THE UNITED STATES IN THE WORLD ARENA 2006

Ellis Sandoz, Louisiana State University

Philadelphia Society National Meeting
 Sheraton Society Hill Hotel, Philadelphia, PA
April 2, 2006

Copyright©Ellis Sandoz 2006. All Rights Reserved.

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Our question is: What is the proper role of the United States in world affairs?  My answer is that it must be what it has always been: To serve liberty and justice as best we can while defending our security and national interests.  None of these terms is susceptible of tidy definition, of course.  So I offer a few sketchy remarks to augment what we have so far heard from our esteemed colleagues. 

1.  Foreign policy.  No entangling alliances, despite abiding appeal to isolationists, xenophobes, and pacifists, didn’t take us very far.  It was effectively repudiated with the Louisiana Purchase which paved the way for Manifest Destiny.  After the lessons taught by the War of 1812, the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 asserted the enduring principle that the United States is to be active in the world arena and that it stood against colonialism or lesser use of force within its sphere of influence then understood primarily as North and South America–but not forgetting the Barbary pirates and their ilk.  This drawing of a line in the sand and daring anybody to cross it without suffering consequences has characterized foreign policy since that time.  Speak softly and carry a big stick became explicit in the Roosevelt corollary.  With the collapse of British power, the interest sphere expanded to encompass the rest of the free world during the Cold War, only so long as vital American interests are implicated.  This included communist expansion or potential expansion (the Truman doctrine later elaborated by Walt Rostow) or any threat to vital national security interests judged sufficient to warrant diplomatic or military action. “Containment” positively meant keeping the world safe for democracy and out of the hands of totalitarian and especially communist despots– as first demonstrated on a large scale in the Korean conflict where major United States military assets were deployed with beneficial lasting results from 1950 until today. 

2.  Current Bush Administration doctrine. From the time of the Founding there has been a moralistic if not plainly religious tinge to these policies, grounded like the country itself on the “laws of Nature and nature’s God” as “self-evident truths” and felt to be an “almost chosen people” blessed by Providence, a light unto the nations.   America did not have to wait for Woodrow Wilson to become righteous. It understood and represented itself as a force for good against palpable evil and tyranny from its beginning. Thus also in the wars of the 20^th century, whose rich rhetoric is familiar to all of us–with varying degrees of public acceptance of this overriding justification for action from the high ground while still attending to mundane military,  economic, and geopolitical threats.  A moral justification in addition to calculated rationality and interests has been judged essential in this country, if public support is to be marshaled and sustained for any period of time.  The failure or inability for various reasons to do so (a potent Left and biased media among others) ultimately doomed the Vietnam policy of Kennedy and Johnson. 

3.  Post 9/11.  The trauma of this malicious Islamist attack engendered a shift in policy emphasis, from sturdy deterrence and containment to proactive diplomatic and military initiative. Preemption as a dimension of Just War theory, and of the universal right to self-defence, is not new with the current Bush administration (e.g., Bay of Pigs, Grenada), nor does it signal imperialistic designs much less eschatological intoxication–as the loud Left and our more excitable citizens clamorously assert.  But it takes on sober importance (to include preventive war)  as an option of last resort in an era of lethal WMD danger when absorbing the first punch could involve wholly unacceptable risk or a knockout. As Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said in 2002, "the risks of waiting must far outweigh the risks of action."

            Not completely new–think of post-Civil War Reconstruction, the Open Door to China, and the Marshall Plan for instance–but more novel and ambitious is express and energetic pursuit of transformative policies. These are calculated to foster by all available means the move of nations to liberal market economies and democratic free governments worldwide as the primary prophylaxis against hostility and deadly threat from regimes or from the fanatical enclaves they may finance or harbor.  

4. Core current policy.  This is different in tone and perhaps of more dubious validity. It rests on the convictions (as formulated on March 16, 2006) that:  “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.  The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world....To protect our Nation and honor our values, the United States seeks to extend freedom across the globe by leading an international effort to end tyranny and to promote effective democracy.  We will employ the full array of political, economic, diplomatic, and other tools at our disposal [to that end].... We have a responsibility to promote human freedom.  Yet freedom cannot be imposed; it must be chosen.  The form that freedom and democracy take in any land will reflect the history, culture, and habits unique to its people...The advance of freedom and human dignity through democracy is the long-term solution to the transnational terrorism of today.... There are four steps we will take in the short term: We will 1) prevent attacks by terrorist networks before they occur; 2) deny WMD to rogue states and to terrorist allies who would use them without hesitation; 3) deny terrorist groups the support and sanctuary of rogue states; and 4) deny the terrorists control of any nation that they would use as a base and launching pad for terror.”  (Quoted from “The President’s National Security Strategy,” March 16, 2006, released by the White House.) 

5.  Pragmatism and politics. Davy Crockett’s motto was “Figure out what’s right and go ahead!”  This maxim well expresses the spirit of the Bush foreign policy in the war on terrorism: it is simple, honest, and moralistic.  It is pure Texas (and Methodist) Sunday school, one might even say–and we have to take President Bush’s religious convictions seriously because he takes them seriously himself.    It leads with the American trump card by transforming American exceptionalism into a universal movement: one invoking a universal human nature and identifying individual liberty as natural to all human beings–a defining God-given attribute and inalienable right. Relatedly, it favors free market global economics and fosters an international community of sovereign free democratic states.  On the key point President Bush remarked at a press conference on Aril 13, 2004: “I have this belief, strong belief, that freedom is not this country’s gift to the world.  Freedom is the Almighty’s gift to every man and woman in this world.”

            Can such policy also be realistic?  Perhaps as realistic as drawing to an inside straight, if you play poker.   However: Better a bold policy than a timid one, or no policy at all, in an ineluctable high stakes game where losing is no option.  Besides: God takes care of children, drunks, and the United States of America, we cheerfully remember. 

6.  Potholes in the road to peace.  Nobody said this would be easy, and criticism abounds.  For instance:

•                     Woodrow Wilson couldn’t do it and neither can George W. Bush.  But the United States was not then the preeminent world leader, hegemonic or superpower, and economy.

•                     The whole endeavor has a destabilizing effect on global politics: safe and friendly authoritarian regimes are better than hostile pseudo-democratic ones in the hands of terrorist entities like Hamas.  This is madness we hear.  (Bring Saddam back?)

•                     The other nations of the world will never accede to such blatant Westernization/ Americanization and/or secularization.  Even (especially?) Europe is skeptical.  It is either too religious or too secular. Maybe. The American public–hearing the incessant clamor of the hollow men composing the world’s ideologized self-anointed “elites”–has no stomach for the kind of dissensus or for the protracted conflict and carnage before us. Isolation and pacifism are too strong to sustain the effort essential to even modest success. Anyway we don’t like imperialism, so bring the boys and girls home, and set up a perimeter around San Francisco, our last bastion of resolute true-blue patriotism.           

            In the media age of information overload, deculturation, manipulation of public opinion, and vitriolic politics, blood on the TV screens 24/7 dramatizing  the horrors of war makes the whole effort patently un-American not to mention plain distasteful. Too many casualties!  Where’s the good news?  The price is too high! And for what?

•                     We’ll go broke in the process: Iraq may now be costing roughly a billion dollars per week, we’re told; the deficit is soaring, the national debt threatens the economic foundations of the Republic: we can’t afford the war on terrorism. Embrace peace in our time. The Soviets couldn’t afford the Cold War; how can we afford this one?  By making the tax cuts permanent?

•                     Rampant anti-Americanism has exploded both at home and abroad because of Bush policy.  We’ve lost all our friends and politics has seldom been more polarized.  Nobody remembers or cares that we saved the world from Adolf Hitler, Tojo Hideki, and later on from the Sino-Soviet evil empire in Central Europe and in Korea.  Class struggle fanatics, having mastered only one flawed text, monotonously decry a dark geopolitical capitalist plot.  Peaceniks incapable of constructive action burn our flag in indignation that we seek to foster regimes devoted to honesty, justice, and individual liberty.  Pass the soma.  Give us the peace of secure serfdom is the cry!–like those oppressed by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor for whom hated freedom was the ultimate tyranny, personal responsibility.  Away with all your principles!  We want to be loved! 

7.  Reality check.

•                     The world has gone from 20 to some 120 democratic nations since the Second World War: if there is a wave of the future in global affairs this is plainly it.

•                     If Indonesia and Turkey can democratize (“rowdy”or not) there is some reasonable hope for the rest of the Islamic world, even if not in accordance with Western models of free governments–a fact explicitly recognized by current Bush policy.  Don’t             expect uniform results but amelioration of traditional systems.  Politics is the art of the possible some sage once said.  Economic freedom may induce political freedom.   It’s worth a try in any case since it brings better lives to all men and women–as can be seen everywhere it exists.

•                     Battle casualties is a painful subject. Every life is precious and cherished, yet some perspective beyond if-it-bleeds-it- leads sensationalist journalism and the howls of peacenik movements is mandatory: 140 miles west of where we’re meeting today 51,000 American soldiers died in a 3-day battle in July 1863 at Gettysburg.  Some 10,000 men died on D-Day; over 6,500 Marines and 21,000 Japanese soldiers died in five weeks on Iwo Jima; the 82-day battle of Okinawa cost more lives (about a quarter of a million) than were lost through both atomic bombs dropped on Japan–one reason these horrific weapons were used to end the war.  The great 1950 Chosin Reservoir 70-mile fighting retreat from entrapment by 100,000 Chinese troops, in 18 days cost 3,400 American (1^st Marine Division and the 7^th Infantry Division) and over 25,000 Chinese soldiers’ lives in during combat.  But it helped secure democracy in South Korea for the next fifty years, where it still thrives.  That war is hell is more than merely a cliché.  The 2,500 American military dead in three years in Iraq is grievous cost, to be sure, and in no way to be minimized. But it doesn’t compare with troop losses suffered in many of our previous military actions.