Essay: Must America Slay All the Dragons?

By Charles Krauthammer Monday, Mar. 04, 1991

"Students massacred in China, priests murdered in Central America, demonstrators gunned down in Lithuania -- these acts of violence are as wrong as Iraqi soldiers' killing civilians. We cannot oppose repression in one place and overlook it in another." -- Senator George Mitchell, Jan. 29, 1991 "So what does this mean, that we want to stop naked ((Iraqi)) aggression? Does this mean that the United States will indeed become the policeman of the world?" -- Senator Tom Harkin, Jan. 11, 1991 Well, gentlemen, which is it? The Democrats first complain that it is hypocritical to oppose injustice x but tolerate injustice y. Then they complain that the U.S. has turned into the world's policeman. How can it be otherwise? If stopping one injustice morally commits us to stopping all injustice, what does that make the U.S. if not the world's policeman? It does not take a Kissinger to figure that any nation has to be selective in its attention to the injustices of the world. Those who imply otherwise have an agenda -- and it is not to turn the U.S. into the world's policeman. It is to turn the U.S. into the world's bystander. If opposing injustice anywhere obliges us to become involved everywhere, then only a fool would not prefer involvement nowhere. This false everywhere-nowhere dichotomy is the moral pillar of American isolationism. Wherever the American banner has been raised in the past decade -- Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua and now the Persian Gulf -- isolationists have demanded to know, How can we in good conscience oppose bad guys there and not land Marines in Port-au-Prince or Cape Town? The question is posed constantly. Only the place names change. Mitchell, in his response to the President's State of the Union address, brought up China, El Salvador and Lithuania. Mario Cuomo, questioning George Bush's motive for intervening in the gulf, asks ironically, Was it designed to curb aggression? Then why not intervene in Afghanistan or Tibet? The answer is breathtakingly simple. Why are American exertions on behalf of the oppressed selective? National interest. Americans, haunted by the stern visage of Woodrow Wilson, are loath to confess that they do not act for reasons of morality alone. We would rather not admit that one reason to resist Saddam Hussein is that we are not prepared to see the economies of the West wrecked by the ambition of a foreign tyrant. Indeed, some American critics think it a fatal moral criticism of the gulf war to say that if Kuwait had only sand and no oil, the U.S. would not have rushed to its defense.

The answer to that charge is, Of course not. And, so what? Foreign policy is not philanthropy. Any intervention must pass two tests: it must be 1) right and 2) in our interests. Each is a necessary condition. Neither is sufficient. Otherwise, foreign policy degenerates into mindless moralism on the one hand or cynical realpolitik on the other. The U.S. does not intervene purely for reasons of morality. If it did, it would spend itself dry righting every wrong in the world. Nor does it act purely out of self-interest. If, for example, a genuine pro-Iraqi coup had led Kuwaitis to join voluntarily with Iraq, the U.S. would hardly have gone to war to reverse that action. (During the oil shocks of the 1970s, suggestions that the U.S. seize the oil fields of Arabia were never even taken seriously.) Every intervention requires a just cause. That doesn't mean that every just cause warrants intervention. To warrant intervention, a cause must at the same time be important to the U.S. The idea that importance ought not matter and that consistency impels us to intervene against every injustice is simply American moralism gone wild. Life presents us with a hierarchy of evils. Being finite, we are forced to assign them priority and even, if necessary, tolerate some lesser evil to fight the greater. Was it wrong to have blinked at the enormities of Stalin for the four years that he was needed in the war against Hitler? Take a hard case, Lithuania. For the months of the gulf crisis, until Gorbachev went free-lancing with his peace plan, there seemed to be a tacit U.S.-Soviet understanding: the U.S.S.R. would stay within the anti-Iraq coalition, and the U.S. would go easy on criticizing Moscow's repression of Lithuania. Is such a deal conscionable? One could say that it is foolish, that we are misreading our interests, that in the long run a freed Soviet empire is more important to America than a small Arabian principality. Perhaps, but the critics' charge is not geopolitical. It is moral. Americans, they maintain, cannot in good conscience uphold freedom in one place and tolerate repression in another. Yes, they can, and sometimes they must. America is not omnipotent. It cannot be everywhere. It has to have priorities. One cannot equate the utter devastation of Kuwait with the cruel but hardly fatal repression of Lithuania. There is no doubt that under Gorbachev or his generals, Lithuania will continue to exist as a society. There can be little doubt that under Saddam, Kuwait will not. Foreign policy is an exercise in discrimination. Our resources, like our stores of compassion, are finite. We take up arms against those troubles that are both particularly evil and particularly threatening to us. And we husband our resources to meet those troubles. That will occasionally mean having to * recruit others to help and having to make moral compromises to keep that help. Hence our long minuet with the Soviets over the Baltics. After the gulf crisis, we must be equally nimble in reordering our priorities. We must immediately turn to a vigorous advocacy of Baltic independence. But it would be irresponsible to jeopardize the war effort by doing so during the crisis. War is no time for moral luxuries. The first task in war is winning it. We cannot slay all the dragons at once. There is no dishonor in slaying them one at a time.
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