January 25, 2005
The Vision Thing
By now everybody has reacted to the President's inaugural speech and the reaction has been fairly predictable -- most on the right liked it and most on the left disliked it. What struck me about the speech is that it represents a bottom up approach to world peace.
Often we get confused by methods and goals and think that people who advocate a different method are advocating a different goal. Most Americans want our nation's foreign policy to ultimately advance the goal of world peace. The disagreements are typically over methods. The method that has been favored by the left and enjoyed the ascendancy in the past century was the top down solution of world government. The League of Nations. The United Nations. They were (are) both miserable failures, and resulted instead in a ravaged century.
President Bush offers a different solution -- empowering every individual to construct representative governments that respect the rights of all individual. This is a pretty radical concept for some.
In the top down, you have a collection of governments, ranging from the virtuous (Canada) to the self-centered (France) to the downright evil (North Korea, working at cross purposes in the UN, and achieving little more than frenzied feeding at the public trough. You could argue that if all governments were as virtuous as Canada, then the UN would be a smashing success. The problem is, as recent history has demonstrated, all governments aren't as virtuous, and the UN itself can't solve that problem. In fact, by it's nature it acts as a brake on attempts to reform countries.
So President Bush advocates a different approach - improve the individual nations, one by one, until something like the UN could actually work, instead of it counting bribe money while millions are murdered. Work on the virtue bubbling up from the bottom instead of trying to impose it from the top.
I think it's a noble vision, and a workable method, but like so may other things that are worth doing, it takes time, effort, and perserverence.
Posted by Kevin Murphy at January 25, 2005 10:35 PM | International Politics>improve the individual nations, one by one
During our various foreign adventures I remember getting into arguments with people where they would say, "What about Saudi Arabia? Don't they oppress women? What about Israel? Don't they have a nuclear bomb? What about Pakistan? Don't they suppress dissent? Why are we intervening in Viet Nam/Iraq/Afghanistan, etc and not there?"
Generally I would respond that even a superpower can't do everything, but that argument would generally fall on deaf ears. So finally I said, "Okay, fine, here's the national policy. We measure every nation's human rights by some objective standard, like: voting rights + life span - infant mortality - political prisoners, or something like that. Every four years we see what country is at the bottom of the list. It's the president's responsibility to change that regime and install a better one during his/her term. When Mexico arrives at the bottom of the list - we're done! (Mexico's government may not be as virtuous as Canada's, but they're doing an adequate job of running the place.). There! We have a policy. Satisfied now??!!!"
This is probably not the policy we really want, but at least it answers the original objection. You can proably even estimate when we'll get around to Sudan, Nigeria, and other problem areas.
