Values and Interests and Stuff
Fred Kaplan observes that "Bush pretends that there is no tension — that our interests and our ideals are synonymous. Beinart indulges in the same pretense, though from a different angle." Kevin Drum counterobserves that "in fairness to Beinart, this is a tension that pretty much every leader of every liberal democracy in history has had to deal with, and no one has come up with a way of squaring this circle yet." I tend to think there's actually less to this conflict than discussion often presupposed.
The basic reality is that the question of what "our values" are is highly contestable as is the question of what "our interests" are. Under those circumstances, it winds up being relatively rare for a disputed policy issue to fundamentally come down to a question of interests versus values. Even when there's fairly widespread agreement as to what the relevant content of "our values" is in a given case, there's always widespread disagreement about the practical consequences of policy options.
Take Pakistan. Are we sacrificing our values to serve our interests there? Maybe. On the other hand, I was friendly with several Pakistanis in college -- members of the westernized elite -- who would strenuously argue that supporting Musharraf was supporting our values, and that any feasible alternative regime would be worse. Obviously, though, that's a debatable point both morally and empirically. But at the same time you have Dan Drezner making the case that pushing democracy in Pakistan would serve our interests.
Which isn't to say that our interests and values necessarily do align in Pakistan. Rather, my point is that sorting out the relationship between interests and values isn't, at the end of the day, the crux of most issues. What you see with Pakistan is a lot of disagreement and uncertainty about Pakistan, a country most of us don't understand especially well.
Similarly, the dispute over Bosnia policy in the 1990s is often portrayed as a disagreement between people who thought we should choose interests and ignore the situation because "we don't have a dog in that fight" and those who thought we should choose values. But look more closely and it's more complicated than that. The architects of Clinton's Bosnia intervention will tell you that it did serve America's interests as well as values. You have a dispute, basically, about the scope and nature of American interests.
And I think that's typically the case. The United States isn't a medium-sized 18th century European country with really obvious interests like "have a bigger army than the country next to you" or "don't let France take your colonies." Clearly, we'd all like to minimize the risk of terrorists detonating a nuclear bomb in an American city. Equally clearly, there's widespread and massive disagreement about how to do this. Under the circumstances, it gets a little hard to find well-motivated "interests versus values" conflicts.
It's true that issues will get complex and hazy when you look at them in detail-- I think 'interests' vs. 'values' conflicts are invoked when thinking about issues that you don't look at in detail. Which is the situation that holds for most people most of the time.
June 21, 2006 6:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Could we please cease regularly bringing up Operation Deliberate Force and Operation Allied Force as lessons, guides, examples of the conduct of American foreign policy.
In both cases Western leaders were personally humiliated by a poorly dressed, corrupt aparatchik who ran a criminal kleptocracy. Their responses had nothing to do with anything that can be called a foreign policy and teach us next to nothing.
June 21, 2006 6:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's too bad our interests aren't our values.
June 21, 2006 7:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
I visited a Pakistani friend from college in Pakistan for several weeks, and over the course of that time, I talked with a lot of people--some westernized elites, others not so much.
I feel perfectly safe saying that there is absolutely no way that American interests or values would be served by cutting Musharraf's legs out from under him in search of some firm commitment to democratic abstractions. If it weren't the Islamists who took over (and maybe even if it were) it would be a regime that would be astoundingly corrupt. (See the past couple pre-Musharraf decades for examples of just how bad their democratic governments have been.)
Now, that being said: who says American values are the ones we wrote down? Clearly, rapacious greed, satiated through the domination and/or genocide of technically less sophisticated Others, is the American Way. If you believe American values are the ones in the Constitution, you aren't paying attention to the values we act on.
June 21, 2006 8:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Trail of Tears, Mexican War, Winning of the West, Cuba sell-out, Philippine-American War --enough of this reality based nonsense.
America just wants to spread freedom and democracy around the world.
June 21, 2006 8:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
The real foundation for "interests v. values" is the rhetorical framework it provides, for hanging a lot of b.s. up to view, without requiring much substantive knowledge, theoretical or particular, about Pakistan or anywhere else.
June 21, 2006 10:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
I could enjoy a philosophical debate about how interest relates or conflicts with value. However, it's a bad frame for a political debate.
Philosophically, I'd put it this way. If interests aligned simply with values, and if either were itself simple and lacking in conflicts among interests and values, there'd be no need for ethics. Yet if interests, long and short, personal and collective, did not have a great deal to do with our values, there'd be no basis for ethics.
Politically, however, it's more important to keep people alert to the distortions made in invoking both. When "realists" or free market types invoke interests, they have a vicious, short-sighted, self-defeating idea of interest. When neocons or the religious right invoke values, they mean something as ethically desirable as Islamic jihad.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
June 21, 2006 1:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't follow this post, Matt, at all.
If your values and interests are not commensurate, you're way off in never-never land.
That's the bottom line.
It's quite clear that US "values" and "interests" ARE commensurate - at least if the "values" you're talking about AREN'T the "pundit-speak" crap about "democracy" "freedom", "human rights", yada, yada, and the "interests" you're talking about AREN'T "national security", "the economy" or some other nonsense.
The US state's values and interests are the same as every other state on the planet - money and power. Period. There are no other values and interests involved.
The fact that the US state will wind up like every other state in history - being destroyed by revolution or war - is the only inevitability.
June 21, 2006 2:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Clinton's BOSNIA invervention? What might that be? Clinton's Bosnia policy was to enforce an arms embargo, meaning that the Croats and the Serbs were fully armed and only the Muslims could not defend themselves, and to have Cyrus Vance engage in phony negotiations whose purpose was to persuade Americans that progress was being made and to keep the war off the front page. It was only after the Srebrenica massacre that the West got sort of serious and imposed the Dayton Accords - not because anyone cared about dead civilians, but because Nazi-style mass killings in Europe demonstrated to the world the impotence of NATO.
The US "intervention" consisted of 20,000 peace-keeping troops, and one combat fatality (a land mine).
And I say sort of serious because Dayton was an appeasement of Milosevich. Failure to deal with him in the context of Bosnia led directly to Kosovo.
US policy in Bosnia was entirely about US interests and had nothing at all to do with "our values."
June 21, 2006 3:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
short-sighted self-defeating interests and the values as desirable as Islamic jihad --- I perceive perfect harmony here.
One can hope that we can alter both sides of this equation and preserve the harmony.
But we must be careful how we define our interest. For example, if it is "securing the supplies of energy and other raw materials", a logical solution may be to resort to piracy (or simply demand tribute from the producers). This may be in conflict with our values (which we must also define with care).
June 21, 2006 4:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
I believe our basic civil value is that "We the People" freely chose to form a government to govern US. What does that have to do with Pakistan?
June 21, 2006 5:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Since before the time of the Barbary pirates the United States' dominant and ultimate value and its principal reason for being has been freedom of trade and of contract -- at home and abroad. Americans have the God given right to be the best -- the wealthiest -- they can be.
As to American interests? There isn't one. The question is which policy will benefit which American elite and will the other elites, such as they are, go along with the costs of putting that policy into effect.
June 21, 2006 5:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
I've got no problem with freedom of trade and contract - the question is who do you have to kill to GET that freedom?
Apparently, the US thinks just about everybody.
In the anarchist world, there would be no corporations (which are creatures of the state), although there would be "companies" (in the classic sense of a bunch of people going in the same direction.) These companies would deal with other people around the world. These companies would have no ability to "wage war" or "occupy nations" or do pretty much anything that they couldn't afford to pay for themselves. There would undoubtedly be quite a number of idiots who would try these things - "corporate warfare" is a staple of cyberpunk sci-fi. But without the state - and most importantly the ability of the state to TAX and impress civilians into a military - any company would be hard put to be a threat of any significance to any other population in the world.
I'd take a world of unregulated companies over a state capitalist world of "regulated" corporations any day.
June 22, 2006 4:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why wouldn't one "company" just hire mercenaries to rid itself of all of its competitors?
June 22, 2006 4:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm clear on what "American values" are, but "American interests" always seem to be code for something. Often that something is a commodity that native companies would sell to us just as surely as the American companies whose interests we are defending.
June 22, 2006 7:11 PM | Reply | Permalink