’s faults are plentiful enough, but let’s not needlessly apologize for Russia doing what we don’t want Bush doing just because it’s not Bush. If you have to falsely indemnify the bad actor to justify your own non-action, you’ve just wholly nullified MY’s (in any case specious) moral point. And “Thoughtless acceptance of pre-existing [...] borders”? Hmm. How would you apply this rhetoric to 1948? 1967? As I said: case by case is the only way. And be very careful what precedents you set.
August 26th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
MY, I do wish you had taken a bigger chunk out of Chait’s hide. His idea that the US represents “morality” is clearly absurd. The idea that the Russians poison the anti-Russian Ukranian candidate, and we would never do anything like that - after invading Iraq, after trying to kill Moqtada Sadr, after trying to state a coup in Venezuela, after invading Haiti, and this is all just in the past eight years - is simply nuts. It isn’t morality, it is vanity. D.C. vanity. I know that staying establishment and making it in that dysfunctional set is important to you - no Chomsky references! - but surely you could point out that there is nothing moral about helping the Georgian president in his attempt to do ethnic cleansing.
The dumbness, the dumbness of Chait’s look, of his schoolboy arguments, of the whole sector of “Truman democrats” that he represents, really needs to be taken on at every opportunity. Otherwise, it is more of the same, more of the Dems letting the GOP own foreign policy, more trillions wasted on the military, more lives lost for a smug, group thinking band of gated community pinheads.
Creeping Bidenization. It’s bad.
August 26th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Let’s be clear here. The U.S. government was deeply involved in the overthrow of the government of Georgia in a bloodless coup and the installation of Saakashvili in Georgia. The reason was to more quickly “open up” Georgia’s economy for Western investment or, to put it more bluntly, to speed up the process of privatization. Saakashvili then moved to silence any opposition, pack his government with cronies and corrupt the judiciary. He only holds his power through the backing of the U.S. government. Casting him as a “pro-democracy” good guy in a morality tale is not an an honest argument.
August 27th, 2008 at 12:39 am
Yes, but “moralistic posturing” is the way you show you’re better than other people.
And that’s what it’s all about: status striving.
August 27th, 2008 at 1:01 am
Matt, for the past two weeks you’ve made a compelling, tightly reasoned case for what I’m term soft liberal realism.
The one area in which you’ve fallen way short is that, time and again, you seem to have gone out of your way not to express anything approaching a wide-awake moral outrage at the brazenness and callousness of Putin’s regime.
You act as if such an expression would obligate you to endorse the sort of moral-obligation foreign policy that Jon Chait endorses, as if to vent against Putin’s 21st-century Russian imperialism would damn you as a neocon when, in fact, all it would do is indicate that you acknowledge and are angered by the depth of Russian arrogance even as you put your emphasis, rightly, on the abiding need for prudence.
August 27th, 2008 at 6:12 am
Whenever anyone uses the word “morals”, I release the safety catch on my semi-automatic and oil up my Uzi.
Steve Sailer hits it on the head with his last comment. This is what primates spend their time doing - trying to prove they’re better than the next guy so “the gods” will give them life and the other guy death instead of vice versa. And of course, running one’s life - and one’s country - that way immediately leads to the exact opposite outcome.
“the brazenness and callousness of Putin’s regime.”
Oh, please, put a sock in it. Start worrying about the “brazennes and callousness” of the US regime, moron. We just killed another 60 children in Afghanistan out of 90 civilian casualties, the worst civilian death toll since 2001 in Afghanistan. The UN confirmed the count - and the US is STILL saying, “No, they were all ‘militants’ - well, except for only FIVE civilians which we now admit which we denied yesterday.”
Putin is the Flying Nun compared to George Bush and Dick Cheney, you idiot.
August 27th, 2008 at 8:01 am
Returning again to Saakashvili’s moral rectitude, who believes that Dick Cheney’s national security man was in Georgia right before the war to set up Cheney’s September field trip that was just announced?
August 27th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Bob Dylan’s best line: to live outside the law, you must be honest. The US went to war in Iraq ostensibly because American Exceptionalism was guarantee of our good intentions and behavior. 5 years later? American Exceptionalism is in tatters because Bush had other ideas that he didn’t cue us in on. We weren’t honest. People hardly ever are.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:09 am
This isn’t a philosophical debate about utilitarianism vs. deontology. This is a debate over whether we believe in a democracy, a President is responsible and accountable for his actions.
We’ve spent the last 8 years in an accountability-free zone, especially when it comes to foreign policy. Let Osama bin Laden get away? No problem! Invade Iraq on a ginned-up story, tie down our army, and destabilize the entire region while strengthening Iran’s hand? No problem! Saber rattle in Russia, further weakening America by making cheap threats you’ll never follow through on? No problem!
Why is it no problem? Because for some reason, testifying to the purity of your intentions and feelings has substituted for justifying the results you actually achieved in the real world.
Sure, thousands of American soldiers have died in order to strengthen Iran, but President Bush tells us he felt really, really sad when they died, so it’s actually a reason to support him.
And yep, Bush gave up on catching Osama bin Laden, but he also authorized the torture of innocent people, so it’s clear he didn’t fail because he wouldn’t do horrible things. And that’s actually BETTER than succeeding in catching bin Laden!
Sure, the President of Georgia thought the Americans would back his play in Ossetia because John McCain was saying things like “we are all Georgians.” But, uh, when we didn’t back his play, we looked like a paper tiger. But it’s much more important that people got to see how very upset John McCain was, as he impotently jumped up and down swearing we’d save Georgia…and didn’t.
We’ve spent the last 8 years psychoanalyzing our leaders, worrying much more about how they felt about their screwups (ie, did they mean well when they screwed up?) than whether they would fix them. As the Republicans justify their feelings and philosophies, they continue to pretend these things are much more important than their actual decisions.
Personally, I think what you do matters much more than how you feel about it. John McCain has a track record of being catastrophically wrong on all the major foreign policy issues of our time. He doesn’t think it’s a problem we’ve failed to catch Osama bin Laden (because if he did, he wouldn’t have endorsed the guy who said “I’m not too concerned about him” in 2002).
You’d think this should matter more than John McCain’s self-testimony that he really deeply wants things to be awesome for America more than Barack Obama wants things to be awesome for America. But even after 8 years of listening to Bush’s self-serving psychoanalysis, the press would still rather report on John McCain’s self-serving psychoanalysis than on whether these guys have a history of being right or being wrong. Because while John McCain’s self-serving psychoanalysis isn’t biased, the facts of his record apparently are.
August 27th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Well, for starters, significantly worse than we behaved in Iraq.
August 27th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
For starters, we would need actual logistics in play that would allow us to counteract Russian actions. Europe won’t play along with effective economic sanctions because they depend too much on Russian oil and natural gas exports. No one who isn’t insane wants to get into a shooting war with Russia on their borders. As a thought experiment, ask yourself what could the rest of the world have done to prevent the US from invading Iraq once it decided not to do so? No state is interested in facing down the US military mano-a-mano. Only the EU and China are big enough markets that economic sanctions in their markets against the US would have had any effect and even then the harm to their domestic economies would have been too large. Without the necessary logistics, all you have is masturbation.
August 27th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
The supposedly moral hawks show no such consideration of these matters — invade Burma, overthrow Zimbabwe, attack Sudan, you know, just because it’s right and they have bad governments and if the consequences of those ill-thought actions happen to include cataclysms for the populations we’re trying to help, well, f*** them, because this isn’t about them, it’s about our ability to assert our moral values loudly.
Well for some of the anti-war left it certainly isn’t about those put-upon foreign populations. Let them rot. We can feel morally superior in opposing war.
It reminds me what that callous Republican Jim Baker (who stole the 2000 election) said about the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia: “we don’t have a dog in that fight.” That’s how the anti-war left feels. Actually, they feel their dog is however is opposing the west and America.
August 27th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Peter K: I’m not interested in feeling morally superior by opposing war. I’m interested in not feeling STUPID by supporting pointless wars for the criminal rich.
You - not so much.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:21 am
Peter K, you shouldn’t build strawmen in your house. They are a fire hazard.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
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