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Two views of foreign policy morality Samuel Brittan Financial Times 14/08/06 The British Moment Social Affairs Unit, £13.99 What’s Wrong with Liberal Interventionism By Roger Howard Social Affairs Unit, £11.99 The London-based Social Affairs Unit has issued two short books conveying opposing views on foreign policy. The British Moment is a compilation by “young Cambridge academics” in support of the Henry Jackson Society, whose statement of principles has attracted some cross-party support. Jackson (1912-83) was a US senator who was an ardent New Dealer, trade unionist and enthusiast for nationalisation and price controls. He became a supporter of “active international engagement” and is best remembered for his opposition to detente with the Soviet Union. There is a paradox about the whole enterprise. The British Moment comes wrapped in a Union Jack cover and all the emphasis is on British policy. Why, then, take the name of a US senator with a very mixed bag of views? Better to have called it the Palmerston Society after the 19th century British prime minister who selectively favoured “small nations struggling to be free”, often with the aid of British gunboats. The authors try to have it both ways. An interventionist foreign policy is advocated for “moral” reasons; but the authors also insist that it will achieve better results than the “realism” espoused by people such as Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state. The authors do not make a case that is easy to summarise. In a sense they do not have to. Who can object to a policy that tries to prevent mass murder and genocide and favours liberal regimes over corrupt dictatorships? The realist objection is not to the aims but to the consequences of such intentions when carried out by fallible and usually power-seeking politicians and military leaders. As a devotee of Richard Cobden, the 19th-century English statesman, who was on the side of liberty and human rights but who cautioned against intervening in distant parts on the basis of little real knowledge, I came to the other book, What's Wrong with Liberal Interventionism, with a bias in its favour. I was disappointed. The author, Roger Howard, devotes too much space to pedantic arguments about the meaning of terms and shows his Conservative colours in opposition to the incorporation of the European Charter of Human Rights into English law. Howard is right to complain of the overuse of the word “democracy” as shorthand for everything desirable. I myself have a standard lecture I use to try to remove the sanctity from mere majority voting. But it is splitting hairs to bring in these conceptual matters when considering oppression, which should be outrageous to any believer in any version of a liberal open society. Better expositions of the immorality of a “moralistic” approach to foreign policy were delivered more than 50 years ago by George F.?Kennan, the US diplomat and historian, and by the British historian, Herbert Butterfield. Butterfield recounted the case of a pacifist pupil so appalled by the German invasion of Norway in 1940 he enlisted in the Royal Navy and died in service. Butterfield wondered what his pupil would have made of the fact Churchill had the intention of invading Norway but was forestalled by the Germans. One objection to liberal interventionism is that governments can legitimately give more weight to their own citizens than to the rest of the world. Even philosophers with universalist principles could believe that the world might be a better place if each government concentrated on the welfare of its own people, while still giving some weight to the interests of others. In addition, the results of well-intended intervention are often to increase the amount of suffering and misery in the world. The war in Iraq is only one of a series of such esca-pades ranging from the medieval crusades to the doctrine of unconditional surrender in the second world war. Finally, there is the charge of hypocrisy. The western powers were happy to make common cause with the Uzbekistan dictatorship on the dubious ground that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. John Foster Dulles, US secretary of state in the 1950s, preached liberation for communist eastern Europe but was happy to invade countries such as Guatemala when he did not like their regimes. There are other cases where the most blatant atrocities are ignored because it does not suit the western powers to alienate the governments concerned, for instance the killings in Darfur. Then there have been all those arms sales to dubious regimes including that of Saddam Hussein. The most plausible cases of intervention in recent years have been Kosovo and Sierra Leone. It is, I am afraid, a case-by-case matter often to be decided on very inadequate evidence. In a speech in 1999, Tony Blair stated five criteria for human rights intervention. They included adequate preparation for the long term in the countries concerned and confining ourselves to “sensible and prudent” military operations. What is wrong is not the criteria but the ease with which the UK prime minister believes they are met. A ­Cobdenite would examine each case with intense suspicion and often come down on the side of, at most, indirect pressure.
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