Moral Foreign Policy

Written before the Iraq War

Pursuit of a moral foreign policy in the United States has fallen into disfavor since President Woodrow Wilson failed to bring the United States into the League of Nations at the end of World War I.  Morality became less and less a factor until sometime in the 1960s or 70s, when it disappeared almost entirely.  By many standards, the various pragmatic foreign policies that the U.S. has followed since then have resulted in a resounding success.  The U.S. is at the top of the heap.  Democracy and capitalism are the main political and economic forces in more countries than ever before.  Yet, with a few carefully chosen exceptions, U.S. support for democracy and capitalism has been amoral -- not immoral -- but pursued with a lack of the moral vision that characterized this country's policies through the end of World War II. 

After more than 20 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, the two most important experiences in my Government service were my service in the Army artillery in during the war in Vietnam, and my service in the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, Poland, where World War II and the Cold War came alive for me.  

In Warsaw, I was responsible for a relatively small science fund to which both the U.S. and Poland contributed.  The U.S. abruptly withdrew from the fund, although it had agreed to participate for several more years, thereby abandoning scientists who had stood by the U.S. during the bad days of the Cold War, including some who had fought the Nazis in World War II.  I was so disappointed in my country that I left the Foreign Service shortly thereafter. 

Now that I am out of the Government and out of Washington, I find that I still can't forget Vietnam or Poland.  Two men in my artillery battery died in Vietnam.  I ask myself why.  They didn't believe in the war, but they gave their lives for something.  I think that it was for the rule of law.  The United States had decided to fight in Vietnam; it had called them to fight, and they had gone -- unlike Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Trent Lott, Newt Gingrich, and most Senators and Congressmen.  Many of the conservative Republicans among them, including some of the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, have become the new "chicken hawks."  

I spent most of my career in the State Department working on controlling the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.  In policy discussions inside the State Department and with other foreign policy agencies, I was always struck by the true believers who were committed to one side or another of issues that could have been decided either way.  They were ready to have someone else die for their beliefs.  Yet, I, who had been to Vietnam, often found myself unconvinced by either side.  Listening to them, I felt like Shakespeare's Hamlet, listening to the passion of actors.  Seeing the passion they expressed for Hecuba in a play, Hamlet thought:

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?  What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have?  He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.
Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn'd defeat was made. Am I a coward?

While he was at the Pentagon and White House, Gen. Colin Powell's solution was not to confront an enemy unless we had overwhelming force.  That worked in Desert Storm, but would it have prevented Churchill from coming to the aid of Poland? Churchill and Roosevelt were often concerned about doing the right thing, but at the end of the war they abandoned Poland, on whose side they had originally entered the war, to the Soviets.  Declaring victory, when victory was not quite achieved, led to the Cold War, and was repeated in Korea, Vietnam, and Desert Storm.  On one hand, political leaders must lead their countries in the right direction; on the other, they must sense when the country as been led as far as it will go in that direction. 

Written after the Iraq War

One factor in abandoning Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union was that the Soviet "second front" was essential to winning World War II.  The Soviets had more than ten million people killed in that war, more than any other country involved and almost twice the number killed in the Holocaust of the German death camps.  The Allies had to treat the Soviet Union as an equal.  Of course the other factor was that Britain and the U.S. were very tired after years and years of global war and did not want to take on an adversary that had played such a big role in defeating the strong German army.  That certainly was not the best thing for the Poles and other Eastern Europeans, but it probably was the best thing for the Western nations.  Britain, which had played the strongest European role in opposing Hitler, never recovered the greatness it had before the war.