In Defense of Mother Teresa: Morality in Foreign Policy

Three major qualifications must be attached to my argument. First, not all crises are of equal importance to world order. Two criteria could help us decide when to intervene. Is the crisis, the domestic conflict, or the policy pursued within the borders of the state, we would ask in each case, likely to threaten regional or international peace and security? Are there massive violations of human rights, even in the absence of such a threat? These criteria correspond to the two sides of the coin of world order: the reduction of violence and chaos, and the creation or maintenance of a morally acceptable state of affairs. Whether it is in our "interest" to intervene to stop genocide or war crimes on a colossal scale I will let the sophists of national security argue among themselves; what I know is that it is our moral duty to act, whenever there is a chance of success.

That brings me to the second qualification. Even when the criteria are met, not every kind of "social work" can succeed, and there are cases in which outsiders are incapable of dealing with the causes of the crisis. In those cases it may still be a good idea to provide a modicum of humanitarian relief, as in Somalia, or to try to limit the number of victims, as the French did, belatedly, in Rwanda. But when the capacity to get at the problem's roots exists, it is a grave mistake to do too little, by putting crippling limits on the mission or by stopping too soon (as may well have happened in Haiti) or starting too late (as in the Bosnian tragedy, which was caused by Serb aggression, and where a much earlier show of NATO force might have preserved the integrity of the multiethnic state of Bosnia and prevented some of the atrocities we are now lamenting). Here I agree with Mandelbaum: when exit becomes strategy, there is something rotten in the realm of foreign policy. There is also something rotten when the blame for failures is dumped on the United Nations, not only because U.N. fiascoes largely result from the failures, ambivalences, and confusions of member states but also because serious efforts at addressing the sources of crises will always necessitate collective interventions and coordinated efforts.

A third qualification concerns the need for public support. Mandelbaum offers two explanations for the lack of support for Clinton administration policies. One is that the interventions he deplores merely responded to the wishes of particular pressure groups in American society. This seems to me quite inaccurate, especially with regard to Somalia and Bosnia. Far more convincing is his argument that the public remained hostile (or in the Somalia affair, became hostile after the deaths of 18 American soldiers) because the administration never provided a clear and persuasive account of American purposes. This charge is true. Although it has made some vague statements about expanding democracy, the Clinton administration has been much too timid in defining and defending a foreign policy based on values and other requirements of world order. American officials contradicted each other and themselves endlessly on Bosnia, and never made the case for the Haitian intervention that Mandelbaum eloquently presents--an appeal to values and a reminder of responsibility.

Mandelbaum, however, would limit American purposes to two broad security interests (military presence in Europe and in the Asia-Pacific region, and prevention of nuclear proliferation) and to trade. He does not seem to notice that the campaign against nuclear proliferation is at least as much about a world order as about protecting American lives; many potential proliferators are in no condition to threaten the United States, but they could create regional chaos and terror. Nor does he note that the drive for free trade reflects American values and beliefs--he himself assumes that "liberal economic policies . . . create wealth and expand freedom"--at least as much as American material interests.

My argument is that a foreign policy adapted to the world after the Cold War must go beyond the purposes to which Mandelbaum wants to restrict it. It must include, on the grounds that they will maintain or restore world order, certain carefully selected interventions in foreign domestic crises. This is not a plea for foreign policy as "social work," a struggle against distress everywhere in the world. It is a reminder that certain levels and kinds of distress are morally unacceptable and certain political, economic, and social breakdowns too dangerous to world order to be ignored. That is what the administration has failed to explain. Perhaps it failed to do so because of its internal divisions between those, especially in the Pentagon, who think like Mandelbaum and those who think more like me. Perhaps it refrained because it sensed the public's reluctance to become involved abroad after 45 years of cold war. But this only increased Americans' reluctance, which in turn drove the administration's obsession with exit dates and the avoidance of "mission creep." And since such restrictions on difficult missions are almost guarantees that the missions will fail, the end result is likely to be a retreat into the traditional foreign policy realm that Mandelbaum defends--at the cost of spreading chaos and misery abroad. For we live in a world in which apathy about what happens in "far away countries of which we know nothing" can all too easily lead--through contagion, through the message such moral passivity sends to troublemakers, would-be tyrants, and ethnic cleansers elsewhere--not to the kind of Armageddon we feared during the Cold War but to a creeping escalation of disorder and beastliness that will, sooner or later, reach the shores of the complacent, the rich, and the indifferent.

Stanley Hoffmann is Founding Chair of the Center for European Studies, Harvard University.