Legitimate interests (I’m with Chris Brose)

Mr. Polansky lamented that intra-blog agreement is terribly dull, so let me spice things up. It is worth asking, as David does, whether it is possible for a superpower to involve itself in situations in which it has no interests. However, I disagree with David’s reading of Chris Brose’s argument. I don’t see any implicit presumption in Chris’ post that America can or should involve itself in situations where it has no interests at all.

Rather, Chris is clearly making a point about the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate interests. Like Fareed Zakaria (to whose column Chris was responding), David and Damir express concern about whether Americans (such as Chris) tend to dismiss the interests of others as illegitimate, while refusing to question whether America’s self-proclaimed interests have any greater legitimacy. In short, Americans apply a double standard.

In many ways, this discussion is the latest installment in a long-standing debate between realists and their critics that goes back at least sixty years. At Yalta, Stalin agreed to allow the countries of Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe to elect their own governments. In spite of the agreement, Stalin promptly installed Soviet puppets in every country where he could. Americans were outraged by what they considered a betrayal.

Nonetheless, the great realist scholar Hans Morgenthau argued that the real sin of Yalta was American naivete. Stalin’s actions simply “expressed the traditional national interests of Russia.” Although Russia’s interests ran directly counter to the United States’ own interests in Eastern Europe, moral condemnation of Stalin’s behavior was foolish. Morgenthau certainly agreed as an individual that democracy was superior to Communism and that lying is reprehensible. But the morality of states is not subject to the same rules as the morality of individuals. (See Morgenthau’s book ‘In Defense of the National Interest, p.108)

Then as now, realist principles lead to the conclusion that certain interests considered illegitimate on moral grounds should be treated as legitimate on geopolitical grounds. In that vein, David suggests “it would behoove us to recognize the primacy of the geopolitical dimension to every move we make.” Assuming the primacy of geopolitics entails an a priori commitment to realist conclusions, regardless of the facts on the ground. This line of argument has often led the critics of realism to argue that is no less ideological and no more realistic than its competitors.

Addressing specific examples doesn’t necessarily clarify which interests are legitimate. Chris and Damir raise the example of Syrian interference in Lebanon, which has long entailed a bloody violation of Lebanese sovereignty. As Damir correctly intuits, one’s assessment of Syria’s behavior depends on one’s broader ideas about whether this sort of power politics is legitimate. I suspect that Chris and I would take one side of this issue, while Damir and David take the other.

For the moment, I will delay my obligation to make an affirmative case that moral principles are essential to sound analysis of both our national interest and to the distinction of legitimate interests from illegitimate ones. My bottom line is simply that when we talk about legitimate and illegitimate interests, it is essential to recognize how much one’s own judgments (and those of others) draw on contending and well-established traditions in American foreign policy.