a dream
If it has to be a crusade, at least make it a humanistic one:
"Americans may fight evil, they argued, but that does not make us inherently good. And paradoxically, that very recognition makes national greatness possible.-- Peter Beinart, The Rehabilitation of the Cold War Liberal.
"Knowing that we, too, can be corrupted by power, we seek the constraints that empires refuse. And knowing that democracy is something we pursue rather than something we embody, we advance it not merely by exhorting others but by battling the evil in ourselves.
"The irony of American exceptionalism is that by acknowledging our common fallibility, we inspire the world."
Otherwise known as Golden Rule Imperialism: do unto others as you would have your government do unto you. The place where it falls down, of course, is the part where democracy relies on a social contract, not an authoritarian decree.
The problem with having a Foreign Policy is that you obviously have no business enforcing it. Diplomacy and decency require a coherent voice: basic human rights, universal suffrage, environmental stewardship, a fair (not free!) market, rule of law... all desirable things.
But these are practically unenforceable except by treaty and consent. You certainly can't do it with bombs. When enforcement is counter-cultural you can't even do it with a police state.
The best Foreign Policy I can imagine takes all of the resources we deploy trying to enforce policy abroad, and redeploys most of them to implement policy at home, while strengthening diplomatic efforts and subsidizing American standards on a global scale.
You don't need to call me a dreamer, I know.
But for $300 Billion annually we should be able to have safe food and water, good roads, efficient baseline medical care; lights, heat, internet; a well-regulated, transparent market and strong public schools; humane treatment of everyone touched by government; and a fair cop.
Instead we get cowboy wars in the oilfield of hatred. So I guess I'd be willing to settle for the compromise of Golden Rule Imperialism. Who do I vote for?
More from the article:
"We must take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization," [Reinhold Niebuhr] wrote.
"We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
Americans, Niebuhr argued, should not emulate the absolute self-confidence of their enemies. They should not pretend that a country that countenanced McCarthyism and segregation was morally pure. Rather, they should cultivate enough self-doubt to ensure that unlike the Communists', their idealism never degenerated into fanaticism.
Open-mindedness, he argued, is not "a virtue of people who don't believe anything. It is a virtue of people who know. . .that their beliefs are not absolutely true."
And this:
"We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please."-- Harry S. Truman
And this:
As the Jordanian journalist Rami Khouri has noted: "George Bush talks in terms of the U.S. having a national mission to promote freedom in the world. . .everybody in the world looks at the U.S. and asks, Where is the moral and the legal and the political authority for you to do this?
"The authority has to come out of some kind of reference point, some legitimate reference point — treaties, international law, international conventions, U.N. Security Council resolutions, General Assembly consensus, some mechanism that has credibility."
By Psydeshow on April 30, 2006 at 12:26pm
Source: www.nytimes.com