SPECTATOR
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POINTING THE MORALS
foreign policy that is utterly moral, wholly consistent and entirely in the national interest is not easy to formulate. Quite often the inglorious compromises that inevitably result fulfil none of these desiderata. Foreign ministries all over the world end up looking ridiculous or hypocri- tical, depending on one's point of view.
Of course foreign policy should rest — in the last analysis — on a moral conception of the world, but it is doubtful whether sudden fits of morality, or worse still of moralising, are ever helpful in this field. Mr Dukakis's recent statements on foreign policy made during his electoral campaign are therefore not reassuring. He says he favours positive discrimination in favour of Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland; and would impose heavy sanctions not only on South Africa but on any company, includ- ing foreign companies, that continued trad- ing there.
It is possible to see these statements merely as electoral gambits; his line on Northern Ireland will deliver him the Irish vote while a strong line on South Africa will satisfy the Revd Jesse Jackson and prevent him from saying anything too anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic, thus simul- taneously securing the black and Jewish votes.
But it is also posSible that Mr Dukakis actually believes what he says, and this is far more dangerous. It means he has a very simple view of what the world and its problems are like, a view quite unaffected by the obvious inability of his own country, for all its marvellous strengths and advan- tages, to eliminate even its own moral blemishes. Worse still, he has failed to re- flect on recent American experience when sudden moral enthusiasms have infected foreign policy. When the Soviet Union invaded Afgha- nistan, the United States placed an embar- go on wheat sales to the evil empire. This magnificent gesture not only failed to please a powerful lobby within the United States, the farmers, who later forced an ignominious retreat, but turned the Soviet Union into Argentina's largest trading partner by far, thus giving the Soviets a potential foothold in the southern conti- nent that half a century of propaganda had failed to secure. The imposition of sanc- tions on Panama following the discovery that General Noriega was not a nice person to know has not only turned this less than saintly man into a Latin American hero, but, far more seriously, has destroyed once and for all the principal industry of the country, the banking system. The American taxpayer may yet be saddled with a recurrent bill for this damage, the consequence of a fit of pique. Unfortunately, the old and rather banal discovery that most human actions have unforeseen consequences has not been fully incorporated into the world view of the presidential candidates. Neither have they acknowledged that the world has grown more complex, that even the most powerful nation on earth cannot produce
at will exactly and only the changes it wants in other nations, and that the attempt to do so in the name of morality often produces in even the fruitiest of banana republics only nationalistic resistance and resent- ment. The failure to recognise that the days of easy foreign interventions are over could be as disastrous for the United States as the failure to recognise the decline of power was for Britain.
Thus foreign policy is a blunt instrument whose too frequent use ends in humiliation or worse. If Mr Dukakis is not merely making electoral promises which he has no intention of keeping, the South African question, to take only one example, may yet return to haunt him. The South African government will long outwit him, because they are struggling for survival while he is only struggling to feel good. He will learn the hard way that to assume unlimited responsibility with only limited power is a recipe for failure and defeat, both per- sonal and national.
A world in which it is necessary for nations to deal with each other, and in which for the foreseeable future most governments will be found wanting by the Enlightenment standards of the American Constitution, is no place for sudden acces- ses of moral enthusiasm on the part of a dominant power. Foreign policy is not the continuation of psychotherapy by other means.
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