Of Interests
Christian Brose on national interests (via a critique of Zakaria’s latest):
The real sticking point is how a Syria or a Russia defines some of its “interests.” Damascus’s desire to dominate Lebanon is not an interest. Nor is Russia’s attempt to create a sphere of influence in its old imperial stomping grounds and prevent sovereign nations from making free choices about their own foreign policies. Such “interests” should be, in Zakaria’s words, “by definition unacceptable.”
I really would like to have a proper discussion about this, so I’ll try to voice my questions in as even-handed a manner as possible: Are geopolitical power plays “by definition unacceptable”? Are spheres of influence a product of a bygone era? And if so, should we be ashamed of the Monroe Doctrine on some level? Finally, and on a somewhat different line of reasoning, is the promotion of democracy a vital national interest for the United States? [Note: not “an interest”, but specifically a “vital national interest”?]
For my part, the more I read the reactions to the Zakaria article, the more I see outlines of the Athens of the Peloponnesian War in today’s United States. Don’t get me wrong: the Athenian arguments for relatively benevolent hegemony are often quite persuasive. And no, I don’t mean to imply that we’ll be slaughtering Melians any time soon. But the danger we find ourselves in right now is that our brightest minds see the United States as a wholly benevolent power and discern no problem with throwing the nation’s weight around to achieve what they deem to be pure goals. They both overestimate America’s ability to achieve these goals, and underestimate how negatively America’s actions come across to the rest of the world. At the end of the day, it’s not about being loved by the world’s tyrants, but rather about managing one’s challenges and preventing the rise of a spunky neo-Sparta (which needn’t even be as fascist as ancient Sparta was) around which the world’s malcontents can rally, causing us bigger headaches than we care to have.