Intro to Just War Theory w/the Terminator!

Now, anyone who's taught anything in a formal (in other words, graded) environment is intimately familiar with the expression on Sarah Palin's face when she's asked about the Bush Doctrine. It's the expression every student wears when they're asked a question they have no fucking idea how to answer. It's the facial analogue to the thought "Oh fuck, I'm fucked now. Time to look attentive and talk about something vaguely related to the question and see if I can salvage anything from this mess." We've all worn it, and we've all seen others wear it.

Still, seeing someone who could potentially be President of the United States of America wearing it when confronted with a fairly elementary foreign policy question does not inspire a great deal of confidence.

That aside, Sarah Palin's interview provides the opportunity for me to do one of my favorite things: explain irritatingly complex concepts in a simple fashion using pop-culture iconography. So, when Mrs. Palin is asked about the Bush Doctrine, her response is:

"Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend."

That statement actually makes a terrifying amount of sense, and is a position well-supported by international law and just war theory. It's a sane position to take. The problem is, it's not the Bush Doctrine. The Bush Doctrine is about preventive war, not preemptive war. The crucial difference is the idea of "imminence." Arnold Schwarzenegger will explain, in the thickest Austrian accent he can muster (you might want to read this section aloud for maximum enjoyment):

FTB: So, Arnold, when you were sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor, would that be analogous to preemptive or preventive war?

AS: That would be a lot like preventive war. You see, the goal was to terminate Sarah Connor in order to prevent John Connor from being born, thereby ending the threat he would later pose to Skynet as an adult leader of the resistance. Paradoxically, our attempt to kill Sarah Connor ended up creating exactly the situation we were trying to prevent. [ironic, vaguely threatening laughter]However, the situation was a little more complicated because of time travel--I had certain knowledge that John Connor would be a threat to Skynet because I came from the future.

FTB: And why would that course of action be frowned upon in the international community?

AS: Well, you see, in a world as complex as ours it is hard to accurately project the costs and consequences of our actions over a long period of time. If a nearly omniscient and singleminded artificial intelligence and its time-traveling nearly-indestructible cyborg assassin couldn't prevent one measly human female from conceiving a rebel leader, what hope can there be for a disjointed herd of puny humans striving to accomplish a far more ambitious goal? And, in the meantime, I murdered a lot of innocent people who were only tangentially related to event I was programmed to prevent.

FTB: You the terminator, or you the Governor of California?

AS: Yes.

FTB [Nervously]: So, uh, can you give us an analogy or example of preemptive war?

AS: You will remember that scene in the nightclub when I am advancing on Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese is at the bar, and he shoots me with the sawed-off shotgun right before I shoot her with my gun? That is preemptive war. I am about to kill her, and Kyle has a limited number of options and a sharply limited timeframe in which to consider them. In other words, the threat to his charge is imminent. In this case, his application of force against my robust hyperalloy endoskeleton was his only hope for seizing the element of surprise and perhaps disrupting the otherwise imminent termination of Sarah Connor and thus protected under international and intertemporal law.

The next time you're hitting on a hot chick at an IR conference and she flips her hair and asks you what the difference between prevention and preemption is, you can refer back to his handy explanation and work your best Ahnold impression. And who knows? She might even overlook your flabby midsection, pasty skin and watery, nearsighted eyes and decide to go for it.

Nah.

This Week in Stupid

Actually, it's technically "last week in stupid," but there was so much chest-beating going around last week that we had a major scheduling crunch. 

Forever Young, by Leon Wieseltier [the New Republic]

Compared to Boot, Wieseltier is a fish of a different color. His problem isn't so much a fundamental misunderstanding of international relations, but a fundamental misunderstanding of absolutely everything from China's economic relationship with the US to the very idea of state sovereignty. On China, I urge you to disregard Wieseltier's "gold medal in tyranny" idiocy and explore the more nuanced view articulated by James Fallows: the $1.4 Trillion Question.

In my opinion, Wieseltier makes the following three mistakes:

1) He blurs the line between "strategic problems" and "strategic choices" into nonexistence.

2) He confuses a "politics of hope" with a "policy of hope."

2a) Relatedly, he conflates motivation--a belief that Americans can change the world for the better--with action, namely the idea that we will change the world for the better by handing out candy to dictators and asking them to pretty please love America.

On the first point, he argues that "George W. Bush was not singlehandedly responsible for getting us into this mess." In some sense, that's true. No one man can take a nation to war. However, to insinuate that the White House--the President being the symbolic if not physical embodiment thereof--was not the prime mover behind the Iraq war is shameless hackery of the first order. I deeply agree with the proposition that the United States had a serious and growing strategic problem in the Middle East around the turn of the millennium. However, "this mess" as Wieseltier euphemistically terms it, is entirely the product of the strategic choices made by the President and his administration. It's not as if he was flying blind, either. Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, was laughed out of the Pentagon when he had the temerity to suggest that it would take several hundred thousand troops to stabilize Iraq. In contrast, we have Paul Wolfowitz's statement:

It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army.

Apparently, our ex-President of the World Bank nee Deputy Secretary of Defense had never bothered to skim chapter 3 of The Prince, by Nicolo Machiavelli. It's difficult to plausibly point to a prime mover responsible for this mess who isn't a Bush appointee.

Wieseltier's second goof is mistaking politics for policy. We can cut him a little slack here, mostly because that seems to be the operating rule of the past few years. For our purposes, "politics" is defined as the strategy by which one acquires power and "policy" as the definite agenda advanced by someone already in power. Wieseltier construes Obama's references to the "politics of hope" as a foreign "policy of hope" or simply a "hope for the best" attitude towards the problems facing American interests abroad. On the contrary, Obama seems to realize that America's reputation abroad has reached its lowest ebb in recent memory, and that improving our international standing is a necessary precondition for any meaningful foreign policy initiatives. Indeed, we've received some not so subtle signals from our allies that this is what they would like as well.

Let's be clear, Wieseltier is not incorrect in his observation that the world is an awful place where awful people do awful things. However, for reasons related to the decline of Europe after WWII and the fall of the USSR, we're sort of running things now. With that in mind, we have to ask ourselves if it's more useful to have a national (and international) audience that believes that America has the ability to be a positive influence on the world, or one that views foreign relations as an intractable quagmire to be avoided at all costs. On a personal level, I find Obama's talking points on foreign policy inspiring, because they evoke an America that is chastened but not defeated, a country that can withdraw without becoming withdrawn. Clearly we need a foreign policy that abandons both the tone-deaf public diplomacy of Karen Hughes and the 1) Topple Gov't 2) Hope for the Best 3) Democracy! approach of the last few years.

Make no mistake, positive change in international affairs is a rarity, but it does happen every now and again. Taking that possibility off the table, as Wieseltier does, in favor of some "hope is for sissies" tough-minded attitude is singularly unlikely to address the issues facing the US in 2008, nor should we expect it to entice bright young people to pursue a career in foreign service.