On Empathy in International Relations
Matt Yglesias approvingly links to a post on Steve Clemons’ blog (authored by Ben Katcher) about the need for more empathy in our approach to international relations. Katcher cites Bill Richardson’s insights as emblematic of this enlightened approach:
He said last year with regard to Iran that, “In my dealings with North Korea, and with other hard-line governments around the world, I have learned that a basic level of respect for – and understanding of – your adversary is crucial for agreements to be reached…we need to recognize [Iran’s] national pride and its own perceptions of threats to its security.”
Matt suggests that empathy should be a “useful corrective” to the blinkered way we sometimes go about things, be we realists or liberals (or, I hasten to add, neoconservatives). One of Matt’s correspondents points out that Katcher isn’t calling for more empathy as such, but rather “a realist foreign policy decision-making based on a sophisticated understanding of other countries’ unique strategic calculuses.”
If Katcher and/or Matt are merely calling for hiring scads of regional specialists within the policy-making arms of State, the Pentagon and the White House—people who have had in-country experience in places such as Russia, China, India, Pakistan and the Middle East, who speak their languages, can talk knowledgeably about their cultures without recourse to stereotype, and who can give us an edge as we go about pursuing our national interests—well I’m all ears for all that. But I don’t think that’s what they are getting at.
I’m uneasy about all of this in the same way I’m uneasy about Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman’s excellent little book Ethical Realism. I’m not uneasy about the prescriptions, such as restraint, caution, knowledge of the world, and a sense of the limits of one’s power. I’m uneasy about the moralizing tone, the yearning for America to regain some sort of hallowed high ground people imagine it has abandoned during the last eight years.
Foreign affairs are best analyzed free of moral categories. To say that the Cold War was a heroic struggle between Democratic market-oriented societies and oppressive Communist regimes grants us little insight into how it was (or how it should have been) waged. Indeed, such a view tends to obscure historical facts in misty myth-making and triumphalism. Along these lines, therefore, Iraq wasn’t the wrong war, or criminal, or a stain on our national honor, or any such claptrap. It was merely a stupid war which ought to have been avoided at all costs, for it tied us down in a wretched situation and clearly revealed the limits of our power to any comers.
Much has been written about the importance of Soft/Smart Power, and most of it is right on. But our broad appeal to the rest of the world should be an arrow in the quiver, not the target we’re shooting for.