Pat Buchanan on the Unnecessary War
Writing by abuhatem on Saturday, 7 of June , 2008 at 7:57 am
Whatever you think about Pat Buchanan, his newest book is absolutely amazing point of genius. Challenging the conventional wisdom, Buchanan’s hardheaded realist non-interventionist foreign policy recommendations inherent in his book would be wisely heeded by an administration who in the quest of “making the world safe for democracy” has destabilized the world leading to the criminal deaths of millions of people.
Here is Pat Buchanan on the Colbert Report last night:
Buchanan’s point that Churchill shouldn’t have given a war guarantee to Poland because it did not posses the capabilities to protect Poland, and that war would destroy the British empire, are absolutely correct. Colbert jokes that Buchanan would allow Poland to fall to Hitler, but Buchanan counters that if we gave a war guarantee to Tibet nowadays this would lead to war with China which is not in our national interests.Our neoconservative friends would say this is not correct. America should be, as Charles Krauthammer says “democratically realist,” it should not only care for its national interest but also, when practical, aim at spreading good throughout the world. Unfortunately, Krauthammer does not understand that American intervention often falls to the law of unintended consequences. Oftentimes our good intentions end up with extremely evil consequences. Questions of war and peace deserve more moral reasoning than that surely.Buchanan recommends that Britain would have carried out a policy of containment, telling Hitler that the red line was France and threatening war otherwise. Unlike the positivists formulating theories of international relations, Buchanan agrees with Henry Kissinger who wrote in his Does America Need a Foreign Policy? that “there was nothing foreordained about World War II.” Indeed, Hitler highly respected the British and would have much rather went to war with Stalin.War is the biggest of big government programs, and times of crisis are often the impetus of increases in government power, decreases in liberty, and pathological utopian social engineering schemes to be given weight.Buchanan compares World War II to the Iraq war. We did not need to start that war, Buchanan says, because Iraq did not threaten the United States. Indeed!
Hitler is often cited as the ultimate example of the necessary war. Indeed, it would have been necessary to contain Hitler by the time that he had upset the regional balance of power. Modern academics of international relations theory call this a strategy of “offshore balancing,” or that once a potential and aggressive hegemon upsets the balance of power to such a degree that their uneven increase in power threatens one’s state, it would be more cost-beneficial to fight that hegemon now while he is weaker and one is stronger, than weight until defensively attacked and lose power advantage.
Positivist international relations theory does not examine the morality of such a situation, only the utilitarian security benefits of a state in preemptive or preventative war. The realm of morality to some realists is nonexistent, and if existent is impossible. This is obviously absolutely rejected. Yet the realists do make important points when it comes to analyzing international politics.
Many times alliances are not created for ideological ends at all, but simple as marriages of convenience for state security. Because a state cannot guarantee its existence except by increasing its military power or by being protected by another powerful state that can check the potential aggressive intentions of another, often nations find themselves in strange marriages. Hitler loved Churchill and his ideology saw Churchill’s people as superior, and the U.S. hated Satlin who they saw as a communist tyrant, but the Allies ended up including Stalin while the Axis opposed Churchill.
Friendships can occur amongst nations through commerce, friendship, and diplomatic ties. And there is no doubt that ideology influences foreign policy (for those that disagree, look at who’s in the White House!), but the realities of international realpolitk must always be affirmed. If Britain would have used its diplomacy more effectively and been more realistic it could have remained the world’s unipolar hegemon, and we would have avoided a Holocaust, a Cold War, and the deaths of millions.
It is the same with Iraq. In a dreamworld quest for democratization of the Middle East, or control of a state in the heart of the Arab world, or preventing hegemony over oil, or a preventative war against a potential Iraqi threat to the West and Israel - whatever the justification for war - we have destabilized the Middle East, created a new Arab cold war over Iran, scared other states in the international system, and perhaps begun something even worse than what Churchill did for Poland.
The moral of the story is that war is a weighty matter, aggression is immoral, and that even for those who reject the morality of war (realists), the decision to enter into a preventative war or a war for idealistic ends should always be seen through cost-benefit analysis.
Category: International Relations
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