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Elementary

By Robert Wright
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2000, at 11:30 PM ET

"Bush has said that he likes Rice because she explains issues in a way he can understand."—Associated Press dispatch

Condoleezza Rice

I recently obtained a copy of Condoleezza Rice's job application for national security adviser. You can obtain one, too—it's an article she published in Foreign Affairs shortly before the presidential primaries. After reviewing it, I can see why she got the job. She makes foreign policy seem simple—like something that a guy with no prior knowledge of it could master in a weekend at a ranch.

Consider a key paragraph, early in Rice's essay, that has been quoted in newspapers as typifying her worldview. In it she chastises namby-pamby Americans who are "uncomfortable with the notions of power politics, great powers, and power balances." Such discomfort, she warns, can produce "a reflexive appeal instead to notions of international law and norms, and the belief that the support of many states—or even better, of institutions like the United Nations—is essential to the legitimate exercise of power. The 'national interest' is replaced with 'humanitarian interests' or the interests of 'the international community.' " This sort of thinking, she says, is naively Wilsonian, and "there are strong echoes of it in the Clinton administration."

That's an easy-to-remember story line: The struggle for the soul of American foreign policy is between austere realists, who keep their steely gaze on the national interest, and weak-kneed, mush-minded liberals, who get lost in humanitarian concerns and an obsession with multilateral cooperation.

But in drawing this one-dimensional spectrum—national interest at one end and humanitarianism/multilateralism at the other—Rice is conflating two separate questions: 1) When should you act for humanitarian reasons as opposed to reasons of national self-interest? 2) When should you act multilaterally as opposed to unilaterally? There is no necessary connection between the two, a fact illustrated by Rice's former boss, the first President Bush. He justified the Persian Gulf War in terms of strict national interest—oil, jobs—but he fought it under U.N. auspices and with the help of troops from other nations.

Is Rice really blind to the distinction between the questions of why you should intervene and how you should intervene? No, and her article later makes that clear. But it would complicate her story line if, rather than cast Clintonites as sissy liberals who see multilateral agreements as "ends in themselves," she acknowledged and engaged their actual argument: that in the modern world, multilateral support is often a prerequisite for successfully pursuing the national interest.

For example: We need the cooperation of other nations on more and more issues—fighting terrorism, solving environmental problems, fighting drug running and other transnational crimes, isolating Saddam Hussein and other creeps—so doing things that alienate "the international community" carries an increasingly high cost. (Here I will heroically resist the temptation to discuss Bush's globally loathed plan for a missile-defense system, except to say that, aside from annoying just about everyone, it would probably increase the number of nuclear warheads aimed at America.)

In addition to conflating two separate questions, Rice warps one of them. In deciding when to intervene, she says, Clintonites "replace" the "national interest" with "humanitarian interests" as their lodestar. But some people—me, for example—believe that, more and more, it is in America's national interest to address certain humanitarian issues abroad. For example: If we help resolve some obscure overseas political grievance before it has time to fester into terrorism (terrorism featuring, say, biological weapons) isn't that in America's interests?

The Clinton administration endured some right-wing ridicule earlier this year when it said Africa's AIDS epidemic was a threat to our national security (not so much by infecting Americans as by destabilizing the region). Personally, I think this argument has merit. (In fact, come to think of it, I have argued at book length that this type of rising interdependence is just one example of a broader growth in "non-zero-sumness" that has characterized human history ever since the stone age.) But whether you agree with Clinton's argument or not, it is an argument and deserves to be seriously engaged, not ignored or actively obscured.

The post-Cold-War world is very complicated. George W. Bush's worldview isn't. It is Condoleezza Rice's job to reconcile these two facts. Speaking as someone who lives on this planet, I am not being sarcastic when I say: Good luck. And, though she hasn't asked for my advice, I would add that complicating Bush's worldview, however challenging, will be easier than simplifying the world.

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Robert Wright, a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, runs the Web site meaningoflife.tv and is the author of The Moral Animal and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.
Photograph of Condoleezza Rice by Larry Downing/Reuters.
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[Notes from the Fray Editor: Joseph Britt shows why he became one of the Fray's first star posters. Munguza took issue with him: "What's the evidence for Bush's decisiveness: his decision not to tell his daughters or the public about his DUI arrest?" Charles Winter has a quick one-liner here; a cheap shot but it made us laugh.

And Dilan Esper made similar points to Brendan Lynch (below): "While nowadays the tendency is to dress up humanitarian actions in the language of national interest, the Gulf War is the opposite--a war fought to keep the price of oil down that was dressed up as having strong humanitarian justifications."]


The difficulty Bush will face in conducting foreign policy is little different than what Bill Clinton faced eight years ago: as a Governor and then Presidential candidate, neither man was required to spend much time on a subject that did not especially interest him.

In his successful effort to adopt a smug and superior tone toward Bush, Wright flatters the Clinton Administration's foreign policy by ascribing to it a developed worldview. In fact, domestic political considerations have dominated policy decisions for most of the last eight years, prescribing heavy American involvement in areas regularly featured on television and interesting to specific groups of voters (Ireland, Israel); reluctant American involvement in areas sometimes featured on television and of marginal interest to specific groups of voters (Bosnia, East Timor); minimal American involvement in areas rarely featured on television (Rwanda); and a desperate and unseemly desire to only commit military forces in such a way that no American casualties are at all likely (Somalia, Kosovo).

Above all, Clinton has been lucky, in that he has served during a time without direct immediate threats to America's national interest. This is not a criticism, but there is reason to doubt that he would have responded well had such a threat arisen. Bush and his team inspire more confidence.

Otherwise, the differences between Clinton's foreign policy and Bush's will likely emerge only over time. For example, I would expect Bush to renew promotion of trade agreements without the skittishness over foreign labor and environmental policies that Clinton had begun to display. Bush is likely to place greater emphasis on our bilateral relationships with such European countries as Germany, Britain and Poland, in order to circumvent French efforts to use European unity as a tool to diminish American influence. Bush will be better able than Clinton to build relationships of trust and confidence with Mexico's leadership and that of other major Latin American countries. Finally, I would expect the Bush Administration to be more demanding of reciprocity in its negotiations with Russia and China over arms sales and trade.

To those who charge that Gov. Bush is less knowledgable about foreign affairs than might be desirable, I would reply that this can be remedied with time and capable subordinates, both of which he has. He has something else, which too few people have recognized--he is much more decisive than Clinton, or for that matter his own father. This may be the most important quality a President can have in conducting foreign policy.

--Joseph Britt

(To reply, click here.)


I wish the author wouldn't spread the myth that George Bush leveled with the American public about the reasons for the Gulf War--he most certainly did not. In his speeches and public addresses, George Herbert Walker left no doubt that we had to fight to stop aggression and defend freedom in a sensitive part of the world. It was only in his memoirs that Bush conceded the obvious, that the war was fought to prevent oil prices from rising too high by allowing one power to have disproportionate influence over oil reserves. It's not that Kuwait was a democracy (it was a monarchy), and it's not that Iraq hadn't been arbitrarily cut off from the Persian Gulf by a decades-old British mandate (it had), and it's not that we were concerned about Iraqi human rights abuses (said abuses did not, to say the least, begin in 1990). It wasn't even that we would lose access to oil. Saddam would've kept selling it to us if he controlled Kuwait--he just would have charged more.

The U.S. didn't kill over 100,000 Iraqis for oil: we killed them for lower oil prices, and our President lied to us about it. No one who cares about human rights should forget either of those points.

--Brendan Lynch

(To reply, click here.)

(12/20)

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