A moral world is one in which perfection and black-and-white choices reign. A moral world in foreign policy is actually easy, and it will never exist. Meanwhile, we have only the real world of military powers competing in a state of anarchy, offering only difficult compromises that are more amoral than moral.
The United States can bring all the creative force of its diplomacy and intelligence services to bear in suppressing interreligious and intertribal violence in the Central African Republic and South Sudan. But it will probably not send in troops - no matter how bad the situation may get in the future - because these states simply are not strategically important, and America cannot afford to tie down ground forces in places where intractable problems may take years or longer to solve. Helping such places is certainly a good in and of itself, but it is not a need given the other responsibilities of the United States, whose prosperity and survival requires that its troops always be available for use elsewhere - in the Persian Gulf or the Korean Peninsula, for example.
In this world, to even contemplate humanitarian gestures is a luxury that has rarely existed in history, given the intense struggle for survival with which all powers, great and small, have been engaged. The fact that humanitarianism is now an established field of activity, with policy proponents and well-funded foundations involved - allowing people to make careers out of it - attests to the unprecedented material wealth and physical security that the states of the West have managed to acquire for themselves. It is only because the United States has performed so well in the amoral struggle for survival that there is room now for even the possibility of humanitarian interventions. And this successful amoral struggle for survival, remember, has been the result of toils of even the most embattled modern presidents - particularly those despised by the media.
In other words, a vast military armature has been built up over decades - from ballistic missiles to warships to hydrogen bombs - that proved crucial to a peaceful victory in the Cold War, and the result is a world where morality can be introduced to foreign policy to a degree unseen before. Humanitarianism would simply be impossible without the very blunt fact of American military power. For without that power, moral interventions could not even be contemplated, let alone argued for. And, once again, never forget that such power was accumulated amorally, as a survival need against geopolitical competitors. Power can be spent morally in humanitarian endeavors, but that very power can only be acquired amorally. Thus, continued humanitarianism requires the continued amoral acquisition and maintenance of American power.
Such an amoral acquisition of power has been supported every step of the way by the vast majority of the American citizenry under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Americans don't have hearts of stone. They are good people, free of the hatreds that have for so long defined Europe. Truly, these citizens are uncomfortable with human suffering in a place such as sub-Saharan Africa, even as they don't like the fact that the Middle East has been governed for so long by dictators. But again, these are wishes. The needs of the American people require the free flow of energy and available American troops that are not bogged down in places that do not overwhelmingly matter to their country's security. Americans supported the humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s only because there were few if any casualties and there was a clear exit strategy. They also supported a humanitarian intervention in Somalia in the same decade, but only until 18 Americans were killed there. Then the public turned against the intervention. The Balkans and Somalia represented wishes only.
The 1990s were a decade of humanitarian interventions because the United States was a unipolar power at the end of the Cold War. A favorable geopolitical climate allowed for the luxury of those interventions. Sept. 11, 2001, still lay in the future, and China was only starting to build a great naval force. The extent to which future humanitarian interventions can take place will likewise depend upon a continued favorable geopolitical climate. And that climate can only be pursued amorally: by countering China, establishing a stable balance-of-fear in the Middle East and so forth.
Thus, to repeat, when we think seriously about foreign policy, we think amorally. And if we do that right, we should certainly have power to spare for various types of humanitarian interventions.
