In Defense of Mother Teresa: Morality in Foreign Policy

As a supporter of the Carter administration's ideals who quickly became disillusioned with its performance and denounced the gap between its good intentions and contradictory policies, I appreciate the pithy and pugnacious prosecutor's brief that Michael Mandelbaum, a courageous supporter of Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign, has drafted ("Foreign Policy as Social Work," January/February 1996). Much of what Mandelbaum says about the Clinton team's policies toward the other major powers and its failures or deficiencies in handling the crises in Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia is convincing. But the central argument of his essay is, in my opinion, wrong.

Mandelbaum believes that an American foreign policy concerned not with interests but with values, not with relations with countries that have the capacity to affect these interests but with "small, poor, weak" and peripheral countries, is foolish. More than that, it is doomed, both for lack of public support and because turning foreign policy "into a branch of social work" is a recipe for "deep, protracted, and costly engagement in the tangled political life of each country" in which the United States intervenes, in a world "filled with distressed people." I believe, however, that the distinction between interests and values is largely fallacious, and that policy which would ignore the domestic crises that affect so many states and pseudostates today would have disastrous consequences.

MORALLY AT HOME

The national interest is not a self-evident guide, it is a construct. It is the sum of the objectives that the policymakers have set. Some of these are indeed imperatives, imposed by the nation's location on the map of power or by clear threats and needs. But many of the goals that states, and especially the major powers among them, pursue go beyond such imperatives, and result from preferences and choices. These goals are usually controversial. Those who support them cover them with the mantle of the national interest, and those who do not back them argue, like Mandelbaum, that they deal with developments that "could [not] affect the lives of . . . citizens" and thus are not in the national interest. Even during the Cold War, the United States pursued goals that could be connected only remotely to the imperatives of national security and deterrence of the Soviet threat. Mandelbaum presents the invasion of Grenada as part of the Cold War, but does not mention the intervention in Panama, which, of course, took place after the Soviet threat had crumbled. On the other end of the spectrum, the human rights policies that American administrations pursued, in their different ways, in the late 1970s and in the 1980s cannot be explained away as mere tactical moves in the battle against communism.

Great powers pursue both what Arnold Wolfers has called possession goals and what he terms milieu goals. National security deals essentially with the former. But much of foreign policy is concerned with shaping an international milieu that will provide a modicum of order (i.e., reduce the inevitable loads of violence and chaos that an anarchic international system carries) and in which the nation's citizens will feel not only safe from attack or economic strangulation but, so to speak, morally at home. Among the reasons the opposition between interests and values is a sham are that a great power has an "interest" in world order that goes beyond strict national security concerns and that its definition of order is largely shaped by its values. Many of America's policies during the Cold War--especially in relations with allies and so-called Third World countries--and many of the institutions and international regimes it helped establish resulted from preferences that could not be reduced purely and simply to the need to resist the Soviet menace or communism.

In the post--Cold War world, there is, in addition to all the classical interstate conflicts that could disrupt world order, a whole new series of dangers arising from the weakness or disintegration of many states, ethnic and religious strife within states, and dangerous policies that certain states pursue within their borders.ffi Not all interstate conflicts "could affect the lives of American citizens." But does this mean that these conflicts could not disrupt the balance of power and provoke chaos in many parts of the world and that the United States should be indifferent to them? Conversely, not every domestic crisis is susceptible to a resolution imported from abroad, or sufficiently grave to have serious external repercussions (in the form of, say, flows of refugees). Does this mean that a world of generalized internal chaos, in which neighbors of the countries in crisis would be tempted to intervene, would be tolerable from the standpoints of order and of our values? Societies and economies are too interdependent today for us to be sure that what happens in "small, poor, weak" countries will not affect the lives of American citizens, or at least the quality of their lives.

Michael Mandelbaum lives in what scholars have called the Westphalian system, in which relations are between sovereign states of unequal power. But today's world is post-Westphalian: myriad normative restraints and a huge loss of autonomy resulting from transnational forces are eroding state sovereignty generally, and the sovereign state itself, the very floor of the Westphalian construction, is collapsing in many parts of the world. Any U.S. foreign policy that would concentrate exclusively on the traditional agenda would expose the world, and the nation, to intolerable horrors and disorder. (In this respect, even though Sarajevo 1992-96 is not Sarajevo 1914, Mandelbaum's dismissal of the dangers of an expanding conflict in the Balkans is more than a little rash.)

TO JUDGE A CRISIS