I’d say that the fall of the Soviet Union discredited several ideas on the left and the right: on the left, the idea that the state should own most of the means of production; on the right, the idea of isolationism, or non-interventionism. It is now patently obvious that if the US had not drawn a proverbial line in the sand through Germany, the Soviets would now own large blocks of Western Europe that would be struggling in the same way that Eastern Europe now does. ~Megan McArdle, responding to Bryan Caplan
Yet it is the fall of the Soviet Union on account of its own internal weaknesses that suggests just how unnecessary interventionist policies really are from the perspective of the American interest. Had it been taken over by the USSR after the war, western Europe would have been more, not less, indigestible than eastern Europe and might well have hastened the break-up of the Soviet empire. One might say that it is “patently obvious” that had the United States not entered WWI, at least one of the great totalitarian nightmares of modern history would probably have never come to pass. Looked at this way, U.S. interventionism hasn’t really been a credible foreign policy since its inception, and the upheavals of the end of WWI and the interwar period ought to have made it disappear forever. However, even if it were the case that the Cold War was exceptional and required a different response, the Cold War ended twelve years before the invasion of Iraq. It isn’t as if the ’90s offered overwhelming proof of the efficacy and wisdom of intervention. Furthermore, our experience in the Cold War argued for continued containment of Iraq rather than an adaptation of the irresponsible doctrine of rollback. In short, there is almost nothing about the Cold War or post-Cold War experience that explains why some libertarians supported an aggressive invasion of a Near Eastern country ruled by third-rate dictatorship. If libertarians were wrong to be non-interventionist in the ’70s and ’80s (I don’t think they were, but let’s just suppose), it is remarkable how a good number of them could then turn out to be wrong by becoming supporters of intervention in Iraq.
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November 27th, 2007 at 8:14 am
chrisgbr
Funny how neither Cuba nor North Korea have collapsed on account of their own internal weaknesses.
November 27th, 2007 at 8:25 am
Daniel Larison
Funny how self-defeating, futile sanctions regimes have strengthened the grip of the dictatorships in Cuba and North Korea.
November 27th, 2007 at 11:21 am
rickm
I also don’t remember Cuba or North Korea acting as empires trying to handle incipient nationalist movements, and failing.
November 27th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
chrisgbr
So, the fall of the Soviet Union was due to relaxation of sanctions?
November 27th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Koz
Geez Daniel. Communism fell through its own internal weakness _and_ outside pressure from (mostly) America which prevented them into an economically unsustainable position. And about the “digestion” part, it seems like the Soviets digested Eastern Europe pretty well for fifty years.
November 27th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Daniel Larison
I am not disputing that outside pressure hastened the fall of the USSR. My main points are that it was not necessary to cause the collapse of the USSR (maybe it was necessary to cause the collapse in 1990-91 rather than later), and that the fall of the USSR did not discredit non-interventionism. Failed systems such as theirs eventually either dramatically change or collapse. My reference to countries being “indigestible” was a nod to Kennan’s (correct) assessment that eastern European national identities would be unassimilable and that eastern Europe would eventually be impossible for the Soviets to retain.
November 27th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
Koz
I get Kennan’s point but in the main I think he was wrong. For every Poland, there was a Romania, whose culture offered little or no resistance to Communism. On top of that, the discontent among the people of the satellite nations would not have mattered if the Soviets had the money to maintain its rule, which they didn’t, largely because of outside pressure by the United States.
My guess is there could be a disconnect between us over “interventionism”. So let me ask you, in your mind did the American response to Communism, either in the Reagan Administration, or over the Cold War as a whole constitute an example of interventionism?
November 28th, 2007 at 5:55 am
Daniel Larison
The collapse of Soviet rule was as much a function of an unwillingness to keep violently suppressing subject nations as it was the result of a lack of wealth. Had they retained the willingness to do that, the Soviet empire would probably still exist. Kennan’s argument about indigestible nations was not focused on whether local religious culture would resist the depredations of communism, but that the Soviet project was fundamentally a project of Russian nationalism and the subject nationalities would not accept Russian hegemony forever. On this, I think he was quite right. Another Kennan argument about the USSR: we have exaggerated our role in precipitating the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The point about Soviet internal weaknesses is that their economic system was unsustainable, especially when combined with massive military outlays that the USSR would have had in any case for the purposes of projecting power. My point here is not to dispute that containment in Europe and resisting Soviet expansion was the right policy at the time. Under the circumstances, I think it was the right policy. What I am saying is that the collapse of the USSR did not invalidate or discredit non-interventionism. Indeed, if there was a moment in the last 60 years when non-interventionism should have made perfect sense to an overwhelming majority of people it was in the early ’90s.
There were episodes of interventionism during the Cold War carried out in the name of containment that I think were unnecessary to the containment of Soviet power (e.g., Vietnam), but, no, I would not call U.S. containment policy in Europe interventionist nor would I call all of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War interventionist. A policy of rollback would have been interventionist, and it would have probably had catastrophically bad results, but that was not the policy we pursued.
November 28th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Koz
“What I am saying is that the collapse of the USSR did not invalidate or discredit non-interventionism. Indeed, if there was a moment in the last 60 years when non-interventionism should have made perfect sense to an overwhelming majority of people it was in the early ’90s.”
Then I think you have to concede that the policy we _did_ follow in the early 90s was non-interventionist, especially in light of the fact that you’re willing to allow that designation for the Cold War. And, it’s also pretty clear that we’d be non-interventionist today if 9/11 had not intervened. Are you with me this far?
November 28th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Daniel Larison
That must be why we invaded Panama, fought the Gulf War, sent soldiers to Somalia, occupied Haiti, and bombed Serbia twice (to say nothing of the decade of bombing Iraq on a regular basis)–because we were so solidly non-interventionist in the ’90s. Making defense commitments against Soviet expansion strikes me as being very different from promiscuously attacking and/or meddling in small countries around the world.
November 28th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Koz
The first Gulf War was a defense of Kuwait, and we left right after we defeated Saddam’s army (a mistake, I would argue). Serbia was a multinational thing that we let fester for several years before we finally, definitively acted. In any case, except for the Gulf War (and to some extent that as well) the military actions of the 90s were spasmodic actions taken without much real commitment.
In any case, the whole of them add up, in just about every substantive way, to less than the containment/rollback/Reagan Doctrine actions of the Cold War, which you’re willing to characterize as non-interventionist. Right?
November 28th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Daniel Larison
Yes, the Gulf War was a defense of Kuwait. Doing something in the name of collective security or under U.N. auspices does not change the nature of the policy. Most of the interventions of the ’90s had no strategic rationale whatever, nor did they have any basis in the national interest. I don’t care whether they were taken “without much real commitment.” Starting wars “without much real commitment” is hardly something that brings credit to supporters of intervention. Whether it is done multilaterally or not, the attacks on Serbia were interventionist; more than that, they were senseless. Containment in Europe is one thing, but I’m definitely not saying that meddling in El Salvador or Nicaragua (or Angola or a number of other spots around the world) wasn’t interventionism. Clearly, these were interventionist episodes. You can’t lump together containment and rollback as if they are the same policy.
November 28th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Koz
Maybe this is worth a separate blogpost because I’m not getting your train of thought.
Leaving aside Vietnam even, during the Cold War we had substantial commitments of troops or money or weapons in Korea, Germany, Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan, Grenada, etc, etc. We also had various military efforts during the 90s, except that, as a generalization they were smaller, faster, and more limited in objective in the latter case.
I suspect that if we sort this all out, the overall narrative of the Cold War does discredit your theory of non-interventionism. The Reagan Doctrine (Nicaragua, Afghanistan, etc) was not thought of as rollback by its proponents. And in any case, containment (as practiced during the Reagan Administration) and the Reagan Doctrine _were_ lumped together as generic anti-Communism, not least in Reagan’s mind.
But before we get that far, I think we’ll have to bright-line your conception of interventionism.
November 28th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
Grumpy Old Man
I can discern three separate rationales for various interventions, which it may be helpful to distinguish.
1. Geopolitical–to prevent Eurasia, and our near neighbors, from falling under the sway of a hostile power or alliance. That rationale was strongest before the USSR and China had their falling out.
2. Counter-Revolutionary–to prevent an expansionist, hostile system from becoming powerful enough to threaten us.
3. Tit-for-tat. Retaliation for attacks on our people or our commerce.
Nos. (1) and (2) justified some of the Cold War activities, though that’s not to say these were all wise, or well-executed. WWII arguably fell under (1) and (3), but it took the attack to create a consensus for war, an attack FDR’s polices helped to provoke. The (3) justification for our entry into the Spanish-American War and WWI was either fabricated or exaggerated.
No. (3) justified action against the Barbary pirates, and attacking the Taliban, who harbored people who attacked us and refused to turn them over.
Gulf War I had a different rationale–”collective security”–and given our and our allies’ dependence on oil perhaps it was wise to prevent Saddam Hussein from taking over the Saudi oil fields, if in fact he intended to do so. I would agree with Daniel that our involvement in international efforts of this kind should depend upon our own interests, not on some abstract principle.
All of these rationales are subject to questioning both as general principles and as applied to particular cases, but each makes some sense.
What doesn’t make sense is attacking even a very nasty government far from our shores because it does bad things, or might attack us in the indefinite future (but not imminently). Equally mistaken is trying to spread our institutions, democracy and a market economy, with our own armed forces. Islamism is a danger, but primarily because of permissive immigration and ex-Christian sterility in Europe, not because of its economic or military power, of which it has very little.
I would add to these notions the proposition that we should always add an extra dose of caution when we consider going to war. We should regard war as a momentous decision and a last resort. It leads to statism, the loss of liberty, and often to unforeseen disasters. Hence the Constituton’s requirement, honored in the breach, of a Congressional declaration.
General Sherman was right.
November 28th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
Koz
As I understand it, Daniel accepts #3 but repudiates 1 and 2, but frankly I’m not sure. Whatever he picks, I don’t think it holds up in the Cold War context we were talking about.