A Note on Interests, Values, and the Use of Force

Abstract

The recent presidential election campaign intensified a public debate that began in earnest in November 1984 when Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger delivered his famous National Press Club speech on use of force. That debate has evolved over years. It began as a discussion of whether force should be withheld only for real war or also used for coercive diplomacy. Though this issue persists, debate has come to focus primarily on whether force should be reserved for defense of interests as opposed to promotion of values. At one end of spectrum are strict constructionist Weinberger doctrinaires, many of them military professionals, who believe that force should not be used either for diplomacy or value promotion--that it should be employed only to protect United States and its allies from direct military threats. At other end are those who believe that force is an indispensable tool of diplomacy and a legitimate if highly circumstantial means of promoting democracy, halting ge nocide, and restoring order in conditions of anarchy. The Bush campaign argued strongly for interests, whereas Gore campaign spoke up for values as well as Indeed, Bush spokesmen condemned Clinton Administration for dissipating US military strength across a series of military interventions and peace-enforcement obligations on behalf of value promotion. The Gore camp defended US intervention in Balkans and Haiti on grounds that stopping ethnic cleansing and restoring democracy served America's strategic interests precisely by promoting American values overseas. The argument over interests versus values as bases for military action is hardly new. President Theodore Roosevelt and his foreign policy epitomized approach to world based on concrete national interest. Roosevelt accepted world for what it was in early 1900s: a Hobbesian struggle for power and influence in which it was foolish to believe in any morality other than that of raison d'etat. The best way to operate in such a world was through maintenance of a balance of power among major states, and war was sometimes necessary to maintain that balance. In contrast was President Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy based on active promotion of American values overseas. For Wilson, peace was natural state of affairs, broken only by tyrannical states bent on conquest. The key to making world safe for democracy was to democratize world itself, because democracies were morally superior to other states and would not make war upon one another. Entry into World War I afforded United States opportunity to join Europe's democracies in ridding continent of German authoritarianism and aggression. Both realist and idealist approaches have influenced US foreign policy since presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Richard Nixon was a self-declared practitioner of realpolitik who acted mainly on basis on interest, not values. His embrace of communist China in a de facto strategic partnership was purely and simply a move to bolster containment of expanding Soviet power and influence in wake of US defeat in Vietnam. Jimmy Carter was Wilson-oriented in his approach to foreign policy, as was Bill Clinton. Carter placed human rights ahead of balancing Soviet power, at least until Russians invaded Afghanistan, and Clinton used force repeatedly to push values in places--Somalia, Haiti, and former Yugoslavia--peripheral to traditional US security Or so it seemed. Most presidents, however, cannot be easily pigeonholed as either or because in their use-of-force decisions they were motivated by considerations of both power and values. Certainly, it is historically preposterous to argue that the liberal fights for values in contrast to conservative who fights for interests. [1] No American better understood threat Nazi aggression in Europe posed to American strategic interests than liberal Franklin Roosevelt, and it was conservative George Bush who went to war in Persian Gulf to vindicate his ideal of a new world order. …