The Simply Evil

David Polansky’s compelling points on empathy in foreign relations still fall short for me in some respects.

Here’s the crux:

The willingness to take another state’s interests seriously is a strong hedge against moralism in our own foreign policy…

Agree 100%. This captures largely what I was saying about hiring specialists with in-country experience with actual first-hand knowledge of the cultures themselves. These people wouldn’t merely be area-majors from Georgetown or SAIS, but people who’ve lived abroad, who follow the local media, perhaps know someone in the country, and understand the ongoing debates. You might call this a sort of empathy, but I prefer calling it intimate knowledge. And I agree: taking this kind of stuff into account when making decisions would provide a strong hedge against our own moralism.

But David then goes on to say:

…after all, if they have no valid interests or security concerns, then they’re simply evil.

I’m uncomfortable. What makes an interest valid? And if we judge it to be invalid, then are they really simply evil?

Let me throw two quick thoughts out there for discussion:

• Leading up to the most recent Balkan wars, many Serbs believed Serbian minorities to be under threat in the newly-independent republics of Croatia and Bosnia. Many more believed that the use of military force was completely justified to keep Yugoslavia together.
• Saddam Hussein clearly placed little-to-no value on human life. Yet the current violence in Iraq shows that his violent repressions were not merely perverse indulgences but were motivated by keeping his hold on power over a badly riven polity.

I’m not at all arguing that Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein were benign actors, nor am I trying to whitewash their heinous crimes: on the moral plane, these are indeed evil men. It’s just that recognizing that they’re evil and deciding to “do something about it” does not make for great foreign policy.

What’s bedeviled us most in both the former Yugoslavia and in Iraq is the notion that once evil was removed, benign order would emerge. Yet in Bosnia we have a fractured government splitting along ethnic lines, with the sizable Serbian minority increasingly moving towards autonomy. In Kosovo, the Serbs choose not to participate in Albanian-dominated institutions and have made efforts to set up their own. Croatia is more stable largely because a huge Serbian minority fled in fear before a Croatian military advance in 1995 (which is now being criminalized at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia). In Iraq, despite glimmers of hope, political violence continues to simmer, and it would be far from foolish to bet on further disintegration as America disengages.

Intimate knowledge of Yugoslavia and Iraq could have helped predict all of the above. If that’s all we mean by empathy, then I’m all for it. Is that what we mean?

Addendum: I just re-read David’s post: he’s not arguing that empathy will lead us to concluding that certain actors are “simply evil”, but that by failing to consider other people’s perspectives, one could easily jump to the conclusion that the other side is “simply evil” and then proceed to doing stupid things. Nevertheless, I’ll leave this post up as I worked on it for longer than I’ll care to admit.