This almost happened in Switzerland in the Second World War—but did not because the army led public opinion despite all sorts of strictures.
Not least of the lessons of the Swiss experience is that, because allies are available in inverse proportion to the need for them and alliances are creatures of circumstances, military forces must not be spread out in positions where their safety depends on allies. Allies may be defeated, as France was in 1940, or fail to see their own interest, as Italy failed. Or they may be too far away to help, as America was. So Switzerland was obliged to fall back on its own resources as the storm was at its worst, and to redeploy its forces as they should have been deployed in the first place. Had the Swiss examined their military predicament and established their mountain redoubt in the sunshine of peace, the military significance of their forces would have been as sound as possible. From this firm foundation, they could have opted for the assistance of whatever allies the circumstances might have produced. But making the survival of one’s military forces dependent on allies whose disposition one cannot control leads to rude awakenings.
As for neutrality, history teaches that it is the fragile creature of the balance of power, and that belligerents violate or respect neutrals’ claims to the extent that either course appears to pay. Neutrality is possible only to the extent that it can be defended, and the behavior that can be expected of neutrals is proportionate to the capacity to hurt them or protect them. Both the Axis and the Allies asserted their interests vis-à-vis Switzerland proportionately to the balance of power. For either side to have pressed harder than its capacity to hurt or protect Switzerland warranted would have invited hatred as well as contempt for impotence. Had the Swiss given in to a greater extent than they had to, they would have been the contemptible ones.
Money
Governments are always under pressure from domestic groups to pay in some way for the foreign exports of domestic businesses. But when goods are sold with subsidies of any kind, the home government—that is to say the taxpayers—becomes the real payer. And the government acts as collector for its favorite interest groups. Any sort of subsidy effectively lets one group live off the resources of others and thus tends to set one domestic group against another. In World War II the Swiss government felt compelled to subsidize sales to both sides on behalf of different domestic interest groups. The balancing act was successful, but the country paid a heavy price in political disaffection.
Money, or rather the prospect of getting hold of it easily at others’ expense, is the driving force of interest-group politics as well as of rapacious war. Montesquieu reminds us that the Roman Republic died when its citizens began to exploit one another as they had despoiled foreigners. This happens all too easily without pressure from foreign powers. But when a country is confronted by a foreign power that can cause rewards to flow to its favorite domestic interest groups, maintaining cohesion becomes even more difficult.
The grand question in Switzerland during World War II was whether and to what extent to resist Nazi Germany. No dispassionate person argued that this was primarily, let alone exclusively, an economic question. And yet much of the interplay among Swiss elites went on as if this grand, long-term question were about which interest group would get what in the short term. Do not confuse this effect of interest-group politics with democracy. Typically, interest groups exercise influence behind closed doors, while the public nature of democratic competition pushes political competitors to frame their claims at least in the language of common interest, if not the common good. Rather, Americans should be mindful that questions of material advantage are inherently divisive and distract from the proper concerns of foreign policy. Americans should be especially wary of such divisions and distractions because in the 1990s the United States adopted the long-standing European and Japanese theory that the purpose of foreign policy is to secure advantages for domestic businesses. Thus an official of the Clinton administration was quoted lumping all that does not concern commercial advantage into the category “Stratocrap and Globaloney.”2 No. The hunt for material advantage on the part of interest groups can corrupt foreign policy no less disastrously than domestic policy. The anti-Swiss campaign of the 1990s is yet one more example that domestic and international corruption are made of the same stuff.
Democracy
Democracy is just because those who bear the consequences of policy also choose it. But democracy is good also because it tends to produce policies more thoroughly thought out than those merely chosen by officials. The Swiss experience in World War II teaches that people at large often have a better sense of events than do their officials. This is not to say that rank-and-file citizens are intellectually brighter than elites; intelligence is not the point. Nor is vox populi to be confused with vox Dei because greater numbers lead to better decisions. History is full of instances in which whole peoples made disastrous decisions after full deliberation. None is more poignant than the ancient Athenian assembly’s self-destructive decision to invade Sicily after rejecting the better arguments. Rather, popular government, or the responsibility of officials to voters, only raises the chances that the better arguments will be considered along with the worse.
Indeed, quite apart from democracy, merely adhering to formal procedures in decision-making forces officials to explain what they are doing to one another and a fortiori to themselves. Officials must then formulate their proposals in full sentences, knowing that they will be held responsible. As we have seen, the Swiss government likely would not have made the errors it did with regard to refugee policy and freedom of the press had the decisions been made through the normal political process, never mind by referendum. The political will to resist Nazi Germany and assert the old Swiss decencies resided far more in ordinary people than in sophisticates.
This is a valuable lesson. Americans at the turn of the century as during the Cold War have been seduced by the argument that their historically unsubtle approach to international affairs—especially revulsion at Communist regimes and preference for using military power decisively or not at all—is dangerously unsophisticated. These matters, so goes the new wisdom, are best left to the pros. One of the clearest articulations of this point comes in the 1995 memoirs of General Colin Powell (U.S. Army, retired), former national security adviser and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Powell, proud of his status as a Washington insider, argues not only that the people’s elected representatives are a bother to serious policy-makers because they play to the public, but also that seriousness in policy-making consists of privately brokering the interests of various bureaucracies and interest groups. Powell has contempt for those officials who try to make policy by presenting full-dress arguments in “big meetings with the boss.” Competent men like himself instead arrange small meetings where different interests are arbitraged without the participants having to fear being held responsible. Alas, officials who make decisions en canaille tend to lose the intellectual discipline and the very language of national interest that are the currency of “big meetings with the boss.”
What would General Guisan have said to that? In the dark years of 1940–1943 the main threat to his country’s survival and to his soldiers’ capacity to fight came precisely from the pros. If the Swiss elites had merely arbitraged their interests, Switzerland would have capitulated to the Nazis behind the backs of the soldiers. So this Swiss general made sure that arguments for resisting the Nazis got wide distribution among the people, and that members of parliament were fully aware of all the ways in which the Federal Council was failing to back the army. His Army and Hearth organization also helped rouse public opinion against any notion of tolerating pro-Nazi activities that might have crossed official minds. The Federal Council resented the army’s political role, not least because it just did not want the issues of the war debated in public. The council members preferred not to discuss their views publicly because they believed that the people would not understand and should obey out of respect for the offices
they held. But the power of office depends on legitimacy, and an official earns legitimacy by embodying a people’s hopes and pride. By acting precisely as Powell advises, the Swiss federal government lost not only the argument over policy, but legitimacy as well.
Latter-Day U.S. Foreign Policy
The anti-Swiss campaign of 1995–1998 shows that America’s role in the world is being undermined by unseriousness—about the realities of international affairs, brought on by a kind of corruption.
It is little wonder that at the end of the twentieth century an important contributor to America’s ruling party was able to enlist the president and enough officials of that party to help extort a large sum from foreign companies doing business in the United States through a trial-less class action suit. Nor was the amount of money involved intolerable; the 10 percent of profits that the Swiss banks had to pay was roughly comparable to what foreign companies in Mexico have to pay as the “mordida,” the local bribe. In our time, exchanging favors for permits is the way political business is done in America as well. Yet it is remarkable how quickly the practitioners of this low art went from extracting money from American companies on the basis of fraudulent claims about the harmfulness of products to attacking a whole foreign country based on imputed guilt for one of history’s greatest crimes and in the sacred name of its victims.
More interesting than the corruption and chutzpah themselves are the reasons why U.S. officials felt safe in them. As often happens in history’s rare prolonged periods of peace, the prospect of war becomes difficult to take seriously. To consider international affairs without war engenders behavior as unrealistic as might follow from considering relations between men and women while abstracting from intercourse and children. And so U.S. officials play at international relations mindless of the realities. It can be fun to wield the country’s tremendous power unofficially, without actually committing the nation to anything, without ever putting anything to a vote. It also can be quite a bit safer to take on weak foreign countries than powerful domestic rivals. After all, the United States is so powerful that modern Germany, never mind Switzerland, can do little harm to us. So why not satisfy a valued contributor at the expense of Swiss or German companies? And why not do it in the name of moral principle?
Why not? First, because the fraudulent use of moral principle is immoral and the cynicism it engenders drives legitimate moral concerns even further out of international life. That is especially significant for America, whose relations with the rest of the world have rested to an unusual degree on claims to moral principle. It was unusually galling that the Clinton administration extorted money from Switzerland and other European countries based on gratuitous accusations of responsibility for the Holocaust. By themselves such insults, much less the injuries, would not ruin American foreign policy. But the unseriousness of which they are part may well do so.
Second, any nation’s international power is based to some extent on the admiration and awe it engenders in other nations. Nowadays that is called “soft power.” In the half century after U.S. soldiers earned it by hard sacrifice in World War II, America’s soft power in Europe—and in much of the world—was overwhelming. Whatever else foreigners might have thought, they believed that America was imitable, was not out to hurt them, and knew how to get its way. The Soviet Union’s calls for anti-Americanism fell mostly on deaf ears; anti-Americanism was confined to the fever swamps of leftist intellectuals. But beginning in the mid-1990s, when Russian and Chinese diplomats shopped around the world the argument that decadent America was dealing high-handedly with everyone, and that everyone should oppose American hegemony, more and more people outside Paris’s Left Bank listened. As the twentieth century came to an end, opinion polls throughout Europe showed that between 60 percent and 70 percent of respondents thought the United States was unfriendly to their interests and should not be imitated. In other parts of the world, resentment of America was even more prominent.
Why? Consider, first, how latter-day American popular culture is sweeping the world. It is difficult to argue that the images we are exporting—rap music, public scandal—are anything but corrosive of any and all cultures. But in the political realm, consider how difficult it is for friends of the United States to deny charges that America’s claims of impartial, uncorrupt government are hypocritical. After all, U.S. administrations, Republican and Democrat alike, long ago acquired the habit of using official power to further the commercial interest of their constituents. The Clinton administration has often reserved seats on international trade delegations for political supporters—just as its Republican predecessors did before. Other governments do so routinely, but again, when mighty, self-righteous America does it, everyone notices and resents it.
Foreign policy is supposed to project power, both soft and hard. Whatever a country lacks in the capacity to make foreigners tremble it must make up in the capacity to attract them, and vice versa. But a prerequisite for awing or attracting is a foreign policy whose voice the whole country will support morally and physically. Yet almost by definition a foreign policy that is no more than what former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger called the stapling together of the goals of domestic constituency groups is more likely to invite all manner of disrespect.
Regardless of whether military power is used or only brandished, the military operations had better be of the same order of magnitude as the political objectives. In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War the United States demanded that Iraq stop manufacturing weapons of mass destruction; in the 1999 Yugoslav war the Americans insisted that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic stop chasing non-Serbs out of various parts of his country. Since meeting these demands would have meant death to the regimes of both countries, they would never bend to any but mortal military operations. Moreover, these regimes realized that the United States was not about to use its full power to unseat them. So they fought. To gain its objectives, the United States would have had to use force majeure. But it used force mineure, and lost its objectives.
All this would matter little if the United States were something like a fortress—if, like republican Rome prior to the Third Punic War, its military strength and ferocity increased dramatically the closer one got to it, and its national unity were unshakable. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century America’s military forces were spread over the globe as never before, and were more dependent than ever on the goodwill of allies. And more than ever, America’s foreign affairs either were of no interest to the American people or were bones of interest-group contention. When the U.S. government takes part in quarrels abroad that do not energize the American people as a whole, it drains the reservoir or public spiritedness. Hence it is no small thing whenever the U.S. government foments abroad disaffection with America—especially when U.S. military power is shrinking and America continually displays international ineffectiveness. In the 1990s the image of imperiousness, moral hypocrisy, and impotence was becoming ever more dangerous to America.
One of the lessons of the Swiss experience in World War II, and indeed of any nation’s experience in any serious matter, is that military power—the capacity and willingness to destroy or to protect—is the foundation of international relations. The outstanding fact about America in the 1990s, and especially during the Clinton administration, was that, even as American military forces were being spread from the Persian Gulf to Haiti to the Balkan peninsula, their size shrank by some 45 percent. At the same time the U.S. government was making military threats and promises it could not possibly keep, such as protecting the eastern borders of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, and possibly of Ukraine. As regards the Balkans, President Clinton called “immoral” the Vance-Owen plan to give the Serbs as much as 43 percent of Bosnia, and then bombed to obtain an agreement that gave them 49 percent. The United States raged against North Korea’s and Iran’s development of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, and then watched as these programs moved to fruition. America bombed Iraq to for
ce it to accept United Nations inspections of its weapons of mass destruction, and then, as Iraq continued to build what its dictator wished, the United States agreed to increase his income from oil sales, making sanctions a joke and accepting the absence of arms inspectors. Moreover, the chief targets of U.S. military power, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, had survived and their influence in their regions had increased while that of the United States had waned. Obviously, more and more of the world’s people had less and less to hope and fear from “hard” U.S. military power.
More important, during the 1990s the world noticed a new qualitative aspect of American military power, namely that U.S. military operations were being designed less to achieve military results than to hold U.S. casualties to zero. Of course, military threats and promises conditioned on zero expenditure of lives can neither eliminate enemies nor safeguard friends. In other words they are not for real. So why would one engage in such operations? What purpose do they serve? Alas, American military operations must stress avoidance of casualties above effectiveness precisely because foreign policies franchised to interest groups cannot give the American people sufficient reason to commit their blood. They serve no purpose for the country as a whole, but rather succeed in making politicians look good to their favorite domestic constituents. In the end, they prove to be shows put on at the expense of the national interest.
Between the Alps and a Hard Place Page 21