Samuel Brittan: Make the world safe from crusaders
The two books that most influenced me as a student were not by economists. One was by the US diplomat turned historian, George Kennan, entitled The Realities of American Foreign Policy. The other was by the Cambridge professor of history, Herbert Butterfield, entitled Christianity, Diplomacy and War. They appeared in the 1950s, about the time that a hawkish US secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, used to talk about “rolling back the tide of communism”.
Kennan’s target was what he called the “moralistic-legalistic” approach to foreign policy, which he maintained brought more human hardship than a straightforward defence of national interest. Butterfield approached his subject as a committed Christian. But a reader did not need to have any religious affiliation to follow his warnings about rushing to judgments that subsequently turned out to be wrong and led to more suffering than a more humble approach would have done. Their obvious targets were the doctrine of unconditional surrender that had been pursued by the allies in the second world war and the impatience of some enthusiasts to go beyond the doctrine of containment and embark on an ideological crusade against the Soviet Union.
Kennan is still sometimes mentioned in foreign policy circles; but this particular book by Butterfield seems to have passed into oblivion, which is a great pity. For there is no better antidote to the fantasies of the American neo-conservatives or the European liberal imperialists. He provides a salutary warning that we could be at war “every minute of our time against cruelty or oppression in some part of the world if we did not have to calculate whether our intervention might not add to the sum of human misery”. Early on he refutes the idea that democracies are exempt from bellicose temptations. Even small states with very recent experience of oppression “show the same cupidities and aggressiveness when for a moment they see a chance of catching a local opportunity”. His most prescient reminder was to say that if the Soviet Union and all its allies were buried under the deepest ocean something analogous to the cold war would soon reproduce itself. A year or two ago this might have referred just to Muslim fundamentalist terrorism. But it might now also apply to Vladimir Putin’s Russia itself.
A little while ago I might have concluded with a plea to reprint Butterfield’s book. But I can do even better. For a US political economist has carefully documented US military interventions since 1898 and their success or otherwise in spreading liberal democracy*. He starts off with a quotation from President George W. Bush’s 2005 inaugural address, stating that US policy is to support the “growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world”. What could be wrong with this seemingly innocuous statement of worthy ends? The rest of Christopher Coyne’s book tells us precisely what.
In the first chapter, there is a table of 25 instances of reconstruction efforts following US military occupations. Prof Coyne asks how many have succeeded in establishing liberal democracies. These are defined not merely by the holding of free elections but by the guarantee of civil liberties and the presence of “institutionalised constraints on the executive”. The success ratio judged by a fairly low benchmark was only 28 per cent after five years. Even after 20 years, the ratio was only 36 per cent. The main theme of the book is that “while we have a good understanding of what a liberal democracy looks like, we know much less about how to achieve such an outcome where it does not already exist”. Certain preconditions are essential and conflicts of objectives in the camp of the military rulers can prove fatal. Moreover, the underlying assumption that liberal institutions represent universal values may not hold true....
Read entire article at Financial Times
Kennan’s target was what he called the “moralistic-legalistic” approach to foreign policy, which he maintained brought more human hardship than a straightforward defence of national interest. Butterfield approached his subject as a committed Christian. But a reader did not need to have any religious affiliation to follow his warnings about rushing to judgments that subsequently turned out to be wrong and led to more suffering than a more humble approach would have done. Their obvious targets were the doctrine of unconditional surrender that had been pursued by the allies in the second world war and the impatience of some enthusiasts to go beyond the doctrine of containment and embark on an ideological crusade against the Soviet Union.
Kennan is still sometimes mentioned in foreign policy circles; but this particular book by Butterfield seems to have passed into oblivion, which is a great pity. For there is no better antidote to the fantasies of the American neo-conservatives or the European liberal imperialists. He provides a salutary warning that we could be at war “every minute of our time against cruelty or oppression in some part of the world if we did not have to calculate whether our intervention might not add to the sum of human misery”. Early on he refutes the idea that democracies are exempt from bellicose temptations. Even small states with very recent experience of oppression “show the same cupidities and aggressiveness when for a moment they see a chance of catching a local opportunity”. His most prescient reminder was to say that if the Soviet Union and all its allies were buried under the deepest ocean something analogous to the cold war would soon reproduce itself. A year or two ago this might have referred just to Muslim fundamentalist terrorism. But it might now also apply to Vladimir Putin’s Russia itself.
A little while ago I might have concluded with a plea to reprint Butterfield’s book. But I can do even better. For a US political economist has carefully documented US military interventions since 1898 and their success or otherwise in spreading liberal democracy*. He starts off with a quotation from President George W. Bush’s 2005 inaugural address, stating that US policy is to support the “growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world”. What could be wrong with this seemingly innocuous statement of worthy ends? The rest of Christopher Coyne’s book tells us precisely what.
In the first chapter, there is a table of 25 instances of reconstruction efforts following US military occupations. Prof Coyne asks how many have succeeded in establishing liberal democracies. These are defined not merely by the holding of free elections but by the guarantee of civil liberties and the presence of “institutionalised constraints on the executive”. The success ratio judged by a fairly low benchmark was only 28 per cent after five years. Even after 20 years, the ratio was only 36 per cent. The main theme of the book is that “while we have a good understanding of what a liberal democracy looks like, we know much less about how to achieve such an outcome where it does not already exist”. Certain preconditions are essential and conflicts of objectives in the camp of the military rulers can prove fatal. Moreover, the underlying assumption that liberal institutions represent universal values may not hold true....