But that is only the half of it. We also know that grand historical events can turn on a hair’s breadth, on this or that contingency. While the destiny of Afghanistan or Libya might never be that of Canada, better or worse outcomes in such places are possible depending upon the choices of individual policy makers, so that all of us, as Berlin rightly suggests, must take moral responsibility for our actions. And because wrong choices and unfortunate opinions are part and parcel of weighing in on foreign policy, we go on torturing ourselves with counterfactuals.
What is fate—what the Greeks called moira, “the dealer-out of portions”? Does it exist? If it does, Herodotus best captures its complexities: From his geographical determinism regarding the landmasses of Greece and Asia Minor and the cultures they raise up to his receptivity to the salience of human intrigues, he skillfully conveys how self-interest is often calculated within a disfiguring whirlwind of passion, so that the most epic events emerge from the oddest of incidents and personal dramas. With such a plethora of factors, fate is inscrutable. In Jorge Luis Borges’s short tale “The Lottery in Babylon,” fate means utter randomness: A person can get rich, be executed or tortured, provided with a beautiful woman, or be thrown into prison solely because of a roll of the dice. Nothing appears to be predetermined, but neither is there moral responsibility. I find this both unsatisfying and unacceptable, despite the story’s allegorical power.
How can a great episode in history be determined in advance? It seems impossible. The older I get, with the experience of three decades as a foreign correspondent behind me, the more I realize that outside of a class of brilliantly intuitive minds—including the late Samuel Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Henry Kissinger—political science is still mainly an aspiration, and that Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories offer a much better guide to the bizarre palace maneuverings of the last Romanov czar and czarina of Russia, of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu of Romania, of Slobodan Milošević and Mirjana Marković of Yugoslavia, or of Zviad and Manana Gamsakhurdia of Georgia. In short, there is no scientific formula to understanding international relations. There is primarily insight, which by definition is Shakespearean.
Yes, geography and culture matter. Tropical abundance produces disease, just as temperate climates with good natural harbors produce wealth. But these are merely the backdrops to the immense and humming beehive of human calculation, the details of which can never be known in advance. And yet, over the course of my life I have known people who are abrasive and confrontational, and generate one crisis after another to the detriment of themselves and their relations, even as I have known others who are unfailingly considerate and modest, who go from one seemingly easy success to another. Character, which itself is partly physiological, can indeed be destiny, and that is fate.
It is this very contradiction concerning fate that produces our finest historians: men and women who discern grand determinative patterns, but only within an impossible-to-predict chaos of human interactions, themselves driven by the force of vivid personalities acting according to their own agency, for better and for worse. A classic work that comes to mind is University of London historian Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924. “It was by no means inevitable that the [Russian] revolution should have ended in the Bolshevik dictatorship,” he writes. “There were a number of decisive moments, both before and during 1917, when Russia might have followed a more democratic course.” Nevertheless, Figes adds,
Russia’s democratic failure was deeply rooted in its political culture and social history…[for example, in] the absence of a state-based counterbalance to the despotism of the Tsar; the isolation and fragility of liberal civil society; the backwardness and violence of the Russian village that drove so many peasants to go and seek a better life in the industrial towns; and the strange fanaticism of the Russian radical intelligentsia.
Figes gives us the determinative forces, but then, like a good novelist, he provides in capacious detail the other factors, without any one of which such seemingly determinative forces might have been stayed. Had only Czar Alexander III not died of kidney disease at the age of forty-nine, long before his son Nicholas II was temperamentally ready to rule. Had only Nicholas truly supported Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin and recognized the talent of another bureaucrat, Prince Lvov, early on. Had only the Czarevitch Alexei not had hemophilia, forcing the royal family to rely for treatment on the mystic Grigory Rasputin, whose baleful influence fatally weakened the regime. Had only Alexander Kerensky been better grounded emotionally and less in love with his own rhetoric, and had only his provisional government not bet its fortunes so completely on the spring 1917 offensive against the Germans. Had only Lenin’s past as a member of the nobility not awarded him such a “dogmatic” and “domineering manner,” and had Lenin only been arrested or even temporarily detained by a nighttime patrol while he walked in disguise to the Smolny Institute in Petrograd, to take control of the squabbling Bolsheviks and declare an insurrection in October 1917. And so on. Again, we are in the realm of geography and culture, until we are in the realm of Shakespeare, and finally in the realm of sheer chance. Although Figes says that “historians should not really concern themselves with hypothetical questions,” his textured rendition of history allows the reader to ponder other outcomes.
Human events, because they involve human beings, will not be reduced to formulas. That is ultimately why historians are more valuable than political scientists. Of course, the Holocaust had its roots in centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe that were, in turn, the partial result of determinative social and cultural patterns. But would the Holocaust—or World War II in Europe, for that matter—have happened without the singular character of Hitler, who combined an obsession with killing Jews with a talent for operatic, megalomaniacal leadership in the teeth of a massive depression?
So, are we back to the so-called great-man theory of history (or dreadful man, in Hitler’s case)? That would be far too simplistic. For the most forceful personalities always operate inside geopolitical contexts that are mechanistic and deterministic. Liberal internationalists credit Richard Holbrooke as the great man who stopped the slaughter in Bosnia in 1995, and whose behind-the-scenes spirit drove the murderous Serbs out of Kosovo in 1999. But there was a fatalistic geopolitical context to this, without which Holbrooke could not have succeeded quite as he did. That context was Russia’s weakness, brought about by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The 1990s saw Russia in the enfeebled chaos that was Boris Yeltsin’s rule. Had Russia been able to exert its usual historical influence in the Slavic Balkans, Holbrooke and the West would not have been able to act with such impunity. The discussions the Clinton administration held with the Russian government over the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s were about saving Russia’s face—not about fundamentally compromising with it. Were Russia in the 1990s like the Russia of Vladimir Putin’s aggressive and centralizing rule, that certainly would not have been possible.
That is a counterfactual, obviously. It is interesting because, like all counterfactuals, it shows how complex and even metaphysical such a thing as fate can be. But we are still left with history as it has actually turned out. Great character, after all, is character that deals heroically with the situation at hand, not with a theoretical situation that can only be imagined.
Both supporters and opponents of the Iraq War can agree that the leading figures in the George W. Bush administration did not have outstanding characters. Their mistakes were serial. It wasn’t only that the Iraqi army was disbanded and the Baath Party outlawed. To give the administration the benefit of the doubt, the Iraqi army did, in fact, disintegrate on its own and the Baath Party at the upper levels had to be removed, if only to win the support of the Shia in the early phase of the occupation. But so many other things were done wrong. The occupation simply wasn’t planned and staffed out in advance. The Coalition Provisional Authority com
peted with rather than complemented the military occupation forces. Too much faith was put in the hands of returning exiles. The critical first phase of the occupation was handed over to an inexperienced three-star general, Ricardo Sanchez. Then came George W. Casey, Jr., a stolid peacetime general if ever there was one, who utterly lacked the intuitive and cultural skills to deal with Iraqis or the larger situation at hand. Given the quickened pace of modern war, President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld did not fire and replace generals with sufficient speed. The list goes on and on.
I supported the Iraq War. I mention this whenever publicly discussing the issue. I was not in favor of exporting democracy. Anyone who knows my work knows that I have seen the benefits of enlightened dictatorship in many instances, and still do. But Saddam Hussein’s regime was not a dictatorship: It constituted a suffocating totalitarianism somewhere south of Stalin and north of the Assads in Syria. I knew it intimately from several reporting trips to Iraq in the 1980s, and thus I was a journalist who had gotten too close to his story. In short, I became committed. Yet, no matter how Iraq turns out in the future, even if there is a sharp improvement and the Islamic State is defeated, the price America paid there will still have been far too steep. The war as it turned out—not how it might have turned out according to some counterfactual—was a disaster.
But that is where my certainty ends. The what-ifs, because there are so many, are indeed tantalizing, even as the sheer amount of mistakes in prosecuting the war leads one inexorably to the conclusion that the decision to invade in the first place was just that, another mistake. But grand themes, because they are teased out of a plethora of intricate little details, must remain an interpretation, not a fate. Maybe the Iraq invasion, precisely because of the many mistakes involved with it, was not even given a chance to succeed. I desperately want to believe this, given my previous support of the war, but at the end of a sleepless night I can’t. I sense instead that the legions of mistakes were inherent in the hubris of the conception.
Here is a counterfactual: Bush, in the summer of 2002, decides not to invade Iraq. Saddam’s regime soldiers on. The sanctions against him are gradually lifted. And so the fact that he has no weapons of mass destruction does not become known. The Arab Spring arrives in 2011. The Shia and Kurds in Iraq immediately revolt. Saddam—in his trademark sanguinary fashion—kills proportionately more or as many people as Bashar al-Assad kills in Syria. The Bushes, father and son, are then blamed for not dealing with Saddam when they had the chance (remember that the elder Bush’s wisdom of not pushing on to Baghdad only became apparent after his son had gotten bogged down in Iraq).
In other words, there may never have been even the possibility of a soft landing for the Baathist regimes in the Levant, given how much these regimes pulverized society, eviscerating all forms of intermediary social organizations except for the state at the top and the tribe and extended family at the bottom. Whether we acted militarily or not, in Iraq or in Syria, the result in any event was going to be anarchy. This is fatalism, I know. It denies human agency—and, therefore, moral responsibility on our part. But while that might be reprehensible, it does not necessarily make my assertion false.
Libya and Syria are the current poster children of this conundrum. We intervened in Libya with airpower, special-operations forces, and logistical assets in order to prevent dictator Muammar Qaddafi from killing masses of civilians in the Benghazi area. We then aided and abetted the toppling of his regime. The result has been sheer chaos in Libya, the undermining of Mali, and the spread of weaponry throughout the Sahara. Tripoli is no longer the capital of a country, but a mere dispatch point for negotiations among tribes, gangs, and militias. Chaos in Benghazi led to the murder of U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Thus, was the decision to help topple Qaddafi a mistake—not only in geopolitical terms, but in moral terms as well? Proponents of the intervention claim that had we put more effort into stabilizing Libya after Qaddafi was killed, much of this would not have happened. But I seriously doubt—especially given the experiences in Vietnam and Iraq—that we have ever been capable of engineering reality on the ground in complex, alien societies. Germany and Japan were destroyed, defeated, and occupied countries—and thus exceptions to the rule. And they had the tradition of being modern, industrialized societies and economies, unlike the countries of the Greater Middle East. At some point, at some level, we must respect the workings of fate, if only to restrain our vanity. It is for the same reason that we believe in God.
The question of Syria is harder. We did not try in earnest to help politically moderate fighters amid the Grand Guignol of forces battling to topple the Baathist Assad regime. Had we done so, the chances of being drawn into an intractable and infernally complex conflict, with dozens upon dozens of different militias arrayed, would have been substantial. But had we done so, there was also a chance of both toppling Assad and undermining both the birth and spread of the Islamic State. And yet there was also a chance of toppling Assad, even as we would have been unable to micromanage events on the ground, therefore helping to midwife a Sunni jihadist regime to power in Damascus. Take your pick. The truth is unknowable. And because it is unknowable, we cannot assume what fate has held in store for Syria since 2011.
What is the answer to all of this?
Determinism, as Berlin writes, may have been argued about since the Greek Stoics identified two seemingly contradictory notions: individual moral responsibility and “causation”—the belief that our acts are the unavoidable result of a chain of prior events. The French philosopher Raymond Aron wrote of what Daniel J. Mahoney described in these pages in 1999 as a “sober ethic rooted in the truth of ‘probabilistic determinism,’ ” because “human choice always operates within certain contours or restraints such as the inheritance of the past.” That is, Aron believed in a soft determinism that accepts obvious differences between groups and regions but, nevertheless, does not oversimplify, and leaves many possibilities open. That may be the best answer available.
Whether we admit it or not, we are all soft determinists. That is the only way we could survive in the world and at the same time, for example, be good parents: by assuming that if we or our children behave in a certain way, some outcomes are more likely than others. And we adjust our actions accordingly. Therefore, the other term for soft determinism is common sense. To take a dull and ordinary illustration, if our son or daughter gets into the best college to which they applied, we generally encourage them to go there, since the likelihood of him or her going on to a good career and earning more money increases. We make such decisions every hour of every day—decisions based on the assumption that the record of the past indicates a certain result in the present or future. This is all to some degree fatalism. And we’re all guilty of it. Why should this commonsensical fatalism, which is reasonable and hesitant, rarely dogmatic, not apply to foreign policy?
Just consider the case of promoting democracy abroad: It took England nearly half a century to hold the first meeting of a parliament after the signing of the Magna Carta, and more than seven hundred years to achieve women’s suffrage. What we in the West define as a healthy democracy took England the better part of a millennium to achieve. A functioning democracy is not a tool kit that can be easily exported, but an expression of culture and historical development. Great Britain’s democracy did not come from civil-society programs taught by aid workers: It was the offshoot of bloody dynastic politics and uprisings in the medieval and early modern eras. In a similar spirit, whatever indigenous cultural elements India possessed for the establishment of democracy, the experience of almost two hundred years of British imperial rule under the colonial civil service was crucial. Certain other countries in Asia had many years of economic and social development under enlightened authoritarians to prepare them for democracy. In Latin America, the record of democracy remains spotty, with virtual one-man rule in some places, and near chaos and socia
l and economic upheaval in others. African democracies are often that in name only, with few or no governing authorities outside of the capital cities. Holding elections is easy; it is building institutions that counts. Given this evidence, and with the Arab world having suffered the most benighted forms of despotism anywhere in the world, how can one expect to export democracy overnight to the Middle East?
Yes, all this is determinism of a sort. It is also common sense.
In sum, foreign policy cannot function properly without a reasonable level of determinism. Determinism constitutes an awareness of limits: limits to what the United States can and cannot do in the world. This is a searing reality. And because it is so, whether we know it or not, we define great statesmen as those who work near the edges of those limits, near the edges of what is possible. Great statesmen rebel against limits, they rebel against determinism, even as their very skillful diplomacy constitutes an implicit acceptance that such limits exist.
Of course, many will try to break through these limits, in statesmanship and in other pursuits. President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “man in the arena” speech was in a larger sense a tribute to all those who have fought the good fight, even if they failed. But not many take heed of that worthy sentiment. For example, one of Bill Clinton’s secretaries of state, Warren Christopher, made more than twenty trips to the Middle East in search of a deal between Israel and Syria that proved just out of reach. His efforts have been completely forgotten, as Secretary of State John Kerry’s failed attempt to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians will be. In those cases, determinism appears to have ruled.
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