by Bruce Thornton
Meeting aggression with bluster and sermonettes only produces more aggression.
Last week British Prime Minister Boris Johnson published an op-ed
about the brewing conflict between Ukraine and Russia. And, no
surprise, it comprised a catalogue of “new world order” idealism of the
sort we’ve watched crash and burn for the last three decades. Vladimir
Putin would not be impressed were he to read it, any more than he’s
worried about the modest increases in NATO forces near his borders,
since the U.S. Commander-in-Chief already announced that we will not go
to war over Ukraine. Plus the NATO countries are still disunited over
how to respond should Putin go kinetic.
Once again, the hard questions of what threatens our interests and
how to meet those threats are ignored in favor of bankrupt idealism and
magical thinking.
Amidst all the virtue-signaling and braggadocios rhetoric, Johnson
offers this strange sentence that epitomizes that idealism: “If I may
adapt some famous words: All nations are created equal, they are endowed
by international law with certain inalienable rights, and first among
these is the right not to have their territory seized, or their foreign
policy dictated at gunpoint, by a powerful neighbor.”
Talk about a false analogy. No, nations are not all “created equal”
and do not have “unalienable rights,” but only such rights as are
created by treaties with other nations, not by shared universal “norms”
or “values.” Nor, as Johnson implies, is “international law” like
“nature and nature’s God” that the Founder believed make certain human
rights unalienable, a feature of our inherent humanity, not a gift of
earthly power. International law, in contrast, is the contingent product
of treaties negotiated by sovereign nations that enter into such
agreements in order to further their national interests. They do not
reflect universal morality or values, and so are regularly violated, or
simply abandoned, as those interests shift.
It’s ironic, and historically obtuse, that Johnson makes this claim
in the context of Russia’s current designs on Ukraine. Back in 2014
Putin annexed Crimea and virtually occupied southeast Ukraine. At the
time Barack Obama pontificated in very similar idealistic terms, also
including an echo of the Declaration of Independence: “Russia’s
leadership is challenging truths that only a few weeks ago seemed
self-evident––that in the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be
redrawn with force, that international law matters, that people and
nations can make their own decisions about their future,” for such
aggression “is not how international law and international norms are
observed in the 21st century.”
The same naive clichés characterized the foreign policy establishment as well: Fareed Zakaria of The Washington Post
referred to “broader global norms––for example, against annexations by
force. These have not always been honored, but, compared with the past,
they have helped shape a more peaceful and prosperous world.” So too
David Rivkin and Lee Casey in The Wall Street Journal evoked
“the three basic principles of international law, reflected in the
United Nations Charter and long-standing custom,” which “are the
equality of all states, the sanctity of their territorial integrity, and
noninterference of outsiders in their international affairs.”
Well, here we are eight years later, and Crimea is still part of
Russia. So is a fifth of Georgia seized in 2008. The rule against
changing borders by force is clearly not a “self-evident
truth,” a “global norm” that has “helped shaped a more peaceful and
prosperous world,” nor are there “long-standing customs” like “the
sanctity of territorial integrity.”
Rather, these all are the provisions of international laws created
by treaties signed by sovereign nations that are definitely not all
“equal,” and that determine for themselves when, or how much any treaty
binds them. This sacrifice of principle to national interest is why
Northern Cyprus, invaded, occupied, and ethnically cleansed by Turkey in
1974, is still part of Turkey; or why Tibet, invaded and occupied by
China in 1951-52, is still part of China.
And when a nation does use force to change national borders or
pursue some other aim, only on rare occasions, such as Saddam Hussein’s
invasion of Kuwait in 1991, have the nations comprising the “rules-based
international order” enforced those “global norms” with military
action. But no one stepped up to honor those norms by stopping the
genocides in Rwanda in 1993, or Darfur in 2003. And as we speak the
great Western nations of the “rules-based international order” are
enjoying the Winter Olympics in China, even as the Muslim Uyghurs in
Xinjiang are brainwashed, brutalized, tortured, raped, and penned up in
forced-labor camps.
The fact is, despite its lofty rhetoric, the “rules-based
international order” based on international laws has rarely been willing
or able to enforce this “self-evident truth” that borders should not be
changed by force, because no nations have not found it in their own
interests to do so.
The permanence of diverse national interests exposes the central
fallacy of this foreign policy idealism––the notion that there is an
international “harmony of interests” among the large, complex diversity
of nations with their distinct cultures, mores, languages, religions,
histories, and numerous other “self-evident” features of national
identity––which include different views on the legitimacy of violence
for pursuing national interests.
This fact of diversity, then, contradicts the West’s claims that
“long-standing custom” contributes to “self-evident truths” like the
imperative to respect national boundaries and not to alter them with
force. On the contrary, as Robert Bork writes in Coercing Virtue,
“There is nothing that can be called law in any meaningful sense
established by custom. If there were, it would not restrain
international aggression; it is more likely to unleash it . . . if
custom is what counts, it favors aggression.” The melancholy fact is,
the West’s proscription of force as a tool for pursuing national
interests remains a historical anomaly.
Hence the problem for the West in confronting Putin’s designs. If
Europe, Great Britain, and the U.S. truly believe that stopping Putin is
in their national interests, they wouldn’t be making symbolic NATO
deployments to the region, but mobilizing their militaries in the
numbers necessary to counter an invasion, which of course would pose an
exorbitant risk. If they were serious about real deterrence, they
wouldn’t, as Biden has done, threaten sanctions after an invasion starts and people are dying. They’d impose them now.
So why don’t these nations act? Because their political leaders are
calculating their political risks and their own national interests. The
West, besotted by the net-zero-carbon moonshine into weakening its
energy resources, now faces inflated fuel costs, making the West,
especially Europe, dependent on Russian oil. Nor are the citizens of the
Western nations in the mood for a war whose reasons have not been made
clear to them. They don’t see an immediate threat that requires spending
lives and money to stop––especially in the U.S., just coming off of
two decades of feckless idealism in the Middle East culminating in the
humiliating retreat from Kabul.
Nor should we be surprised, since this short-sighted vision has
bedeviled democracy since its creation. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville
warned, a “clear perception of the future, founded upon judgment and
experience . . . is frequently wanting in democracies. The people are
more apt to feel than to reason; and if their present sufferings are
great, it is to be feared that the still greater sufferings attendant
upon defeat will be forgotten.” This reality means that national leaders
must explain specifically to the voters why, in our case, Putin’s
annexation of eastern Ukraine, poses a long-term threat to our security
and interests.
But so far all we hear about is how evil Putin is, and how anyone
who questions taking action is a crypto-fascist admirer of autocrats. Or
we get empty, feel-good rhetoric like Boris Johnson’s about common
“norms” and the “rules-based international order,” or paeans to “patient
and principled diplomacy,” as Johnson calls the time-honored tactic for
leaders to avoid doing something meaningful and camouflaging their
inactions with the theater of “diplomatic engagement.”
If Putin seriously threatens our interests and security, then make
the case to the people. Start taking action now. Don’t just threaten
serious sanctions, impose them now, not after the cannon start roaring.
Don’t hide behind piecemeal NATO deployments, but mobilize forces and
materiel adequate to meet Putin’s challenge. Shame allies like Germany
who put GDP ahead of those principles they continually lecture us about.
And go before Congress and seek an authorization to use military force.
Finally, we all need to acknowledge the obvious truth that meeting
aggression with bluster and foreign policy sermonettes only produces
more aggression. We are where we are in Ukraine because in 2014 the
annexation of Crimea was allowed to stand.
Most important, if we truly believe in the “rules-based
international order,” then we must defend it and enforce its rules with
mind-concentrating force. That means spending the money necessary for
playing that role––and it means acting, not just talking about acting.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/boris-johnsons-foreign-policy-magical-thinking-bruce-thornton/
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