[This is Chapter 2 of Murphey's book Out of the Ashes.]

 

                                                                Chapter 2

 

                                       THE ETHOS OF GLOBAL INTERVENTION

 

 

            Powerful opposing forces – some centrifugal and others centripetal – contend for preeminence in the world today.

            A centrifugal flying-apart into fragments occurs in movements that in many places passionately seek local autonomy.  They often want secession from the larger entity to which they have belonged.  A short list of the areas in which local cultures are asserting themselves in a great many parts of the world includes the United Kingdom, northern Italy, Spain, Corsica, Canada, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, southern Mexico, Macedonia, Bavaria, Sweden, the Russian Federation, Indonesia, the Philippines and many parts of Africa. 

            In their recent book Beyond Westphalia?: State Sovereignty and International Intervention, Thomas Weiss and Jarat Chopra interpret the secessionist impulse as an aftermath of the breakup of the European colonial system that followed World War II.  They say that "the decolonization process that began in Africa and Asia continues not only in the former Soviet empire but also within newly independent states, as ethnic particularism and subnationalism surface...."¹  Weiss and Chopra would almost certainly agree, however, that the fragmentation goes far beyond what can be attributed directly to the breaking away of the European colonies.

            The centripetal tendency, on the other hand, leads toward consolidation.  It entails an all-encompassing outlook premised on the assumption that "everybody's business is the world's business."  It presumes a proper role for global policing and social welfare.  Historian David Callahan speaks of an "internationalist project as a whole" that is backed by "elite liberal internationalist opinion."²  The past century has seen the growth – even though unevenly and with much interruption – of a "global community."  This often holds definite opinions about what is right and wrong, and is willing to take action to mold the world, as best it can, in the direction it finds desirable. 

            Cultural historian Samuel P. Huntington says "the term ‘universal civilization'" is used to speak of "the assumptions, values, and doctrines currently held by many people in Western civilization and by some people in other civilizations."  He suggests that "this might be called the Davos Culture."  The name comes from a tangible presence: "Each year about a thousand businessmen, bankers, government officials, intellectuals, and journalists from scores of countries meet in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland."  Huntington tells how "Davos people control virtually all international institutions, many of the world's governments, and the bulk of the world's economic and military capabilities."³

            The Davos meeting is just the most recent sign of a consensus that has long existed among the global elite (and here I use "elite" in a neutral sense that denotes those in the professional classes who hold the most prominent positions).  The name "Davos Culture" is useful, but the consensus is much older and more expansive than could possibly be suggested from a single annual gathering.  Even those who point to the influence of the Tri-Lateral Commission or the Council on Foreign Relations, which are essentially parts of what Huntington is referring to with his term, are speaking too narrowly.  In his book The Warrior's Honour, Michael Ignatieff tells how the impulse toward universalism has been developing within Western civilization for several centuries.   

            Ignatieff speaks of centuries during which "Europeans gradually came to believe in a myth of human universality... that human needs and pain are universally the same."  Part of this was "the Christian promise of the universality of salvation," and it was reflected in "the jurisprudence developed by early modern natural law theorists [when they] sought to provide a universal natural law."  He says that "one of the moments when the universalist definition of human identity won an irreversible victory over the particularist view was the successful campaign against the slave trade, and then against slavery itself, from 1780 to 1850."⁴

            Elsewhere, I have referred to all of this as a gradual "lowering of the threshold of human compassion," since more and more people have come to be included within the scope of benign sensibility.  By no means should those who are critical of it think of it in limited, personalized terms.  Such a broad-based change of sentiment among so many people of like mind, nurtured over the centuries, is hardly a "conspiracy."    

            Even though universalism has been the historic tendency, this doesn't mean that there is necessarily a popular consensus in Europe and America today in favor of a policy of global intervention and meliorism.  Such a policy is a major leap from the more limited politics of the nation-state.  Where it most finds favor is among those who are wedded to what we now call "politically correct" thinking (a euphemism for conformity to the ideology of the elite). 

            Hedley Bull describes a "common intellectual culture" that exists "only at the elite level."⁵   A fair summary of the consensus within this "world community" would be that it is

 

            ·          "social democratic," but in a way that still allows it to be

            ·          enthusiastically supportive of a global market economy;

            ·          state interventionist in economic and social matters, despite its commitment to free trade;           

            ·          internationalist, increasingly subordinating national sovereignty; 

            ·          ready to see more and more issues as global rather than local;

            ·          reformist;

            ·          and action-oriented toward imposing its will where it can, despite many practical difficulties, double standards and blind spots.        

 

            This community is by no means laissez-faire toward world problems.  Among other things, it hopes to relieve humanitarian crises, address the chaos within "failed states," decide which secessionist movements deserve to succeed and which to fail (sometimes making a point out of "self-determination" and sometimes not), protect "human rights" as those have become generalized within an international code of conduct, act at least selectively against "war crimes," prevent genocides, protect the world's environment, foster arms control, "stop bloodshed" by ending conflicts, encourage "multiethnicity," advance the "status of women," maintain strategic balances of power, preserve "international stability," and operate through international rather than national agencies.

            An overlapping ideological climate prevails in the United States, Great Britain and Western Europe.  The outlook within these countries forms an important part of the "international consensus" among the world's elite.  The cocoon of "politically correct" attitudes surrounds people in opinion-forming circles.  The ideologically correct outlook is insisted upon for the great body of professionals and semi-professionals – in fact, conformity to it is declared obligatory for all members of society.  A great many opposing opinions exist, but they find little effective expression and there is considerable social, economic (and sometimes legal) pressure against them in circles considered respectable.  

 

Significantly different from containment

            This internationalist meliorism is conducting s

omething that differs in significant ways from the long twentieth century struggle to contain Communist expansion as a militant totalitarian ideology.  The vast global intervention and common effort that went into the decades-long effort toward "containment" were essentially defensive.  A single people could hardly be expected to stand up effectively on their own against the subversion, the assassination squads, and the externally-armed and supplied fifth-column movements that emanated from the Soviet Union and Communist China.  This matching of an enormous movement against individual nations meant that as the process continued the "Free World" would shrink and become surrounded, as Mao proposed, by a "countryside" of Communist states, each dedicated to the destruction of "bourgeois" civilization. 

            Writing in The Mises Review, David Gordon takes issue with the view I just expressed.  He asks, "given the weakness of socialism as a method of economic organization, were the Soviets in any position to maintain world hegemony?" and answers that "eventually, a socialist system must collapse into chaos."⁶    The demise of the Soviet Union after seventy-plus years demonstrated, of course, the wisdom of Ludwig von Mises' insight into the economic unworkability of socialism,⁷  although that insight needs to be combined with certain others, such as about the political difficulty of holding together widely disparate elements in a broad empire.

            Gordon's point should give us reason to pause before we worry about vast expansionist systems in the future, because they do indeed have Achilles heels.  But to have relied on the premise that "the problem will take care of itself" as totalitarianism marched through all of the continents of the globe would have placed the non-Communist societies at ever-increasing risk.  It is possible, of course, to look at it primarily from the vantage point of the United States, but that would be too narrow, since civilization everywhere was at issue.  Anything less than containment would have surrendered much of the world and seriously threatened the rest. This is not the situation we face today.  Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the intervention has – instead of being defensive – been geared toward, in effect, "minding everyone's business." This is why Gene M. Lyons and Michael Mastanduno find cause to ask, "Are we currently witnessing the emergence and recognition of a legitimate ‘right' to intervene in the domestic affairs of member states in the name of community norms, values, or interests?"⁸

            In the period since September 11, 2001, the "war against terrorism" has, of course, propelled the United States and its allies into increasing interventionism.  But at least in its early stages this response is largely defensive in the same way that containment was, even though this defense has mostly been made necessary by the hatreds incurred through the earlier interventionist policy.  Just the same, we run the risk that the meliorist, "minding-everybody's-business" type of intervention discussed in this chapter is likely to be encouraged by the conflict against terrorism unless Americans come to understand that the dangers that make the war necessary stem precisely from the earlier interventionist policy.   

            Although considerable American foreign intervention, both in "containment" and in the immediate response to the atrocities of September 11, has been defensive, it is important to understand that the meliorist effort between the end of the Cold War and late 2001 actually resumed its original Wilsonian thrust.  There were serious moves in its direction before and even during the conflict with the totalitarian systems.  It was a general world-improving spirit that inspired the League of Nations and the Kellogg-Briand Pact that outlawed aggressive war, and later the creation of the United Nations at the end of World War II.  President Jimmy Carter's policy toward black Africa was enigmatic from an anti-Communist point of view, but becomes clear when we see it from a world-meliorist perspective.

 

Some impulse, at least, toward restraint     

            The mindset that favors a universal policing and social servicing of the world has, however, been beset by considerable costs, frustrations and inadequacies.  So we see a second detour from all-out world meliorism.  The frustrations have prompted prominent voices to call for restraint – although by no means for a general repeal of the mindset.  Before September 11, this less-than-total universalism had become an important school of thought in itself.  Here are some of its leading manifestations:

            Caspar Weinberger, the U.S. Secretary of Defense under President Reagan, favored certain preconditions to U.S. military involvement.  There should, he said, be (a) vital interests at stake, (b) a clearly defined and feasible mission, (c) Congressional support, and (d) a viable exit strategy.  It is worth noting, however, that Secretary of State George Schultz so heartily opposed these limits that he openly took issue with them in speeches even though he was a member of the same administration. 

            After the Gulf War with Iraq, U.S. General Colin Powell announced the "Powell doctrine."  He wanted U.S. military involvement "only if victory is assured, if [the United States] is willing to use overwhelming force and if the fight has broad public support."⁹  It has been said since September 11, however, that the nature of the conflict with the Taliban was such that the "overwhelming force" element of this wasn't applicable, since quick-strike capability is much more suitable to that war.

             When answering a question during the 2000 presidential campaign debates, George W. Bush seconded the need for an exit strategy and at the same time argued that the United States should have priorities that would treat the Balkans and Middle East, say, as more important than Rwanda when choosing where to intervene. 

            Insight magazine said about the two candidates, Bush and Gore, that they "agreed on four fundamentals that have to be met before deploying troops: (1) It must be in the national interest to do so; (2) the threat to be met must menace U.S. national security or important allies; (3) the objectives of the mission have to be clear and success assured; and (4) there has to be an exit strategy.  The vice president added that the costs should be proportionate to the benefits."¹⁰

            In an interview just before taking office, Bush expressed a restrained view toward aid to Russia: "It's hard for America to fashion Russia... We don't want to be lending money and/or encourage the lending of money into a system in which the intention of the capital is never fulfilled.  The intent of the capital was to encourage entrepreneurship and growth and markets."¹¹

            After the failure of the "nation building" intervention in Somalia, even U.N. secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali wrote a supplement to his An Agenda for Peace that called for "scaled-down expectations and missions."¹²

            These concerns exist alongside the broad philosophy of meliorism; and since the concerns are based on practical, reality-based factors, they are bound to put limits on it.  The result is that "the Security Council's definition of what constitutes ‘threats' to international peace is both expanding to cover virtually any subject and remaining selective in application," according to Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst (emphasis added).¹³

            Needless to say, this restrained position contains considerable ambiguity.  Before September 11, the principal thrust remained in favor of involvement in problems everywhere.  In the early 1990s, a group of highly influential people – who included Senators John McCain, Sam Nunn, and Pat Roberts; Condoleezza Rice, later George W. Bush's National Security Advisor; Brent Scowcroft; David Gergen; and executive directors from Harvard University, the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom, and the RAND Corporation - formed the private "Commission on America's National Interests."  The Commission's Report represents a sort of "middle interventionist" position.  Its restraint is evident in its desire to relate intervention to a particular country's national interest, in its desire to prioritize subjects of interest,¹⁴ and in its moderating of the call for efforts to universalize democracy and human rights.¹⁵

            Nevertheless, the Report calls for a vastly interventionist role for the United States.  It is considered absolutely essential to "prevent the emergence of a hostile hegemon in Europe or Asia," and "extremely important" to "prevent the emergence of a regional hegemon in important regions, such as the Persian Gulf."  Accordingly, the United States is charged with the responsibility of "managing the power balance" in East Asia, and with "preserving the independence of Ukraine and the Baltic states and protecting them from aggression, intimidation, and blackmail."  The United States is to defend allies, prevent genocides, end conflicts, and assure the survival of Israel, among other endeavors.  The moderation comes only in allowing selectivity and occasional decisions not to act. 

            Despite this detour by some into a somewhat illusory "restraint," there have nevertheless been many voices calling for the more sweeping view.  Thus, Steven W. Mosher, one of the United States' leading China experts, writes from the perspective of an "American global primacy."  He is fully explicit about it: "We need make no apology for striving to maintain America's global primacy... America's continued preponderance over China, as well as other states, brings with it important advantages for Americans.  The benign American order carries benefits for the wider world as well by promoting prosperity, political development, and international peace."¹⁶  In like fashion, Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, in their book The Coming Conflict With China, speak of the "principles of Western-style liberal democracy" as having "become the global norm."¹⁷ Mosher, Bernstein and Munro are, of course, just three voices out of many.

            In his State of the Union speech on January 29, 2002, President George W. Bush included a passage that, though conditioned in a small way that actually proves meaningless, envisions the United States' playing a sweeping Wilsonian-type role. Here is what he said:

 

            No nation owns these aspirations, and no nation is exempt from them.  We have no intention of imposing our culture.  But America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity: the rule of law, limits on the power of the state; respect for women; private property; free speech; equal justice; and religious tolerance.

 

            America will take the side of brave men and women who advocate these values around the world, including the Islamic world, because... we seek a just and peaceful world beyond the war on terror.

 

            The qualification that "we have no intention of imposing our culture" is disingenuous.  Global commerce and communication are doing that already, and a crusade on behalf of the ideals of the Enlightenment will complete it.  Bush seems not to realize that the "non-negotiable demands of human dignity" he enumerates do in fact run counter to the fundamental premises of many cultures, where the belief is in an organic rather than individualist society.  This is apparent when we reflect on the fact that the elements he lists would involve a repudiation of the main outlines of Western civilization itself as it existed prior to the nineteenth century.  If it is intended that the United States champion the supporters everywhere of religious tolerance, limited government, private property, and the like, that does mean "imposing American culture."  Whether imposing magnificent ideals upon a recalcitrant world is a valid and valuable American undertaking is the main subject of this book.  The rhetoric is splendid; the reality less so.

 

The issue of legitimacy

            Legitimacy for the meliorist project is thought to stem from the collective consensus that underlies it. "What appears to be required to justify intervention, increasingly, is what might be called collective legitimation,"¹⁸ according to Lyons and Mastanduno.  Those who identify with this "world community" feel that they are already in command of a sort of world government that uses the United Nations and a vast web of international organizations ("IOs"), even though it is not yet fully institutionalized as a government as such.  They lay claim to the various features of government: jurisdiction, coercive power, and legitimacy. 

            The concept of legitimacy-through-collective-will calls for serious reflection.  Ironically, it is precisely the basis upon which lynching – a phenomenon of frontier-like communities acting upon outraged public opinion and not feeling themselves accountable to anything outside themselves – could be said to be "legitimate."  No enlightened person accepts that as morally supportable in a well-ordered society.  The idea that a powerful group's consensus validates itself reminds us of what, according to Thucydides, the Athenians told the Melians: "In fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept."¹⁹  In the absence of a universally-recognized sovereign power based on a commonly-embraced moral and legal order, an international quasi-government is open to justifiable criticism on precisely the issue of legitimacy.  This is, in fact, the view taken of it by many commentators in the non-European civilizations.

 

Roles of the United States and others

            The will of the American elite is fully in evidence within the international meliorist project.  This is so even though "action by the world community" is hardly comparable to a well-oiled machine and the United States has often acted on its own because of others' reluctance.  Friedrich Kratochwil cites an author who points out that the rationales for intervention "usually coincide with the U.S. position on virtually any issue...."²⁰  In Somalia the initial U.S.-led intervention in late 1992 was replaced in May 1993 by the United Nations effort, but a recent book adds that "although the United States did hand over formal control of the operation..., it still determined the nature of the operation."²¹          

            The near-universal presence of the United States (its "primacy," to use Mosher's term) is attested to by the fact that, according to Insight, "as of July 1998 the United States had more than 200,000 troops stationed in 133 countries and territories and another 20,000 sailors and Marines on Navy ships."  In late 1999 there were 6,000 in Bosnia and another 6,000 in Kosovo.²² 

            This doesn't rule out involvement by others.  Callahan speaks of "a consensus... emerging among the major democracies that a sustained collective effort must be made to deal with humanitarian crises and failed states."²³  On the world economic scene, action is taken through the major powers who have formed the Group of Eight. 

            It is a moral oddity that the "world community" has sometimes thrown open its cloak to include even the totalitarian states, such as in quarantining white South Africa.  Robert H. Jackson says the quarantine "was effective because the West and the Communist bloc cooperated to make it so."²⁴  In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the unanimous vote of the General Assembly, which means that even the Communist members voted for it.²⁵  (All the while, Communism worldwide was producing a death toll that responsible scholars estimate at 85 to 100 million people.)²⁶  Recall that a Soviet judge sat on the Nuremberg tribunal.  This participation by totalitarian governments necessarily suggests vast double standards, and conceptual and moral ambiguity.

            Nor does the "world community" rest easily upon its throne.  The offsetting rise of ethnic, religious particularisms – the "centrifugal forces" I spoke of earlier – is only the tip of the iceberg.  Huntington observes that nine highly diverse civilizations exist in the world.  "The concept of a universal civilization is a distinctive product of Western civilization," he says, adding that "the idea of a universal civilization finds little support in other civilizations.  The non-Wests see as Western what the West sees as universal."²⁷  Stephen D. Krasner points out that "there is not yet any compelling evidence that the polities of the major powers are infused with a full commitment to democracy and liberalism.  The United States and Japan do not share the same social purpose.  Much of the Islamic world utterly rejects the West.  The political trajectory of Russia and the other republics that were part of the Soviet Union is uncertain."²⁸ 

 

The changed mental landscape of American interventionism

            From the beginning of American national existence until 1898, the United States committed itself explicitly to being a shining example of a free society while at the same time not intervening in Europe or other parts of the world.  John Quincy Adams expressed this eloquently in his Independence Day speech in 1821:

 

            Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been unfurled, there will [America's] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be.  But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.  She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.  She is the champion and vindicator only of her own... She well knows that, by once enlisting under other banners than her own... she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue... She might become the dictatress of the world; she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.²⁹

 

            In 1897 seventy-six years later, The Nation expressed the same outlook in an editorial that opposed annexing Hawaii:

 

            We are under the most solemn obligations to the civilized world not to diffuse our ‘happiness' or our ‘life' among other people in the old way.  We have for one hundred years made known to all mankind... that when we spread we meant to spread... through knowledge and trade, and law and liberty, and brotherly kindness.³⁰

 

            This agreed with Andrew Carnegie's comment two years earlier that "the man in America who should preach that the nation should interfere with distant races for their civilization, and for their good, would be voted either a fool or a hypocrite."³¹

             There were, of course, dissenting voices.  Walt Whitman wanted President Polk to send 60,000 troops to Mexico to establish and permanently guarantee a reformed government there.³²  During Europe's revolutionary years in 1848-9, enthusiasm existed in the United States, supported by Secretary of State Daniel Webster (but also strongly opposed by Senators Clay and Calhoun), for assisting Louis Kossuth's Hungarian independence movement against the Habsburg monarchy.³³  Thirty years earlier, Webster had urged the United States to intervene to support Greek independence from the Turks (but ran into opposition from John Quincy Adams).³⁴  In 1869, President Grant wanted to annex Santo Domingo, only to see the Senate reject the treaty of annexation.³⁵   Probably the most significant tendency toward a social-interventionist outlook (though its expression remained internal until the late nineteenth century) was what Murray Rothbard calls the "postmillennial pietist Protestantism that had conquered Yankee areas of northern Protestantism by the 1830s" and that wanted "to stamp out sin" within the United States.³⁶

            In 1898, what had been a minority position became the majority outlook.  1898 is thus a watershed year in the history of the United States.  That year, the United States annexed Hawaii and went to war against Spain, prompted by the outcry over abuses in Cuba, taking on long-term involvements in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. 

            These actions differed in kind from the continental expansion of the United States to the Pacific Ocean.  That was an expansion into what was perceived as empty space, despite the presence of the American Indian who was seen as hardly counting because of the Indians' nomadic way of life, thin population and vastly lower level of development.  The actions of 1898 involved exercising power over indigenous peoples of very different ethnic and cultural origin, and were motivated by an internationalist spirit of meliorist responsibility.  The Nation inveighed in vain against this sea-change in American opinion.³⁷

            Even though many Americans have continued to uphold the traditional view and even though the steps toward global intervention over the past century have often been halting and uncertain, the prevailing American assumption has been that almost anything that goes on in the world is Americans' business if only it is sufficiently dramatically brought to Americans' attention and appeals to their moral indignation.  On May 27, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson told Americans that "we are participants, whether we would or not, in the life of the world.  The interests of all nations are our own also."³⁸  Historian Eric A. Nordlinger says that "[Wilson's] conflation of American power and morality was evident in urging intervention in Europe both to uphold our rights on the high seas and to ‘make the world safe for democracy.'  When the Navy bombarded and occupied Veracruz in 1914, Wilson maintained that ‘the United States had gone to Mexico to serve Mankind.'"³⁹

            In 1943 while President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was contemplating the formation of the United Nations, he thought "the real decisions should be made by the United States, Great Britain, Russia and China, who would be the powers for many years to come and that would have to police the world."⁴⁰  Along the same lines, when Robert McNamara became director of the World Bank he "threw its resources behind ‘a new world economic order' on the premise," Walter McDougall says, "that the rich ‘have a responsibility to assist the less developed nations.'"⁴¹

            McDougall observes that President Harry Truman's "Point Four, though modest at the start, amounted to a promise to extend the New Deal and Fair Deal to the world."  And he tells how President Dwight Eisenhower became convinced of the need for a worldwide drive against poverty by "the birth of the non-aligned movement in 1955 and the Suez crisis of 1956," believing that "the freedom of nations can be menaced not only by guns but by the poverty that communism can exploit."  Driven by the need to contain Communism, McDougall says, "Global Meliorism secured the bipartisan support needed to sustain grants, loans, and investments that would transfer, all told, some $2 trillion (in 1980s prices) from the First to the Third World by 1990."⁴²

            Between approximately 1947 and 1989, much of this was part of the strategy to contain Communism.  The global-meliorist underpinning was never absent, however, and served as an underlay.  FDR wasn't thinking of containment in 1943 when he included the Soviet Union as one of the world's four policemen.  Nor was Francis Fukuyama thinking of meliorism as having been limited to the needs of containment when after the disintegration of the Soviet Union he wrote about "the end of history" based on what he saw as the "final triumph of liberal market democracy."⁴³

 

Conclusion

 

            In this chapter we have noted the existence of a world-meliorist project and of American leadership within it prior to the September 11 attacks.  Unless the outlook changes, the project is likely to remain as an underlay even during the potentially vast conflict now underway.  It would be reassuring to think that the interventionism is well-advised and its results even primarily constructive.  The rest of this book will, however, cast considerable doubt upon those assumptions.

 

 

                                                                   ENDNOTES

 

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