Rethinking Foreign Policy: Roundtable Discussion

Also, read: Rethinking Foreign Policy Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 (Conclusion).

The Roundtable provides a forum for the further discussion of material published in the IOS Journal. Readers are encouraged to submit questions, objections, and further thoughts on issues raised in the newsletter. IOS staff and advisors may also participate, sometimes by commenting on readers' letters.

This Roundtable is devoted to comments on "Rethinking Foreign Policy," a three-part essay by Roger Donway that concluded in the last issue of the Journal. Letters printed below have been selected from among many excellent communications about the essay. In this issue's selection of letters, we have made an effort to represent key issues raised in the many letters that could not be printed. Mr. Donway's reply to the letters concludes the Roundtable.

Rethinking Foreign Policy

I never thought I'd see the one world federation described in Anthem proposed as an "ultimate goal" in an Objectivist periodical. It's interesting how you reach your conclusion: with the best of intentions, you postulate a "one world" single society amidst a culture of freedom. The problem is—things change, people change, ideas change (as occurred in the Hellenistic world within one generation after Alexander's death); yet, we are left with your one world structure to place a single noose around the neck of future generations....The best and brightest of us will postulate ultimate goals and everyone will agree with the rationality and benevolence of a one world society. Moving toward that end—differences, disagreements, individuality will be considered "antisocial." It would only be a matter of time before the antisocial became the anti-federation, i.e., illegal. Thus, in the stale, gray oneness of our one world society someone will wonder about those irrational "dark ages" when people actually raised their voices, spoke their minds, had disagreements....

—Tom Mahon, Van Nuys, CA

...On the subject of import controls...Mr. Donway departs significantly from free trade principles. He asserts that a hypothetical Hank Rearden, burdened by having to compete with subsidized steel, has a right as an indirect victim of coercion to sue to force the United States government to ban the subsidized imports....Such lawsuits will not be easy matters, they will, for example, become bogged down in questions of what is and what is not a subsidy (not an easy matter when one is talking about different countries with different legal systems). In addition, giving this kind of "right" to businessmen would, I believe, tend to increase the power of the state since it would undoubtedly give some government official the power to determine which pleas for relief will be listened to and which will be ignored. It should also be noted that restrictive trade policies, usually justified under a banner of "fair trade" have international repercussions....

—Douglas Mataconis, Falls Church, VA

[Mr. Donway's]...claim is clearly based on the premise that when an industrialist has taken the trouble to calculate his markets and his costs, build his plant, etc., this gives him a right to his customers. The actions of the foreign exporters of subsidized steel have no direct effect on the industrialist himself, but only on his potential customers; they presented these customers with the opportunity for obtaining steel at low cost. To claim that this makes the industrialist an "indirect victim of coercion," and that he should be able to sue to prevent his potential customers from making use of this opportunity, is to assert that the industrialist has some right to have his potential customers choose to buy from him. And I think an assertion of such a right is philosophically indefensible.

The economy of any country is affected in many ways by irrational policies of other governments, either as a result of military threats...or of economic policies such as tariffs or subsidies....It is not the function of government to protect entrepreneurs from losses resulting from market conditions that they have mispredicted; I see no reason why conditions caused by other governments' subsidy policies should be regarded as different in this regard....

—Eyal Mozes, White Plains, NY

...How can it be said that Iran's taking hostages of U.S. diplomats was "more infamous than the attack on Pearl Harbor without a declaration of war"?

—Kurt V. Leininger, Malvern, PA

I found Roger Donway's article on foreign policy...very disappointing with its omission of the role U.S. imperialism played during the Cold War in regard to Latin America and other Third World nations.....[He] does not mention America's long history of oppression against Haiti, such as the ban on democratic elections during its occupation there that began under the Wilson administration, which explains why Aristide won a landslide victory with his anti-American campaign. The fact that the number of Haitian refugees accepted by the U.S. were dramatically higher during Aristide's brief term, who was popularly elected, than during Duvalier's ten year dictatorship is part of the overwhelming evidence that the U.S. government will aggressively oppose any Third World nation that attempts to declare its economic and political independence....Furthermore, it is incredulous that while he does acknowledge that Haiti was, and still is, a pro-U.S. tyranny...he leaves it at that without further discussion....

—Monica Deliganis, Olympia, WA

...I do not think it would be useful to dissolve all of our Cold War military alliances at one stroke. The NATO Alliance, successful as a Cold War deterrent, could be a useful basis for the Free World Security Alliance....But clearly we have a long way to go, and NATO's involvement in the Bosnia crisis illustrates the need for a revamped NATO policy-planning process....

—James Robbins, Tufts University, Medford, MA

Roger Donway Comments

...I'll answer a number of questions—those invoking traditional conservative and libertarian warnings against a strong state—with the following very abstract principles: A vigorous, properly limited state, based on a culture informed by Objectivism, would not be a danger to freedom. It would be an important ally of freedom. By contrast, all of the following are enemies of freedom or dangers to freedom: an improperly limited state, a state based on a flawed cultural-philosophical foundation, and a weak state.

1) I don't believe we must expect significant philosophical backsliding after the full cultural triumph of Objectivism. Because humans possess free will, such backsliding will always be metaphysically possible. But the Objectivist philosophy of history suggests such backsliding would probably not take place on a large scale. We cannot look to history's "eras of reason" for guidance in this matter, because even the best of them rested on frail pillars of philosophy. For example, John Locke may be called the philosophical pillar of the Enlightenment, and yet his philosophy could not defend even percepts—much less concepts—against the skepticism of David Hume....

2) Did Anthem implicitly denounce the idea of a one-world government? That is not how I read it. Many novels have projected a collectivist future and somehow linked it to a one-world state: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World comes to mind. But it was part of Ayn Rand's genius that she differed from Huxley on this point. She saw that moral and political collectivism are so anti-human that they could not support a globe-girdling high-tech super-state. Consequently, her model of society in Anthem appears to be drawn from the Dark Ages. The effective unit of government seems to be the city-state....

3) Let me try to answer the many objections to my discussion of subsidized exports.

My argument did not concern the means by which one state might persuade another to forgo export subsidies. If it had, I would have said the best means of persuasion is to uphold the principles of free trade. But I don't think those principles lead one to tout the domestic benefits of subsidizing foreign exports. On the contrary, if we proclaim that Americans benefit from the subsidized exports of foreign countries, we imply that Americans would be worse off if those subsidies stopped, i.e., if free trade were introduced. Is that an argument for free trade?

The thrust of my argument was that export subsidies produce both direct and indirect victims, and that both should have some legal recourse. The first, the taxpayers in the exporting country, should have recourse to constitutional limitations on what their government can do. The second, certain producers in the importing country, should have recourse to their civil courts for damages and injunctive relief.

I said nothing about the extent of America's own subsidization schemes. ...[T]he magazine I help edit has published—with my enthusiastic endorsement—an article by Cato [Institute] Chairman William A. Niskanen in which he identifies the United States as the hypocritical "bully of world trade."

I know that the means of subsidization can be subtle, perhaps even too subtle to be objectively demonstrated in a court of law. In those instances, obviously, a suit against subsidization would not prevail. Fortunately, in making my case, I was able to cite the ingenuous arguments of Rose and Milton Friedman, which conceded the premise of a known subsidy. Accepting that frank concession, I then rejected their argument—and I still do....

I reject the utilitarian belief that consumers benefit from a market distorted by coercion (by subsidized goods). I reject the underlying belief that men's economic interests conflict and that consumers can benefit at the expense of coerced subsidizers. And lastly, even if I accepted both of those beliefs, I would reject as utterly un-Objectivist the belief that one need consider only a country's consumers, and not its producers, when calculating economic benefits....

I think Eyal Mozes presents the strongest rebuttal on this issue: He says that the producer is not an indirect victim of coercion because he has no right to his customers. Clearly it is true that the producer has no right to his customers. But I think we have to operate here at a higher level of abstraction: the producer does have a right to a free market.

Let me offer this example by way of rejoinder. Suppose I have sold short a large block of a particular stock. Clearly I have no right to expect that any given individual will come along later and sell me that stock at a lower price so that I can cover my short sale. But: suppose an enemy who wishes to ruin me coerces a wealthy investor, at gunpoint, to go on buying and buying that particular stock—driving up the price—until my deadline has passed. You cannot point to a given individual seller of the stock whose shares I had a "right" to buy at a lower price. But am I not, nonetheless, an indirect victim of coercion (the wealthy investor being the direct victim)? And, if my enemy's plot is uncovered, should I not have the right to sue him for damages?

4) ...Why did I call the seizure of the U.S. embassy worse than Pearl Harbor?

Americans have too easily accepted the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran as just another international affront, not fully justified perhaps but extenuated somewhat by Iran's awful "grievances" against the United States. The first thing to keep in mind, therefore, is that the initial justification for the seizure, before Khomeini's more skilled apologists got on to the case, was given by Iran's Foreign Minister as "the hurt feelings of the Iranian people about the presence of the deposed Shah, who is in the United States under the pretext of illness." (In fact, the shah died of lymphatic cancer eight months later.)

As time went on, of course, the anti-American intelligentsia tried to build a more respectable justification for the embassy takeover. None of that is relevant, however, because nothing can justify harming diplomats...

Even the U.N. Security Council, though driven by the Cold War (the invasion of Afghanistan was less than a month off), demanded the immediate release of the hostages—unanimously. Even Khomeini's hand-picked prime minister, Mehdi Barzagan—a man who had been a senior advisor in the Mossadegh government overthrown by the CIA in 1953, a man who had spent five years as a prisoner of the shah, a man not likely to minimize his country's grievances against America—opposed the seizure of the embassy and was forced to resign. Only in the lunatic world of the ayatollah, and the no less lunatic world of rabid anti-Americans, could the seizure possible by excused by "hurt feelings."

I do not mean to minimize the death and destruction of Pearl Harbor, but say what you will, it was a military raid on a military installation. It owes its reputation for "infamy" to its status as a "sneak attack," which is accurate but only technically so. It was not a sneak attack in the sense of being a bolt from the blue. It followed months of high tension between the United States and Japan, and Washington had issued a "war warning" to U.S. forces only 10 days before the December 7 raid. Moreover, Pearl Harbor was not intentionally an act of undeclared war. Tokyo had ordered its Washington representatives to hand over a declaration of war shortly before the attack began. Unfortunately, owing to a delay in transcription, the declaration was not handed over until the attack was underway. And so Pearl Harbor became infamous.

5) ...One must be careful when discussing the history of American foreign policy, because the body of objective knowledge in that field is so small. Most histories of American foreign policy—particularly those that deal with the Cold War—are on a par with histories of American capitalism written by the "robber barons" school. That is, one should be skeptical of even the simplest assertions of fact, and one should assume as a matter of course that all interpretations are false. We need an entire generation of Objectivist historians to re-write this field from its primary sources up....

...Although many of the "crimes" alleged against America by anti-American historians were in fact morally acceptable uses of American power, it is true that America's conduct of the Cold War was deeply flawed and involved many actions in the Third World which should never have taken place... The root of the problem is that the Cold War was conducted throughout by Trumanesque Cold Warriors, to coin a phrase (and, yes, I include Ronald Reagan). Their policy was George Kennan's containment, which brought the war into the Third World, instead of a forward strategy that would have put the contest on communist ground. They opposed Moscow's ideology, not with a capitalist ideology, but with cries of "atheism," plus American foreign aid. They courted "world opinion" and favored multilateral action. They proclaimed democracy over liberty...

Take the case of Haiti. U.S. support for François "Papa Doc" Duvalier cannot be separated from Haiti's appalling history of anarchy and its strategic location in America's backyard. Yet one key moment in this support for Duvalier shows how Trumanesque Cold Warriors have provided ammunition for anti-American historians. The Eisenhower administration had allowed Fidel Castro to take power in Cuba in 1959. In 1961, the Kennedy administration botched the Bay of Pigs invasion that should have ousted Castro. In January, 1962, therefore, Washington wanted to impose sanctions on Cuba, as though that were a solution to the presence of a communist satellite 90 miles off Key West. But the Kennedy administration was not prepared to blockade the island unilaterally. It wanted regional action: specifically, it wanted the Organization of American States to impose sanctions on Cuba. Unfortunately, the Latin states that mattered—Mexico, Brazil, and Chile—opposed the U.S. proposal. But of course the OAS was "democratic." And so Washington sought to offset the opposition of significant states by rounding up every pip-squeak dictator in the hemisphere. Duvalier seized his moment. Three months earlier, he had engineered a "unanimous" re-election for himself as Haiti's president and U.S. opposition became a distinct possibility. Now, Duvalier sold Haiti's vote in return for U.S. money and backing. Thus, the blame for U.S. support of Duvalier in 1962, if blame there be, lies not with U.S. anticommunism but with Washington's attempt to pursue anticommunism on the cheap, through the policies of containment and multilateralism.

6) ...I am less interested than Jim Robbins in "building on NATO." The key doctrine of NATO is "an attack on one is an attack on all"—automatically. I believe the United States ought to reserve that very high degree of commitment for states that are, or are solidly committed to becoming, free states. At present, several NATO states—France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Turkey, and the United Kingdom—are not listed in the top rank of Freedom House's annual survey of freedom. And Freedom House does not even consider economic liberty. Denmark, Norway, and Spain—which got top marks from Freedom House—are currently ruled by parties belonging to the Socialist International. And Italy is ruled by a coalition with a major fascist partner.

I have no problem with establishing a new multilateral treaty organization to replace NATO. But I think we ought to make explicit that the signatories look ahead to being free states. And, until they are free states, the United States ought to withhold an automatic commitment to their defense.

—Roger Donway, Philadelphia, PA

Also, read: Rethinking Foreign Policy Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 (Conclusion).