Heroic Conservativism Review Part 2: Foreign Policy

the perils of idealism

[content note: torture, child death]

[Previously]

I.

Gerson’s view of foreign policy can be summed up by a single quote late in Heroic Conservativism:

In 2005, a friend visited a remote clinic in Zambia. She found that some people who had come to the facility—sick with AIDS—had walked for days in the hope of treatment. When asked why they had come, one Zambian woman responded, “Because we heard the Americans are going to help us.”

That is a familiar refrain in history. In Nazi-occupied Europe…in the gulags of the Soviet Union…there were many who said, “We heard the Americans are going to help us.” That is what America has been, and should always be.

I’m not going to lie, as a patriotic American, this actually makes me cry. America is the richest country in the world, and we should do something good with our wealth. There are people going hungry that we can feed; there are sick people that we can heal. This is what I want as my country’s legacy: we heard that the Americans are going to help us.

As most of my readers know, one of President Bush’s signature policies was PEPFAR, which combats HIV/AIDS in the developing world. PEPFAR has saved millions of lives at a cost of only $2,450/life—comparable with GiveWell top charities. That only counts the direct lives saved: the indirect effects make the program even more effective. PEPFAR reduced all-cause mortality by 16-20% in the countries it works in.

Behind each of the numbers is a human story. Gerson writes:

On the African continent in early 2005, I saw the result [of HIV/AIDS]: primitive wards, open to the elements, filled with lethargic patients receiving outdated, ineffective treatments…a beautiful and polite sixteen-year-old AIDS orphan, taking care of her three brothers and sisters, her hand burning with fever when I shook it…and a mother carrying her own baby home through the gates of the hospital, dead in a small sack held to her chest, the loneliest sight I have ever seen.

Those people’s lives are better because of PEPFAR—a program that absolutely would not have existed without Bush’s support. Gerson has a telling anecdote:

At one post-Katrina meeting with White House officials, a conservative think-tank sage urged: “The president needs to give up something he wants. Why not the AIDS program for Africa?” The argument here is stunning: that the best way for conservatives to prove their ideological purity is to let African children die.

If Bush’s foreign-policy legacy were PEPFAR alone, I would have nothing but praise for him. But whenever we praise PEPFAR, an elephant wanders through the room and begins to knock over the recliners.

According to Gerson, Bush was an idealist who legitimately wanted to spread democracy and human rights. That brought us PEPFAR; it also brought us Iraq.

II.

One of the America’s¹ biggest non-military advantages is that our vision of what societies ought to be like is generally appealing. Not to be a naïve idealist on main, but democracy, freedom, and free markets are actually preferable to Putinism, Chinese Communism, and Wahhabist theocracy. Wealth, a noncorrupt government that follows the will of the people, and the ability to decide for yourself what your life ought to be like—not to mention McDonalds and Hollywood—will win in the free market of ideas. That is why China has to censor the American Internet and I can read Chinese Doom Scroll as much as I please.

But if you’re an idealist, and you have this big army under your control, there’s a real temptation to go “well, we can invade this horrible country that keeps oppressing its people, and liberal democracies with human rights and free markets will so appealing that we don’t have to put any effort into making sure it happens. The Americans are going to help you!”

The theory of the Iraq war was "liberate and leave": we'd invade, kill Saddam, hand the country over to the Iraqi people, liberal democracy, yay! Gerson writes:

“Victory in Iraq,” one former CPA official told me after I left government, “was defined as decapitating the regime. No one defined victory as creating a sustainable country six months down the road.”

Yeah, uh, you do kind of need to do that second thing.

It’s not that nation-building always fails. America actually has a pretty good track record with twentieth-century nation-building: Italy, Japan, Germany, South Korea. But you need, like, a plan. You can’t just kill the big bad evil guy and hope that a democracy springs up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. The Afghanistan and Iraq nation-building projects were horrifically mismanaged, with the result that we spent an enormous amount of money and resources in order to leave them worse off than they were when we got there.

The neoconservatives genuinely believed that free markets and civil society were ready and waiting. If they removed Saddam and the Baath Party, then citizens would freely associate into voluntary non-state organizations which hold hands and sing Kumbaya. In the final analysis, they didn’t plan because they didn’t believe planning needed to be done. This was one of their most crucial mistakes. America is appealing, but you can’t be a shining city on the hill and expect everyone to navigate there by themselves without supplies or a map.

III.

One problem with an idealistic foreign policy is that, if you’re the Good Guys, then it’s easy to conclude that the people you’re opposed to are the Bad Guys. This isn’t a necessary consequence of idealism: one could easily argue that it’s more idealistic to think everyone is pursuing the Good as best they can, although sometimes they’re tragically mistaken.

Gerson is openly contemptuous of the idea that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein had valid complaints about the American order. He writes:

Another false lesson is found in the assertion that the Iraq War has actually been creating the terrorist threat we seek to fight—stirring up a hornet’s nest of understandable grievances in the Arab world. In fact, radical Islamist networks have never lacked for historical provocations. When bin Laden proclaimed his 1998 fatwa justifying the murder of Americans, he used the excuse of President Clinton’s sanctions and air strikes against Iraq—what he called a policy of “continuing aggression against the Iraqi people.” He talked of the “devastation” caused by “horrible massacres” of the 1991 Gulf War. All this took place before the invasion of Iraq was even contemplated—and it was enough to result in the murder of nearly three thousand Americans on 9/11. Islamic radicals will seize on any excuse in their campaign of recruitment and incitement.

I dunno, man. Those other things seem to me like they’re understandable grievances too. Americans doing some real helping, here.

If your explanation of the world is “radical Islamists are trying to kill us because they are evil and hate freedom,” you might miss more plausible explanations like “radical Islamists are trying to kill us in part because we keep trying to kill them.” Like, maybe Saddam Hussein was implying that he had weapons of mass destruction in order to ward off U.S. sanctions—sanctions which some observers called equivalent to a genocide. I’m not an expert in Saddam Hussein’s psychology but it seems… possible?

I’m not saying the right choice was to stop killing radical Islamists: if you’re on a battlefield, the other side is often trying to kill you because you’re trying to kill them, but unilaterally disarming will just get you shot. But if you don’t understand why people are doing what they’re doing, you’re going to make serious mistakes in predicting their behavior—mistakes which can, as they did in the case of neocon social policy, lead to tragedy.

IV.

In the long run, there are practical advantages to an idealistic approach to foreign policy. Even if you’re just seeking stability, oppressive governments get overthrown a lot, and dictators have this real tendency to invade their neighbors and to go around trying to acquire nuclear weapons. America benefits from a liberal international order. As Gerson puts it, our own self-interest calls for a foreign policy that prioritizes "democracy, free trade, economic progress and development, and good government."

Realpolitik also sacrifices the appealingness of America, one of its great advantages. The Americans are no longer going to help you; the Americans are going to help your oppressors in order to get a consistent oil supply. Sorry about that!

But on the other hand… we can’t actually afford to go around killing the leaders of every oppressive government and bringing the people democracy. In the long run, sure, human rights; in the short run, the president is going to have to work with oppressive governments in order to get oil, or they’re going to wind up voted out of office.

Not even Gerson is really an anti-realpolitik idealist. His silence on the war of terror at home is deafening, probably because it would be very bad for his argument to point out all the ways—the Patriot Act, the TSA, Guantanamo Bay—that Bush sacrificed what he was fighting for because he thought it would eke out a slightly higher change of winning. And in one of the more unimpressive passages in the book, Gerson writes:

This is not to say that support for democracy in the Arab world always requires immediate elections. Such elections in Saudi Arabia, for example, would likely result in a government more oppressive and dangerous than the current one.

Uh, no, I actually do think that support for democracy requires immediate elections. That’s what democracy is. It’s just that Saudi Arabia was a valuable American ally, and if it had elections it might stop, and we needed Saudi Arabia as an ally in order to conduct the global war of terror. Be honest about the tradeoffs you’ve signed off on and the compromises you’ve made with dictators to avoid something worse. Don’t piss in my face and tell me it’s democracy.

It’s not clear how much safety we even bought, with all this realpolitik. Gerson repeats, over and over again, that radical Islam is a major threat to America, and that if we don’t do something about it we will face more terrorist attacks—perhaps next time with a nuclear bomb. From the vantage point of fifteen years later, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that America has done absolutely nothing effective about radical Islam and it’s fine (for us, if not for people who live in the Middle East). In fact, the Global War on Terror looks like nothing but an enormous waste of time, money, and lives. Through his actions, Bush squandered a valuable period of peace between great-power conflicts, leaving us woefully underprepared for the actually important conflicts with China and Russia.

V.

My experience reading the foreign policy sections of this book is sort of like:

Me: This is really inspiring! I’m really looking forward to the part where Gerson takes accountability for the torture and discusses what we should have done better to avoid it going forward.
Gerson: Bush’s foreign policy was based on human dignity and equal respect for every human being.
Me: I wonder how Gerson is going to reconcile that with the fact that Bush tortured people.
Gerson: Saddam’s government tortured people. It was an atrocity.
Me: Okay, but you also did that…
Gerson: The Iraq War was part of the centuries-long struggle for freedom and democracy, the struggle of the Founders, of Wilbur Wilberforce, of Lincoln, of Solzhenitsyn, of Martin Luther King Jr…
Me: THE TORTURE?
Gerson: It’s terrible how Democrats think we should stop invading countries even if the countries are really bad.

Spoiler: he does not once mention the torture. In fact, he goes so far as to say:

The conduct of the Iraq War—the extraordinary care taken to minimize civilian casualties—was indeed a moral advance.

I was absolutely flabbergasted.

There’s an interesting contrast here between my utilitarian views and my deontologist views, a contrast Gerson would not like very much. As a utilitarian, PEPFAR, which saved the lives of millions, outweighs the torture of a few hundred people. George W. Bush ends up net-positive on the great scale of morality.

But there’s another part of me, the part of me that sympathizes with Gerson when he says that we must never sacrifice the powerless for the powerful whatever the utility calculation says. That part of me says—no. Torture is not a sin you can cancel out by doing enough good to someone else. Ordering the torture of one single person is a stain on your soul that you cannot wash out.

(we heard that the Americans are going to help us)

Let me be frank: George W. Bush and his collaborators should be arrested.² They should have a fair trial with due process of law. And then they should live out the rest of their lives in prison, with every single one of the comforts and rights and protections that they denied to the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

Michael J. Gerson is an idealist. I don’t exactly know the man, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to me if George W. Bush was one as well. And I think that should horrify us idealists.

You can want very badly to make the world better. You can care deeply about democracy, liberalism, human rights, human dignity. You can fight against your own supporters and administration in order to save the lives of millions of African children. And you can still do the single most unconscionable, unforgivable thing a person can do, and justify it and rationalize it to yourself to the extent that you write an entire book without it even occurring to you that your actions might need to be excused.

Heroic Conservativism: Why Republicans Need To Embrace America’s Ideals (And Why They Deserve To Lose If They Don’t), by Michael J. Gerson. Published 2008. 320 pages. $9.

1. More properly, countries in America’s sphere of influence, but that’s too much typing. Sorry, Australia.

2. They are, of course, far from the only American political leaders who ought to be arrested.