CHAPTER SIX
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
What We’re Fighting For
We have it in our power to begin the world
all over again.
—THOMAS PAINE
AMERICA REPRESENTS A NEW WAY OF BEING HUMAN AND thus presents a radical challenge to the world. On the one hand, Americans have throughout their history held that they are special: that their country has been blessed by God, that the American system is unique, that Americans are not like people everywhere else. This set of beliefs is called “American exceptionalism.” At the same time, Americans have also traditionally insisted that they provide a model for the world, that theirs is a formula that others can follow, and that there is no better life available elsewhere. Paradoxically enough, American exceptionalism leads to American universalism.
Both American exceptionalism and American universalism have come under fierce attack from the enemies of America, both at home and abroad. The critics of America deny that there is anything unique about America, and they ridicule the notion that the American model is one that others should seek to follow. Indeed, by chronicling the past and present crimes of America, they hope to extract apologies and financial reparations out of Americans. Some even seek to justify murderous attacks against America on the grounds that what America does, and what she stands for, invites such attacks.
These critics are aiming their assault on America’s greatest weakness: her lack of moral self-confidence. Americans cannot effectively fight a war without believing that it is a just war. That’s why America has only lost once, in Vietnam, and that was because most Americans did not know what they were fighting for. The enemies of America understand this vulnerability. At the deepest level their assault is moral: they seek to destroy America’s belief in herself, knowing that if this happens, America is finished. By the same token, when Americans rally behind a good cause, as in World War II, they are invincible. The outcome of America’s engagements abroad is usually determined by a single factor: America’s will to prevail. In order to win, Americans need to believe that they are on the side of the angels. The good news is that they usually are.
America’s enemies are likely to respond to these assertions with sputtering outrage. Their view is that America’s influence has been, and continues to be, deeply destructive and wicked. As we have seen, this criticism comes from different directions: from multiculturalists who allege historical racism and the ongoing oppression of minorities; from Third World intellectuals who deplore the legacy of colonialism; from Western leftists who see America as a force for evil in the world; and from Islamic fundamentalists and cultural conservatives who view America as culturally decadent and morally degenerate.
These attacks on America usually begin with complaints about America’s foreign policy. Many European, Islamic, and Third World critics—as well as many American leftists—make the point that the United States uses the comforting language of morality while operating according to the ruthless norms of power politics. This is a theme that we in America hear endlessly from leftist intellectuals like Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and Michael Lerner; it is a also a theme that Muslim fundamentalists have stressed. To these critics, America is guilty of such foreign policy outrages as overthrowing democratically elected regimes in Iran and Chile; propping up dictatorships in Latin America and now in the Middle East; fighting to protect oil fields in the Gulf War while pretending to be fighting for the rights of Kuwaitis; ignoring massive human rights violations where no American interests are involved; starving hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through a cruel policy of economic sanctions; and demonizing people like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden whom the United States itself once supported.
These are serious charges, and they seek to expose as wide a chasm between American ideals and American actions as there was between the rhetoric of Pericles’ funeral oration and Athens’s ruthless massacre of the citizens of the island of Melos. While Pericles sang lofty hymns to freedom, the Athenian ambassadors conveyed a different message in the Melian dialogue: if you do not submit to slavery, they told the Melians, we will destroy you, and our reason for doing so is because we can, because the law of nature dictates that “the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.”1 In short, the Athenian ambassadors made explicit the law of realpolitik: that nations act based not on ideals but on their interests, and that in the field of international affairs, might inevitably makes right.
In his book White House Years, Henry Kissinger says essentially the same thing about American foreign policy: America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.2 And in a sense this is true: The American people have empowered their government to act on their behalf against adversaries. They have not asked their government to be neutral between their interests and, say, the interests of the Ethiopians. It is unreasonable to ask a nation to ignore its interests, because that is tantamount to asking a nation to ignore the welfare of its people. Everywhere in the world this is taken for granted. Asked recently why he once supported the Taliban regime and then joined the American effort to oust it, General Pervez Musharaff of Pakistan coolly replied, “Because our national interest has changed.” When he said this, nobody thought to ask any further questions.
Critics of United States foreign policy judge it by a standard that they apply to no one else. They denounce America for promoting its self-interest while expecting other countries to protect their self-interest. Americans do not need to apologize for the fact that their country acts abroad in a way that is good for them. Why should it act in any other way? Indeed, Americans can feel immensely proud about how often their country has served them well while simultaneously promoting noble ideals and the welfare of others. So yes, America did fight the Gulf War in part to protect its access to oil, but it also fought to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi invasion. American interests did not taint American ideals; indeed, the opposite is true: the ideals dignified the interests.
But what about U.S. backing for Latin American, Asian, and Middle Eastern dictators, such as Somoza in Nicaragua, Marcos in the Philippines, Pinochet in Chile, and the shah of Iran? It should be noted that, in each of these cases, the United States eventually turned against the dictatorial regime and actively aided in its ouster. In Chile and the Philippines, the results were favorable: the Pinochet and Marcos regimes were replaced by democratic governments that have so far endured. In Nicaragua and Iran, however, one form of tyranny promptly gave way to another. Somoza was replaced by the Sandinistas, who suspended civil liberties and established a Marxist-style dictatorship, and the shah of Iran was replaced by a harsh theocracy presided over by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
These outcomes help to highlight a crucial principle of foreign policy: the principle of the lesser evil. This means that one should not pursue a thing that seems good if it is likely to result in something worse. A second implication of this doctrine is that one is usually justified in allying with a bad guy in order to oppose a regime that is even more terrible. The classic example of this occurred in World War II. The United States allied with a very bad man—Stalin—in order to defeat someone who was even worse and posed a greater threat at the time—Hitler. Once the principle of the lesser evil is taken into account, then many American actions in terms of toppling socialist and anti-Western forces, and also of backing Third World dictators like Marcos and Pinochet, become defensible. These were measures taken to fight the Cold War. If one accepts what is today an almost universal consensus—that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire”—then the U.S. was right to attach more importance to the fact that Marcos and Pinochet were reliably anti-Soviet than to the fact that they were autocratic thugs.
A second principle crucial in understanding foreign policy is that of situational logic. Situations change, and therefore policies must be devised to deal with a particular situation at a given time. It is foolish to hold the U.S. culpable for “inconsistently” changing its policy when t
he underlying situation that justified the original policy has also changed. By this reasoning, there was nothing wrong with America supporting Saddam Hussein in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the greatest threat in the region came from Iran; so, too, America was justified during the 1980s in providing weapons to the mujahideen, even if this group included Osama bin Laden, in order to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Obviously when the Cold War ended and, under new circumstances, Hussein and bin Laden emerged as the greatest threats, America shifted its focus and began to treat them more severely. Let us also remember that we know things today about Hussein and bin Laden that were not known then. We cannot fault American policymakers in the 1970s and early 1980s for not possessing knowledge about Hussein and bin Laden that only became available in the 1990s.
What, then, of the starvation of the Iraqi children? This has become a staple complaint of American leftists, and it is one that bin Laden has repeatedly raised. The fallacy of this argument is contained in its premise: that by refusing to trade with Iraq America is to blame that Iraqi children are hungry. To see this fallacy, consider an example. I am walking down the street, eating a sandwich. You approach me, give me an account of your troubles, and ask me to share my sandwich with you. For whatever reason, I decline to do so. Now my reasons for this refusal may be good ones or bad ones. But in either case I am not to blame for your plight. I didn’t cause your hunger. So, too, one can agree or disagree with America’s policy of sanctions, but America is not responsible for the fact that Iraqi children are starving. The reason they are starving is that they are under the subjugation of a barbarous dictator who spends Iraq’s oil revenues on his own indulgences and doesn’t seem to care whether Iraqi children live or die.
None of this is to excuse the blunders and mistakes that have characterized U.S. foreign policy over the decades. Unlike the old colonial powers—the British and the French—the Americans seem to have little aptitude for the nuances of international politics. Part of the problem is America’s astonishing ignorance of the rest of the world. About this the detractors of the United States are right. The critics have also played a constructive role in exposing America’s misdoings. Here each person can develop his own list: long-standing U.S. support for a Latin despot, or the unjust internment of the Japanese in World War II, or America’s reluctance to impose sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid regime. There is ongoing debate over whether the U.S. was right to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
However one feels about these cases, let us concede to the critics the point that America is not always in the right. What the critics completely ignore, however, is the other side of the ledger. Twice in the twentieth century, the United States saved the world: first from the Nazi threat, then from Soviet totalitarianism. After destroying Germany and Japan in World War II, America proceeded to rebuild both nations, and today they are close allies. Now the U.S. is helping Afghanistan on the path to political stability and economic development. (What this tells us is that North Vietnam’s misfortune was to win the war against the U.S. If it had lost, it wouldn’t be the impoverished country it is now, because America would have rebuilt and modernized it.) Consider, too, how magnanimous the United States has been to the former Soviet Union after victory in the Cold War. And even though the United States does not have a serious military rival in the world today, America has not acted in the manner of regimes that have historically occupied this enviable position. For the most part, America is an abstaining superpower: it shows no real interest in conquering and subjugating the rest of the world. (Imagine how the Soviets would have acted if they had won the Cold War.) On occasion the U.S. intervenes to overthrow a tyrannical regime or to halt massive human rights abuses in another country, but it never stays to rule that country. In Grenada and Haiti and Bosnia, the United States got in and then it got out. Moreover, when America does get into a war, it is supremely careful to avoid targeting civilians and to minimize collateral damage. During the military campaign against the Taliban, U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld met with theologians to make sure that America’s actions were in strict conformity with “just war” principles.3 And even as America bombed the Taliban’s infrastructure and hideouts, its planes dropped rations of food to avert hardship and starvation of Afghan civilians. What other country does these things?
Jeane Kirkpatrick once said, “Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is.” The reason that many Americans don’t feel this way is that they judge themselves by a higher standard than anyone else. Americans are a self-scrutinizing people: even if they have acted well in a given situation, they are always ready to examine whether they could have acted better. At some subliminal level, everybody knows this. Thus if the Chinese, the Arabs, or the sub-Saharan Africans slaughter ten thousand of their own people, the world utters a collective sigh and resumes its normal business. We sadly expect the Chinese, the Arabs, and the sub-Saharan Africans to do these things. By contrast, if America, in the middle of a war, accidentally bombs a school or a hospital and kills two hundred civilians, there is an immediate uproar and an investigation is launched. What all this demonstrates, of course, is America’s evident moral superiority.
The moral superiority of America is vehemently denied in three camps: among leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe and the Third World; among American multiculturalists; and among Islamic fundamentalists. These three groups make up the “blame America first” crowd. The discontent of the intellectuals seems to originate mostly from peevishness and envy. The Europeans are haunted by the knowledge that they once had an empire and directed the course of world affairs; now they play the part of assistant coach on America’s team. This subservient role is very annoying, especially given the high opinion that most European intellectuals have of themselves.
For Third World intellectuals, it is simply unbearable to acknowledge how good America is because then they are forced to admit how bad their own countries are. After one of my lectures, a graduate student from Sri Lanka came up to me and protested, “I cannot agree with what you are saying, because if you are right, then I don’t know what to say to people in my country. Am I supposed to tell my people that America is the best and that they are shit?” I didn’t know quite what to say, so I replied, “Well, I’m not sure I would put it that way.” But I was struck by the degree of his agitation. My numerous conversations with Third World savants convince me that they are disgraced by American greatness, and their anti-Americanism is a way to salvage pride.
Multiculturalists have a different reason for objecting to American superiority. In their view, the United States cannot be morally superior because no culture is morally superior to any other culture. The multiculturalists hold that there are no universal standards by which cultures can be judged better or worse. All cultures are basically equal. This, of course, is the multicultural doctrine of cultural relativism. This doctrine was first articulated in the early part of the twentieth century and has been adopted by multiculturalists in the past few decades. Multiculturalists are committed to cultural relativism in large part because they see it as a weapon against racism. Racists are prevented from asserting the superiority of their culture because the very concept of superiority is denied at the outset. Cultural relativism also appeals to American intellectuals in general because they don’t like approaching other societies with the assumption that their own way is always better. The presumption of cultural equality strikes them as a much fairer and more reasonable way to study other cultures.
As a methodological starting point, the premise of cultural relativism seems unobjectionable. Before we know anything about the Papuans, we might fully expect that they have their Proust and Einstein. In examining that culture we should of course be very careful to allow for various forms of knowledge and discovery: their Proust may not closely resemble our Proust, their Einstein may have produced an entirely new conception of the universe. But it is also possible that we will discov
er that the Papuans have virtually no literary tradition, just as many cultures have gone on for thousands of years without philosophy. Equally disconcerting, we may find out that the Papuans have only a very rudimentary understanding of the operations of the natural world. In this case we cannot reasonably continue to insist that Papuan culture is fully equal to Islamic and Hindu and Western culture. It is sheer intellectual dishonesty to proclaim, “The best we can say is that Papuan culture is simply different from other cultures.” Rather, we must revise our relativist assumption and conclude, wistfully perhaps, that Papuan culture is in some respects inferior.
I emphasize the phrase “in some respects.” I am not suggesting that there is any absolute standard by which one can proclaim cultures superior or inferior. The Papuans could excel in other areas, such as face painting or coconut juggling. There is no set of norms in the Platonic empyrean by which we can objectively rank cultures. Nor is there any purpose in staging a cultural Olympics that awards general prizes for “superiority” and “inferiority.” Certainly groups and nations are free to dispute the criteria by which progress and excellence are usually judged. The Amish, for instance, reject many aspects of modernity. They generally avoid cars and telephones, although I recently read that they have established a website to market their products. Even so, the Amish clearly value the solidarity of their community over the convenience of many of our technological contrivances. They have chosen to go their own way. And nobody considers the Amish “inferior” for this.
But the situation is very different when one considers, for example, the main racial groups in America. Despite their various differences, Asian-Americans, blacks, Hispanics, and whites in the United States have the same objectives: all want to be in the entering class at Berkeley and Yale, all would like more seats in the boardroom at Microsoft and General Electric, all seek a greater representation in the Congress. When groups agree on the prize, when they define success in a similar way, it is entirely reasonable to ask which cultural strategy is the most effective to achieve this goal. As I have earlier argued, the assimilation strategy of the immigrants is simply superior in today’s world to the protest strategy employed by African-American leaders, because it leads to more rapid upward mobility and economic success.
What's So Great About America Page 15
