Truth, government and debate

“From enthusiasm to imposture the step is perilous and slippery; the demon of Socrates affords a memorable instance of how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud.”

Does this quote describe the ongoing detachment of the Bush-Administration from the rational center of American Foreign Policy?

The quote is used by George Kennan to describe the Soviet Government in the famous article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct“, published in 1947 in the “Foreign Policy”-Journal. Kenan was an influential American politician who architected the American Containment Strategy after WWII. According to this strategy, open confrontation with the Soviet Union should be replaced with isolating the Soviet Union and fighting their influence in other states.

In his article, Kennan advances the interesting argument that the Soviet Government claims to be the sole owner of truth in order to strengthen its domestic power:

The Soviet concept of power, which permits no focal points of organization outside the Party itself, requires that the Party leadership remain in theory the sole repository of truth. For if truth were to be found elsewhere, there would be justification for its expression in organized activity.

Therefore normal relations with the Soviet Union was out of question. A condensed argument would be: Democracies should not negotiate with governments that don’t allow a public debate within their domain. A corollary of this argument is: Only authoritarian regimes suppress a public debate, democracies don’t.

Pakistan and Burma, and to some extent Russia and Iran could be named to support this argument.

The Iran-Debate in the USA and Hitler comparisons

There is, however, some evidence that the public debate in the USA is moving into the paradigm of another war with Iran. Such a paradigm would render a rational debate about the pros and cons difficult to sustain - the rational center would once again be silenced.

In his book “Containment - Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror“, Ian Shapiro explains how the Bush-doctrine in 2003 succesfully advanced the idea that any opposition to its plans is un-american and un-patriotic.

Since 2003, there was no neutrality in the War on Terror, opposition to the President was political suicide, and French fries became Freedom fries. Doubts, diplomacy, and negotiation were no longer part of the toolkit of American Foreign Policy.

The American president is talking about a Third World War and military action against Iranian nuclear facilities. It seems the world is once again at a stage where negotiation and diplomacy are no longer regarded as vital tools by the US government.

The example to silence any opposition to the War against Iran is the appeasement of Hitler and its desastrous consequences. Norman Podhoretz, foreign policy advisor to Rudy Guiliani, recently said in a discussion on American Television:

If we allow Iran to get the bomb, people 50 years from now will look back at us the way we look back at the men who made the Munich pact with Hitler in 1938 and say, “How could they have let this happen?”

Fareed Zakaria, an expert on Iran from Newsweek and also present at the Television debate, advances in his article “Stalin, Mao And … Ahmadinejad?” some reasons why such a comparison does not hold and that…

…the American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality.

Confusing intentional and potential threats

How can a debate on such an important topic like American relations with the Middle East spin into this fateful direction. Dr. Halpers “silence of the rational center” is only one part of the story. Presumably, in the media, in some think-tanks and in debates between the Presidential Candidates of both camps, the pros and cons of Iran are present. Unlike in 2003, the Bush administration is far from succesfully establishing the rationale for war and I would argue that the public debate in the US is still strong.

The other side of the story is an institutionalized lack of understanding the counterpart, much similar to what Kennan found in the USA when deciding the new policy towards the Soviet Union. Only few people understood the Soviet Union, many politicians and journalists fell victim to their own preconceived opinions about the Soviet Union.

Even highly-educated opponents of containment, such as famous publicist Walter Lippman, confused intentions and potentials of the Soviet Union. Lippman replied to Kennan’s Containment Proposal in a series of articles called “The Cold War” in 1947:

It is the threat that the Red Army may advance still farther west–into Italy into western Germany, into Scandinavia–that gives the Kremlin and the native communist parties of western Europe an abnormal and intolerable influence in the affairs of the European continent.

Therefore, the immediate and the decisive problem of our relations with the Soviet Union is whether, when, on what conditions the Red Army can be prevailed upon to evacuate Europe.

This argument should sound familiar. In clear words, it says: Our opponent has the intention to harm us, we must do everything to harm it in order to prevent it from harming us first.

The same argument is advanced towards the Iran right now. But the argument confuses intention and potential. When assessing the tools of foreign policy, it is necessary to discuss which tools are best suited for diminishing the potential threat of an opponent, not the intentional threat.

Clearly, the Iran does not have the potential threat to nuke the USA, or even its neighbours. Such a step would cause immediate retaliation by the Nuclear Powers. Irans potential threat lies in fighting an asymmetric war with Iran by supporting radical groups in the various conflicts of the region.

Does containment work for Terrorism?

As I have pointed out in an earlier paper, a feasible strategy of undermining potential threats from terrorists is encouraging the host society to withdraw its support. The afore-mentioned Ian Shapiro argues that this strategy, already succesful with the Soviet Union, should be used when containing Iran. He claims it has been succesfully used when containing Libya and Syria in the 1990ies and highlights the role of states when containing trans-state phenomena like Terrorism.

Remark: While there are many differences between the situation in the 1950ies and now, Shapiro asserts that containment works because of economics:

Islamic fundamentalists share in common with the old Soviets the lack of a viable economic model or success story to which they can point. Authoritarian regimes are not good at running market economies.

The economic problems of Iran are a support to his theory, and I am not sure that Russia without natural ressources and China without cheap labor could grow as impressively as they do given their current institutional design.

Shapiro points out that the Bush doctrine of 2003 is the complete opposite of a feasible containment strategy which would avoid direct confrontations (Kennan himself says: “If you ever had a chance to do something without the use of military force, by all means choose it rather than put military force into the picture.”), use diplomacy and economic support to allies, and engage in issue-driven multilateralism.

Bush’s doctrine of war against terror on a global scope, driven by unliteral action and the belief of the right to preemptive war (which is quite unlike the NSC 68, Kennans National Security Policy), its permanent state of war and the preference of security over democracy will not yield the results that American Foreign Policy wants. Shapiro writes that the…

…Bush doctrine is like the Monroe Doctrine on Crack…

and blatantly contradicts what Bush said before he came into office:

I’m going to be judicious as to how to use the military. It needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear and the exit strategy obvious.

There is little hope that the Bush-administration will change its strategy towards Iran.

Reasons for the impossiblity of a change of strategy?

Is it already too late to still achieve such a complete change in strategy if a new administration enters the White House in 2009? Shapiro writes:

Even if Democrats win the White House in 2008, they will likely have been co-opted by much of the Bush administrations’s self-defeating national security policy.

Maybe the role of the United States in the world is changing - from a supplier of security to other countries (through containment strategies and multilateral organisations such as NATO) to a country which focuses on its own interest at stake. We have to remember that when the US acted as the sole supplier of security to the Western countries, these countries were quite happy to finance the military spending and the induced budget deficit of the USA. Germany and Japan accumulated large foreign reservs to finance the consumption in the US, but at the same time they were an integral part of the American security architecture.

China, which is currently accumulating American foreign reserves, is not part of the American security structure and pursues quite independent strategies when it comes to energy security and military security. Maybe the US is realizing that its future does not lie with being the one-and-only super-power in the world. Instead several regional powers are probably emerging and are heavily competing with the US.

Thus the foreign policy of the US is much more aimed at self-preservation than hitherto thought of. Knowing that its internal capability to deal with large-scale catastrophes is very limited, the future foreign policy might be a mixture of renewed isolationism and interest-based military strikes, regardless of legal or moral principles. The public debate in the US on the Iran thus only reflects a change of paradigm which. Until now this paradigm has not been vocally articulated in the public because the public belief of the US remaining a global superpower is needed to support financing the Iraq War.

Public deceit on the status of being a super-power

Such a two-faced debate reminds me much of the philosopher-king-argument. A few years ago, I wrote a paper on different perspectives on the famous Socratian philosopher’s rule, as developed by Plato and commented by Niccolo Macchiavelli, Leo Strauss and John Rawls. Unfortunately I did not have time to publish it yet on this website.

Plato sees the wisdom of ruling nested in the philosophers and wants to shield this wisdom from the rest of society. Macchiavelli regards public deceit as admissible if its in the interest of the princely states. Strauss encourages the use of the “noble lie” (which is the combination of philosopher’s rule with public deceit) to reach certain ends. Rawls argues against the “noble lie”, but argues that some conditions of political liberalism are necessary to make “noble lies” not fruitful. What if the necessary liberal conditions, such as balanced public debate, will not prevail due to the changing paradigm of the state? Is it then reasonable to expect that states will return back to a strategy that represents their old ideals, but not their new interests? What interest does the US have in containment when global security is no longer in its long-term aim?

Why do the two candidates which currently have the biggest chance to get the nomination from their party (Clinton and Giuliani) are both supporting military actions against Iran? Do they know they have no other choice? In April 2006, the Guardian featured an article by Timothy Garton Ash displaying a chronology of the Iran-American War started unter President Hillary Clinton in 2009 and the asymmetric war that followed in 2010. It gives a flavour of what could happen and seems to suggest to some sort of endgame between the two sides. Are the USA maybe in their final struggle as a global power?

A lesson from history

Quite ironically, the source of Kennan’s quote which opened my article could suggest such a thought. The quote is taken from the seminal work by 18th-century author Edward Gibbon, which has the foreshadowing title: “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire“. Gibbon argues that the lack of civic virtue, a necessity for public debate, crumbled the Roman Empire.

Modern scholars such as Peter Heather have argued that the outside threat from the Sassanid Persians (which originated where today’s Iran is situated) stretched military and economic capacity so far that other attacks could not be answered anymore.

The devastating impacts of the Roman-Persian Wars made both empires vulnerable to attack and eventually destroyed them. It would certainly be an historical irony if several centuries after this conflict, the Iran-US conflict could have the same effects on the US as a global superpower.