When discussing our national security strategy, I wanted to make a couple more points. One is something I ponder, though I don't have any firm conclusions:
In Gladwell's book Blink, he talked about thin-slicing and the way that first impressions shape a relationship. It reminds me of something Lois McMaster Bujold said in one of her science fiction books - start as you mean to go on.
I do think our initial reactions are important. They set the tone, shape how relationships (personal or professional) play out. I think you can change those patterns after the fact, but it's significantly harder. Which means I think it's important to be true to ourselves at the very beginning. Start as you mean to go on.
I think about this with regards to national security and our policies towards human rights. We have said that we think human rights are important, but in practice we haven't acted as though it's true. We'll compromise if it seems too difficult. Push for human rights with an ally who controls a critical resource? Not so much. Hold firm when it might mean losing trade deals and risking war? Again, not so much. Intervene when a nation is committing genocide? Just look at Rwanda, or any of the other historical examples.
There's a danger in saying that we should act differently. It means we would have to commit to interventions abroad that we aren't really willing to do. Yet there's also a danger in compromising on this too much. It makes us seem like we're all talk and no action. Hypocritical. That we don't really take it seriously.
This is the cognitive dissonance at the heart of our foreign policy. In some cases, certain interest groups will push for action...they see how powerful we are and know we can influence things for the better. But when it comes to putting troops on the ground and risking American lives, not so much.
It reminds me a bit of the American Civil War, actually. Abolitionists wanted to end slavery - and who can blame them? What compromise is worth letting one person suffer slavery a second longer than they have to?
But moving to act on that, to force an end to slavery in the South? Not so much. In some ways, the Southern fears of exactly that led to the Civil War. We tried compromising a lot before the war came. As the United States expanded and new states were formed, there was a big debate over which ones would allow slavery and which ones wouldn't. The Missouri Compromise was created to get around that, in the attempt to ease the fears of the slave-holding South by ensuring that half the new states would also be slave states (so that the slave states weren't outnumbered and wouldn't face the risk that the majority of free states would impose an end to slavery). The compromise may have delayed the onset of the Civil War, but at what cost to existing slaves?
What's interesting is how it all ended, though. The South basically let their fear of what might happen prompt them to secede from the Union in 1861 when Abraham Lincoln (who supported ending slavery) won the election. Whether or not Lincoln could have ended slavery without the Civil War is something we will never know. The attack on Fort Sumter kicked off the Civil War, and in the course of the war Lincoln passed the Emancipation Proclamation.
I previously pointed out that we don't have to share the same values to live together comfortably, but there really was no middle ground between accepting slavery and believing that slavery should be eradicated.
Human rights are kind of similar, in that you can't really agree that human rights matter AND agree that ignoring human rights is acceptable in certain situations. We can overlook situations we don't want to deal with, deny that something is a problem, pretend that we can support human rights and at the same time support nations that don't share those values...but that's more a reflection on the human capacity for cognitive dissonance than any real room for compromise.
Could we have ended slavery without the Civil War? If the South hadn't attacked Fort Sumter, if Lincoln tried ending slavery using our democratic political processes, could the (most likely slow) method of doing so truly be considered better, when it meant allowing people to continue living in slavery? Would it have meant freedom without Jim Crow laws?
I am not writing this to provide a clear answer, but because this is in the back of my mind as I consider what sort of foreign policy the US should use to support our ideals. Compromising on these issues may help prevent war (or secure a critical resource), but it's done by overlooking real human suffering. War might seem worse to a Union soldier who never suffered as a slave, whereas it probably isn't any worse to the ones still living in slavery. (Though we must consider Iraq when discussing this. The argument I laid out is rather close to the neocon point of view, at least with regards to military intervention, which didn't seem to pan out very well. Was that because Saddam's human rights violations weren't as bad as war? Or was it because we executed the war so poorly?)
In Gladwell's book Blink, he talked about thin-slicing and the way that first impressions shape a relationship. It reminds me of something Lois McMaster Bujold said in one of her science fiction books - start as you mean to go on.
I do think our initial reactions are important. They set the tone, shape how relationships (personal or professional) play out. I think you can change those patterns after the fact, but it's significantly harder. Which means I think it's important to be true to ourselves at the very beginning. Start as you mean to go on.
I think about this with regards to national security and our policies towards human rights. We have said that we think human rights are important, but in practice we haven't acted as though it's true. We'll compromise if it seems too difficult. Push for human rights with an ally who controls a critical resource? Not so much. Hold firm when it might mean losing trade deals and risking war? Again, not so much. Intervene when a nation is committing genocide? Just look at Rwanda, or any of the other historical examples.
There's a danger in saying that we should act differently. It means we would have to commit to interventions abroad that we aren't really willing to do. Yet there's also a danger in compromising on this too much. It makes us seem like we're all talk and no action. Hypocritical. That we don't really take it seriously.
This is the cognitive dissonance at the heart of our foreign policy. In some cases, certain interest groups will push for action...they see how powerful we are and know we can influence things for the better. But when it comes to putting troops on the ground and risking American lives, not so much.
It reminds me a bit of the American Civil War, actually. Abolitionists wanted to end slavery - and who can blame them? What compromise is worth letting one person suffer slavery a second longer than they have to?
But moving to act on that, to force an end to slavery in the South? Not so much. In some ways, the Southern fears of exactly that led to the Civil War. We tried compromising a lot before the war came. As the United States expanded and new states were formed, there was a big debate over which ones would allow slavery and which ones wouldn't. The Missouri Compromise was created to get around that, in the attempt to ease the fears of the slave-holding South by ensuring that half the new states would also be slave states (so that the slave states weren't outnumbered and wouldn't face the risk that the majority of free states would impose an end to slavery). The compromise may have delayed the onset of the Civil War, but at what cost to existing slaves?
What's interesting is how it all ended, though. The South basically let their fear of what might happen prompt them to secede from the Union in 1861 when Abraham Lincoln (who supported ending slavery) won the election. Whether or not Lincoln could have ended slavery without the Civil War is something we will never know. The attack on Fort Sumter kicked off the Civil War, and in the course of the war Lincoln passed the Emancipation Proclamation.
I previously pointed out that we don't have to share the same values to live together comfortably, but there really was no middle ground between accepting slavery and believing that slavery should be eradicated.
Human rights are kind of similar, in that you can't really agree that human rights matter AND agree that ignoring human rights is acceptable in certain situations. We can overlook situations we don't want to deal with, deny that something is a problem, pretend that we can support human rights and at the same time support nations that don't share those values...but that's more a reflection on the human capacity for cognitive dissonance than any real room for compromise.
Could we have ended slavery without the Civil War? If the South hadn't attacked Fort Sumter, if Lincoln tried ending slavery using our democratic political processes, could the (most likely slow) method of doing so truly be considered better, when it meant allowing people to continue living in slavery? Would it have meant freedom without Jim Crow laws?
I am not writing this to provide a clear answer, but because this is in the back of my mind as I consider what sort of foreign policy the US should use to support our ideals. Compromising on these issues may help prevent war (or secure a critical resource), but it's done by overlooking real human suffering. War might seem worse to a Union soldier who never suffered as a slave, whereas it probably isn't any worse to the ones still living in slavery. (Though we must consider Iraq when discussing this. The argument I laid out is rather close to the neocon point of view, at least with regards to military intervention, which didn't seem to pan out very well. Was that because Saddam's human rights violations weren't as bad as war? Or was it because we executed the war so poorly?)
No comments:
Post a Comment