Ramesh Ponnuru begins a forum discussion at the Washington Post with the following observations:
In foreign policy, the pursuit of national interest is the beginning and very nearly the end of morality. Or so I tend to think. I thus judge Obama’s speech today less on its truthfulness than on its effectiveness. I do not think it would do well on the former score, given its false equivalences (for example, Obama spoke as though women’s rights were not distinctively suppressed in the Muslim world) and misreadings of history (he spoke as though the Treaty of Tripoli were a high point in relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world).
The speech could, nonetheless, improve America’s image. The spectacle of a nonwhite president who didn’t invade Iraq and who pledges to close down Gitmo speaking positively about Muslims might, as the president said, challenge anti-American stereotypes. Perhaps his attacks on 9/11 conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial will also get a hearing. Perhaps the speech will strengthen Muslim reformers. I am skeptical about these outcomes–but not without, well, hope.
What about you?
I think Ponnuru considers this some kind of moderate position for a conservative to take. Rather than quibble about whether, for example, there are seven million Muslims in America or less, he is willing to grant that a better measure of Obama’s Egyptian speech is its likely effect. But let’s consider his first sentence. He considers the morality of a foreign policy to be almost synonymous with the national interest. This is a pretty good example of why conservative foreign policy can easily slip into preemptive war and the torture of detainees. If something can be said to advance our national interests it is almost impossible that it could be immoral.
There might be a long-term view in which this is true in a kind of tautological sense. In other words, if you have a clear and correct understanding of the national interest, it’s not possible to craft policies that are so immoral that they will undermine those interests. But, what seems to happen more often is that we take a short-term view. We want this dictator gone so that we can get out of an embargo and sanction regime that is making us less safe and is not accomplishing its purpose. So, we tell a bunch of lies about how imminently dangerous the dictator has become. We want information from a detainee today, so we throw away inconvenient prohibitions against torture. It’s easy to make mistakes of this type if you first allow yourself to believe that morality is completely pliable to whatever might be in the national interest. Invading Iraq and torturing detainees made us less safe and less influential and less powerful. Those actions did not ultimately serve the national interest precisely because they were immoral.
Yes, it is better to swear off those tactics and strategies and seek areas of economic and educational cooperation. It is better to show respect to other cultures, even ones that are considerably more socially conservative than our own. Making people like you and want to cooperate with you is better than relying on fear and coercion. That is the basic insight of the American political system.
