Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign proves that America needs to grow up about dictators

For foreign policy mavens, the main race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination has not been particularly uplifting, mainly because the subject has received relatively little attention. Despite this, the recent feud over the attitudes of candidates towards autocrats has been a new low. I refer, of course, to the accusation that Bernie Sanders is an apologist for dictatorship because he told an interviewer that Fidel Castros Cuba had real educational achievements, as well as Parallel attack on Michael Bloomberg for declaring that Chinas Xi Jinping was not a dictator. Like Daniel Larison later it is noted, (T) oo much of the foreign policy section has been consumed by this denunciation of a dictatorial exercise and many other issues have been overlooked as a result.

I love liberal democracy as much as anyone, and I am grateful to live in a country where these values ​​are still (mostly) respected. But this reflexive need to offer deep attacks against authoritarianism is symptomatic of a long-standing pathology in the conduct of American foreign policy; that is, the tendency to view someone's moral vision and commitments as the most important (and perhaps the only) criterion by which their competence in foreign policy should be assessed. It’s a lasting manifestation of what realists have long had critical as the legalistic / moralistic approach of the Americas to foreign affairs, an approach that overlooks the political and moral complexities of politics and has constantly led decision makers astray.

Moral considerations are hardly irrelevant in the conduct of foreign policy, but the simplistic moral litmus test in sight in the recent Democratic debate mainly reveals that the United States remains, as I wrote in 2005, a remarkably immature great power whose rhetoric is often at odds with the reality of its own conduct and which often treats the management of foreign affairs as a complement to internal policy.

Why is the willingness of politicians to denounce dictators a bad litmus test for his ability to power? To start with, it's too easy: anyone running for president knows that you're not supposed to say too many good things about foreign despots, and even Donald Trump has only been praised. for people like Russia's Vladimir Putin when he was on the campaign trail in 2016.

Most importantly, no matter what a candidate says on the campaign, whoever gets elected will have to deal with a lot of autocrats (some of whom are quite heinous) and especially if they are at the head of it. A powerful country. In 1992, for example, Bill Clinton attacked George H.W. Bush for being too tolerant of Chinese human rights abuses and said he would get tough on Beijing; once in power, he found that China's anger was not working very well, and he quickly turned the corner. The next president will speak with people like Putin, Xi, the Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan turkeys, and many others, and start the conversation by speaking out against their immoral conduct will not be the best way to advance American interests or get them to improve their behavior a little.

I'll take this idea a step further: in most cases, ostracizing autocrats or trying to freeze them does not advance either strategic or moral goals and can even be counterproductive. The missed American embargo on Cuba is a clear example. The powerful United States has refused to deal with Cuba for almost half a century to appease the Cuban lobby in Floridayet. This policy did not overthrow the regime, did not help the Cuban people, and did not moderate the international conduct of Castros. It is suspected that an engagement policy would have put Castro under more pressure over time, allowing Cubans to see how better life was elsewhere and exposing the limits of their own system. Likewise, not speaking to countries like North Korea or Iran makes it more difficult to resolve issues where interests are in conflict, which is why it makes sense to speak to them despite moral objections legitimate to the systems of government of these countries.

Third, a moral attitude like this on stage last week makes America hypocritical. As everyone knows, the United States has long supported some pretty reprehensible dictators, and that overturned or mined authentic and legitimate democrats on more than one occasion. The behavior of the United States at home or abroad is also not beyond reproach or in accordance with the moral values ​​to which the Americans like to carry the others.

Before some of you jump on Twitter to denounce what you just read, let me emphasize that I am not suggesting a moral equivalence between the United States and all the autocrats who have ever ruled. I simply point out that one tactic that could play out on a stage of debate is to accuse a political rival of being gentle with dictators and of not being sufficiently attached to the Americas, core political values ​​is not going to play very well abroad. Other nations already believe that the United States is remarkably hypocritical and rightly so, and that this antics will only reinforce this opinion.

Unfortunately, the problem goes beyond the suffocation of a controversial political campaign. As realists have warned for decades, the Americas' tendency to make morality the cornerstone of its foreign policy is not just an occasional distraction; it actively harms strategic and moral objectives.

One of the dangers is utopia, where the United States is trying to rely on idealistic solutions that just don't work. The Kellogg-Briand Pact is perhaps the best-known example of this type of solution, but the tendency to see regime change and the promotion of democracy as the answer to many contemporary problems, including terrorism, is a close second. Liberal democracy has many virtues, but overzealous efforts to spread it abroad by peaceful or more powerful means have a deeply disappointing record. Stressing that other nations should truly live up to our values ​​can also lead us to overlook less idealistic outcomes that could further alleviate conflict and short-term suffering.

Worse still, once we begin to view international and foreign policy as a game of morality with virtuous democrats on one side and wicked despots on the other, the only logical solution to most global problems is to get rid of these. Once the troublemakers are gone, we tell ourselves, there will simply be no more problems. At the very least, this urge to do good by toppling wicked despots leads to proud debacles like the war in Iraq or the unfortunate intervention in Libya. At worst, it is a recipe for an endless war to eradicate evil forever.

If simplistic moral litmus tests are not the answer, what is it? A better approach was outlined many years ago in Hans Morgenthaus The scientist against the politics of power. Although Morgenthau is widely (and correctly) regarded as a central figure in the realistic canon, he was also deeply concerned with moral issues and believed that they could never be dissociated from social and political life. Indeed, a central theme of this book is that all political action has moral consequences; there is no way to operate in the political world and keep your hands perfectly clean. (Similar themes run through the works of other realists, notably the Christian realist Reinhold Niebuhr.)

For Morgenthau, there is therefore an inevitable tension between the moral universe of human beings and the real world where the politics of power reign. Anyone who aspires to political leadership therefore faces a real burden. In his words, Act successfully, that is, according to the rules of political art, it is political wisdom. To know with desperation that political action is inevitably bad, and to act nonetheless is moral courage. To choose among several expedient actions, the least bad is moral judgment.

Instead of asking for ritual denunciations of this despot or this dictatorship, therefore, the right question to ask Sanders, Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, etc. and Trumpis how they will weigh these inevitable tensions when they are forced to deal with governments whose conduct and character differ significantly from American ideals. Does Sanders think that Cubas' legitimate educational achievements were only possible under a communist dictatorship? Are there any circumstances in which he thinks a country is better off under the one-party rule? If not, are there any conditions under which he thinks the United States should use its power to advance purely moral ends? Likewise, instead of asking Bloomberg whether Xi is a real dictator or not, a better question is what measures, if any, he would take to put pressure on China on moral issues and what could be those moral issues . Nor should the Americans stop asking their current president why he seems to prefer the autocrats to the leaders of other democracies and why his administration continues to take steps straight out of the books of the authorities.

In short, it is one thing to recognize the inevitable tension between our moral preferences and the realities of an imperfect world and to do what we can to advance the former without sacrificing our security or making bad situations worse. and another thing to ignore moral considerations entirely (as Trump tends to do) or reduce them to superficial suffocation and false contempt of the democratic debate in recent weeks. The next time the remaining candidates are on the stage, maybe someone will ask them how they would deal with some of the moral compromises and dilemmas that exist in the real world. For example: How could they try to pressure China to end the forced indoctrination of its Uighur Muslims? Would they be willing to grant diplomatic recognition to North Korea in exchange for progress in nuclear arms control? Etc. I don't know about you, but I love to hear what they have to say.