Virtue, power: the dilemma of US foreign policy
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 14: The Trouble with Paradise
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by John Kane
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On coming to office in 2001, George W. Bush encapsulated his administration's intended approach to foreign policy in a seemingly bizarre conjunction of qualities: "strength and humility". Strength clearly signified a determination that America should, as Ronald Reagan said, "stand tall" in the world – though to what purposes American strength would be put remained to be seen.
In his first inaugural address, Bush promised to defend freedom, democracy and peace abroad, though not by direct intervention in the manner of Woodrow Wilson. On the traditional assumption that what's good for America is good for the world, these goals would be secured as a second order effect of a concerted pursuit of "enduring American interests". Bush's understanding of these interests turned out to reflect a very conservative ideology, and his actions in pursuit of them before September 11, 2001 – over the Kyoto greenhouse gas accord, long-standing missile treaties, trade and tariff agreements, and the International Criminal Court – seemed to reveal a bully's willingness to use American strength to override the wishes of other nations. His humility thus appeared as phoney as Uriah Heep's, though distinctly less obsequious.
Interpreting more generously, however, the promise of humility signalled that America had finally learned what Robert McNamara called the "humbling" lesson of Vietnam – namely, that it had no God-given right to shape other nations in its own image as it might choose. Bush's stance toward the wider world was strictly "hands off", even when – as in the case of Israel – this seemed an abrogation of responsibility. There would be no "nationbuilding" on his watch, nor any of that well-intentioned but often bumbling intermediation in the affairs of other nations that had characterised the Clinton era, and which had occasionally – as in Somalia – ended in humiliation and a loss of American prestige.
But if "strength and humility" indicated, most immediately, a repudiation of the Clinton administration's priorities, at a deeper level it signified the persistence of a venerable dilemma of US foreign policy. An enduring article of America's faith in its mythological destiny prescribes that power be used only for virtuous ends, and that American virtue not be sullied in any exercise of power; only in this way can innocent virtue – the Christian virtue of "clean hands" – be preserved without offence to honourable pride.
Yet an irresolvable tension has marked the relationship between power and innocent virtue from the start, causing a frequent oscillation between realism and idealism, and between engagement and isolation. It has also produced recurrent uncertainty about the justice of American actions abroad, rendering the national psyche peculiarly vulnerable to doubtful exercises of power. During the Vietnam era, power and virtue were radically sundered and woundingly undermined. This caused severe and simultaneous injury to America's pride and its sense of innocence. Given this legacy, Bush's "strength" obviously equated to power and pride, while "humility" connoted innocent virtue. The formula represented, then, the latest in a series of post-Vietnam attempts by American leaders to redeem – at least rhetorically – the difficult marriage of power and virtue that the myth seemed to demand. The events of 9/11 caused a radical reorientation of Bush's foreign policy, necessitating a much more virile interpretation of the reconciliation of power and virtue. His administration gave operational definition to this new conception in a hugely ambitious international project aimed at reshaping the entire Middle East and, with it, the post-Cold War international order. It was a bold enterprise marred by miscalculation and imprudent action, and it came to grief in Iraq. Power was once more humbled and virtue soiled, and America found itself again impaled on the horns of the recurrent dilemma that its national mythology had bequeathed it.
AMERICA'S DISTINCTIVE MYTH WAS GROUNDED IN British history and the optimistic theories of the European Enlightenment. An essential premise was that the American experiment in free government was made possible because American virtues – honesty, integrity, simplicity, justice, courage and devotion to the public good – were relatively uncorrupted by the luxuries and rank-subordinations that had supposedly degraded Europeans and undermined the famous liberties of Englishmen. Americans, in their unspoilt wilderness, were closer to nature than Europeans and could lay some claim to the simplicity and innocent virtue that Rousseau had attributed to natural man. If such simple individuals could but maintain their virtue and freedom, they might found a republic that would stand as an example to all the world of what any self-governing, self-reliant, industrious people could achieve in conditions of political liberty and economic opportunity. Americans thus found themselves flatteringly cast as the dramatis personae in a grand unfolding story that ennobled even their most ordinary endeavours – an inspiring narrative of a people selected by Providence from the Old World to found a New World of liberty and hope in a "virgin" wilderness set apart by the Deity for the purpose.
This myth, though European in origin, was gratefully adopted by colonists to justify their rebellion and provide a thread of common meaning to stitch together the disparate sections of their new nation. The American mission to defend and extend human liberty was coupled to the success of the American union, and the success of the American union identified with the best interests of the whole world. American nationalism was thus a transcendent nationalism defined in universalistic terms. Americans would never be able to disconnect their own progress from that of the world's progress. Even their frequent insistence on the need for isolation betrayed, paradoxically, this mythical connectedness.
The problem was how to preserve the simple virtue that made the American experiment possible. Some argued this would be difficult in a commercial republic that encouraged avarice, luxury and individualistic endeavour, but Thomas Jefferson thought all would be well as long as most Americans remained sturdily independent freehold farmers. Though devoted to laissezfaire liberalism, he opposed large-scale manufacturing enterprise which, he said, corrupted virtue by turning labourers into degraded objects. He also opposed strong central government and standing military forces as further potential instruments of domestic tyranny.
A contrary vision was provided by his great rival, Alexander Hamilton, who sought a strong executive government precisely to encourage manufacturing and lay the foundations of a powerful modern state complete with professional military. If Hamilton's vision accurately foreshadowed the destiny of actual America, Jeffersonian thought – magnified by his party's capture of the presidency from 1800 to 1828 – won the nation's soul. After Jefferson, Americans came to accept without much question that superior virtue was part of their national heritage and closely connected to the providential mission. After Andrew Jackson's presidency, most would be equally certain that the mission included the spread of democratic government.
But if America's sense of special virtue proved robust, so did the belief that virtue was vulnerable to corruption and required fortuitous or enforced isolation to ensure its preservation. Jefferson defined virtue as the absence of "disease", and its preservation as a matter of maintaining healthy conditions. Corruption was associated with "contamination", a medical rather than a moral category that demanded sanitary or preventative remedies rather than the fostering of exemplary character. But what if conditions deteriorated due to the growth of manufactures and cities, an influx of immigrants of incompatible habit and religion, or the rise of alien ideologies? It was no coincidence that outbreaks of national paranoia in America always focused on alien contaminants.
The fragility of virtue was also presupposed in the ingenious American political system, which institutionalised extravagant respect for the corrupting effects of power on self-interested individuals. Power implied force and coercion and was the antithesis of virtue, which implied justice, reason, consent. But only power, not virtue, could resist power. Constitutionally separating state and federal governments and the different branches of government one from another allowed power to check and neutralise dangerous power in the political realm, so that the whole system could be made subject to the virtuous rule of law – the judiciary having, as Hamilton said, "no force or will but merely judgment".
American virtue also assumed qualities of Christian innocence and benevolence that were quite absent from ancient republican ideas. The virtue of the ancients was widely admired but, as Jefferson said, that of Jesus was superior; he inculcated "universal philanthropy ... to all mankind, gathering all into one family, under the bonds of love, charity, peace, common wants and common aids".
Innocence became a perennial theme in American history, often lost and as frequently regained. It could be maintained only if American foreign policy avoided the use of coercive force that would undermine its benevolent mission. No agreed realm of super-arching law constrained the interactions of nations and empires, which continued to be determined by force, cunning and corrupting "power politics". How was virtuous America to operate and survive within this field of wickedness without itself fatally descending into wickedness? Here lay the logical roots of the enduring tension between idealism and realism in American foreign policy, and the reason why it typically revealed itself in debates over international engagement versus national isolation. Isolation preserved virtue; engagement always threatened it.
THE DANGERS BECAME ACUTELY APPARENT IN the 1790s when conflict between Britain and revolutionary France divided American political sympathies, causing domestic turmoil and threatening to draw the United States into foreign wars. George Washington's principle of "non-entanglement" in foreign alliances, buttressed by a policy of strict neutrality between belligerents, was intended to obviate this danger.
Such a principle might be expedient for a young and weak nation, but for Jeffersonians it became a means of permanently safeguarding the national mission from the corrupting effects of war. The Washington dictum also indicated that America would best accomplish its mission by pure example, not by active engagement in foreign struggles for liberty. This position was famously enunciated by John Quincy Adams in 1821: America, he said, should be "a beacon of liberty" for all, but should not go "abroad in search of monsters to destroy".
But political isolation had to be reconciled with America's deep involvement in a developing global capitalist economy. Moreover, upholding freedom and independence proved difficult so long as the nation maintained its prejudice against a strong army and navy. Jefferson, as president, tried to substitute economic embargo for military might as a means of compelling respect for American neutrality between warring trading partners, but this was a dismal failure.
Military might was the ultimate currency of international relations, and the United States, lacking any, found itself treated contemptuously by the powerful. After a period of severe national humiliation, President Madison's 1812-15 war with Britain – however agonising to the pacifist consciences of Jeffersonians – came as a relief and gave huge boost to parochial nationalism. (It was no coincidence that an incident in the war inspired the writing of The Star Spangled Banner.)
Jefferson was moved to discard his adamant opposition to manufacturing, since modern industry implied military power, and preserving national security seemed to require a measure of industrial self-sufficiency. By 1823, Jefferson was advising President James Monroe that the preservation of freedom in the Americas might require that the despotic powers of Europe be excluded from the whole Western hemisphere. "Our first and fundamental maxim should be, never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe. Our second, never suffer Europe to intermeddle with cis-Atlantic affairs." This was, of course, the central principle of the Monroe Doctrine promulgated that same year, and destined to become the main plank of US foreign policy for over a century. Ironically, preserving America for the world meant, in practical terms, preserving America from the world – or at least the threatening European part of it.
This whole period exposed the uncomfortable tension that existed between America-the-particular-nation – for which power and martial valour were necessary to maintain pride, honour and interest – and America-the-universal-nation – for which power was a threat to innocent virtue and the national mission. The parochial nation would sometimes think only force would serve. It was clear that territorial expansion against the opposition of native– and Hispanic-Americans could not be achieved with clean hands, nor could a long civil war be conducted other than with horrendous violence. Burgeoning American capitalism could not effectively expand into overseas markets except aggressively.
The Monroe Doctrine, meanwhile, resulted in economic and political hegemony over Latin America, necessitating frequent armed interventions. Americans managed to find ways of rationalising all these in terms of national innocence and the national mission, with a hypocrisy that was virtually demanded by the contradictory demands of the mythology. National greatness could not be denied a great country – indeed, it was seen as a product of American virtue, the natural outcome of freedom, industry and pragmatic genius in an abundant land. Yet to seek national aggrandisement at the expense of innocent virtue, as imperialist nations had done, would be to become just another self-serving state. America would then be great, but meaningless.
Americans became torn between the impulse to preserve patriotic pride and the fear of betraying their benevolent mission through selfish action. They admired equally the rough-and-tumble foreign policy of President Jackson, who placed pride and honour above innocence, but also responded to a Wilson who favoured innocence over worldly pride. Preferences for one of the poles above the other caused a broad division in American society over questions of military power and foreign engagement. Conservative "isolationists" were patriotically proud of American might, but believed the United States should deploy it only as a last resort and under extreme provocation, whence it should hit the provoker with swift, overwhelming force before retiring to the barracks. More liberal Americans were deeply suspicious of the corrupting effects of military power and opposed to larger militarisation but were not necessarily isolationist – being quite prepared, for example, to join international schemes for world peace. Both groups remained opposed to dangerously entangling alliances and neither doubted the necessity of maintaining American virtue, though each interpreted the latter after its own fashion.
The United States managed to avoid major conflicts with the European powers for the whole nineteenth century after 1815, and felt it had succeeded admirably in evading corruption from that source. But, as America grew into a major industrial power, the question of whether and on what terms it should engage with the wider world pressed more urgently. In the midst of the great age of European (and nascent Japanese) imperialism, some argued that the only realistic course for guaranteeing safety and prosperity was to join the great game and carve out an American empire to rival the rest.
Drawing on deep strains of American racism and conventional imperialist rationale, the national mission was reinterpreted in terms of an Anglo-Saxon destiny to bring the benefits of civilisation to inferior peoples. This was supported by some eminent Americans, notably President Theodore Roosevelt, but did not ultimately succeed among a people bred in a belief in anti-imperialism. Despite popular enthusiasm for the war of 1898 against Spain – understood as a war to liberate Cuban peasants from a cruel imperialist power – there was dismay when the result was the acquisition of a formal American empire in the Philippines and Guam. The storm of debate at home was conducted in terms of whether the American mission was to remain purely exemplary (the isolationist option) or become an actively proselytising one (the imperialist option). When occupation of the Philippines provoked an insurgent uprising and a savage American military response, Americans had a foretaste of Vietnam six decades later, complete with congressional revelations of American atrocities and loss of public respect for American troops.
Most Americans still hankered for the non-entanglement policy they believed had served them well. Isolationists just wanted to be left alone, an attitude reinforced by resentment of foreign critiques of the Southern denial of civil rights to blacks. The more extreme among them promulgated a profoundly exclusivist, reactionary version of "Americanism" which, as a corollary, turned "un-Americanism" into a form of treachery. Liberal internationalists, meanwhile, equated treaty alliances with power politics but used American prestige to influence an international peace movement dedicated to establishing a league of nations to end the curse of war forever.
President Wilson was, of course, a seminal figure in this story. A fervent disciple of the American mission, he took a typically strong view of the antithesis of power and virtue. War, even in a just cause, was inevitably brutalising and harmful to innocent virtue and liberty. Yet Wilson rejected isolationism, believing America's economic rise had made it an inevitable participant in world affairs, which it should selflessly influence for the good. He nonetheless opposed entangling alliances, since only weak nations needed alliances, and nations were only weak when untrue to themselves – which America manifestly was not.
Isolationism and non-entanglement, then, were not identical – though isolation implied non-entanglement, the reverse did not follow. Non-entanglement was quite compatible with unilateral American action in the world at times of America's own judgment and choosing. Even when Wilson made the fearful decision to take America into the war in Europe, it was as an "associated" power, its armies kept separate under American command. America would act firmly in the world, even take a leadership role, yet remain incorruptibly its own master. The proposed League of Nations was, of course, multilateral by definition, but Wilson thought he could commit to it without being caught in the corrupting balance-of-power politics of the "old diplomacy".
Wilson believed the Great War had proven the old diplomacy inherently unstable. To balance power with power was to try to bind evil with evil, with inevitably catastrophic results. Yet the great question for the "new diplomacy" was how the League could effectively prevent aggression among member nations. Wilson hoped collective "moral suasion" by formally equal members would be enough, but could not put all his faith in such simple virtue. He argued that Article 10 of the League Treaty must be an "affirmative guaranty" against aggression by any member against any other – in other words, an enforcement clause. This presumed that the only real deterrent against aggression was the threat or exercise of military power, and that there would have to be either a binding commitment of all members to deploy military means or an international force created for the purpose.
But Wilson would accept neither of these, for either option implied a dominant group of Great Powers sufficiently armed for the job. Wilson's objection was really no different from that of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and the other Republicans who opposed him – namely, that the grave sovereign decision to go to war would be taken out of the hands of president and Congress and given to a ruling clique in the League. This would be entanglement on a grand scale; Wilson could not stomach it. He would accept only a "moral" obligation to commit to force on specific occasions, and only subject to congressional approval.
Wilson dithered because he was torn between his distrust of power and an apprehension that, in the political world, nothing moves except by the application of some force. The same deep ambivalence would paralyse American engagement with the world in the years that followed the defeat of the League Treaty in the Senate. Wilson's failure to achieve the goals that alone could justify America's voluntary, selfless commitment to war caused profound disillusionment. It became common wisdom that only a direct threat to the survival of the United States could justify a purely defensive war.
Yet the "isolationism" of the period did not preclude Americans seeking peace through international disarmament treaties, or the Pact of Paris of 1928 ("the Kellogg-Briand Pact") that purported to outlaw war. These were greeted with wild public enthusiasm, for they promised to secure peace not by force or military balance but rather by disarmament, virtuous self-restraint and the pressure of world opinion. However, the pious hope for peaceful diplomacy was defeated first by Japanese expansion in Manchuria and China and then by Hitler's aggression in Europe. Adisappointed America, preoccupied with the Depression, turned severely inward. Despite a rapidly deteriorating international environment, America declined to intervene until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor shocked it out of its paralysis.