Wright and Wrong

America's role in the world

When America undertakes military intervention in the world, are we the heroes or the villains? What perspective should guide our approach? I am not a credentialed expert, but I started caring about such questions as a teenager during the Vietnam War, and I have pondered them ever since.

The debate has largely been between two sides. I call one side the Moral Humility approach, or MH. I call the other side the neoconservative approach, or NC. I am dissatisfied with both.

MH thinks that the world would we be better if America would approach conflicts by recognizing the legitimate aspirations of each side. We should come up with solutions that accommodate both sides’ legitimate aspirations.

My problem with MH is that it has a blind spot regarding groups that are willing to engage in violence for objectives that go beyond legitimate aspirations. Maybe there are a lot of Palestinians who aspire only to a state that lives in peace with Israel. But there sure are a lot of well-armed organizations, both within and outside the Palestinian territories, that seek a less ideal outcome, at least for the Jews now living there.

NC thinks that the world would be better if America intervened on the side that comes closest to reflecting our values. We should promote Western democracy as best we can.

[after I wrote this post, Noah Smith ran an email interview with Sarah C. Paine, who gives the flavor of the NC view. She writes,

If Ukraine had collapsed in 2022, the situation of the West would have been dire. China would have looked at a country the size Texas falling to Russia. Why not go for Taiwan? Other countries looking on, with their many and varied territorial grievances, might think, why not go for it? Then the rules-based order that allows us to travel the globe with pieces of plastic called credit cards honored and allows both the weak and the powerful to expect their contracts to be fulfilled—that global order would have been on its way out. And this would ultimately impoverish us all…

For dictators, democracies are inherently threatening both because fair elections preclude dictators and because the parasitical nature of dictators means living standards in dictatorships fall over time. Dictators feed off the labor of their citizens to project growth-stifling power at home and wealth-destroying power abroad. Democracies are not interested in territorial expansion but in economic growth. Dictatorships cannot leave them alone because they regard the high living standards in democracies as an indictment and mortal threat to themselves. Therefore, democracies must defend themselves. There is no way to be accommodating enough for dictators like Putin or Xi. 

]

My problem with NC is that it presumes that we have the knowledge and skills to manufacture state capacity and democracy anywhere. My reading is that such a presumption leads to disaster.

As a teenager, I took the MH view of the Vietnam War. During the Vietnam war, MH went beyond criticism of specific atrocities, such as the My Lai Massacre, that were committed by American forces. MH questioned whether we were even fighting on the right side.

The MH view was that we could not be sure that the Vietnamese people were better off under capitalism than Communism. Noam Chomsky alleged that American intervention in Vietnam was driven by the objectives of rapacious American corporations, who were eager to exploit the resources of that country. MH said that for the ordinary peasant in Vietnam, Communism would be at least as conducive to prosperity as capitalism.

As an adult, I discarded the MH view, but many others have not. I would describe Robert Wright as MH, hence the title of this essay. [note: after I wrote this post, I listened to Wright talk with Russ Roberts. By the time you’ve heard all of Wright’s nasty innuendoes and sly, snotty insinuations on that podcast you may wonder why I associate him with the words “moral humility.”]

MH says that America can be, and often is, the bad guy in our conflicts with other countries. MH says that we over-estimate Western virtues. We fail to empathize with and respect the moral outlook and perspective of other countries. MH says that if you were to step outside of your bubble and look at America from other points of view, you would see our policies as often reckless, hypocritical, and harmful.

MH warns us not to always think of American intervention as on the side of making the world a better place. Instead, notice cases like Syria, Libya, or Iraq, where our interventions resulted in mass bloodshed and chaos.

The MH view threatens our sense of self-esteem as Americans. In a famous speech in support of President Ronald Reagan, Jeane Kirkpatrick characterized the MH view as “Blame America First.”

I think that MH tends to suffer from the fallacy of the Moral Dyad. The general fallacy is to regard one actor as a robot, having agency but no feelings, while the other side is a baby, having feelings but no agency. If you think that Palestinians have no alternative but to engage in terrorism, chances are you are seeing them as babies and seeing Israelis as robots.

MH treats the United States as the robot, and it treats its adversaries as babies. It sees American policy as provoking Russia to invade Ukraine, as if Russia had no other motives. It sees American policy as driving Hamas to violence, as if Hamas had no other motives.

I don’t think MH would accept my characterization. I think MH would say that they regard our adversaries as adults; they are merely pointing out symmetry between America and its adversaries.

I should note that it is very difficult to get either MH or NC to back off of its position. Motivated reasoning, also known as confirmation bias, can do remarkable things. For MH, the October 7 pogrom reinforces the urgency of the two-state solution. For NC, it reinforces the need for the Palestinians to have state capacity and democracy.

For me, the October 7 pogrom reinforces a wish that we could shed the delusions of both MH and NC. Take into account the existence of organized violent factions inside and outside the Palestinian territories. They will frustrate any attempt to orchestrate a two-state solution or a Palestinian democracy.

After World War II, Japan and Germany were reborn as well-behaved democracies. But they had very high state capacity and very advanced cultures before their war regimes took over, and it was fairly easy for them to adopt peaceful politics after those regimes were defeated.

We had much less luck in Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. Those cases would lead one to have a very modest view of our ability to quickly create state capacity and foster democracy where those did not exist before.

But if intervention can go badly, so can nonintervention. I think that Hong Kong should be ranked among our worst foreign policy failures. I do not know what costs or risks we might have incurred standing up for freedom there. But we sure didn’t try very hard. We just sat back and let the bad guys win. Perhaps we should be as ashamed of that as we are of other calamities.

MH and NC each have their strong points and their weak points. My outlook is that there are some genuinely bad actors in the world, and there is no painless solution for dealing with them. Sometimes, we are better off leaving them alone. Sometimes, we are better off taking sides. MH never wants to take sides. And NC never wants to leave things alone. Ideally, we would make the best choice in individual instances. That requires a combination of moral clarity and cognitive humility.