Values vs. Interests

If you haven't done so already, read former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech leading the home page. It is well worth it.

This is worth considering though:

The statesmanship that went before regarded politics as a Bismarck or Machiavelli regarded it. It's all a power play; a matter, not of right or wrong, but of who's on our side, and our side defined by our interests, not our values. The notion of humanitarian intervention was the meddling of the unwise, untutored and inexperienced.

But was it practical to let Pakistan develop as it did in the last thirty years, without asking what effect the madrassas would have on a generation educated in them? Or wise to employ the Taliban to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan? Or to ask Saddam to halt Iran? Was it really experienced statesmanship that let thousands upon thousands die in Bosnia before we intervened or turned our face from the genocide of Rwanda?

Here are some additional questions: what if the U.S. had asked about the effect of these madrassas in Pakistan, determined them to be harmful, and wanted to do something about it. What then? How exactly was the U.S. going to reform the Pakistani school system? How many other school curricula would we need to monitor and reform?

And when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and we decided that the locals were just a tad too Islamic for our liking, what then? Find other proxies? Insert our own forces? Be content to let the Soviets suppress the local insurgency and retain their puppet government?

The problem with making values the guiding light of your policy and not interests is that values create an almost limitless mandate for action. The world is such that there will always be outrages against Western values. In a world of limited resources, the state can't simply pick up and move whenever that happens. There has to be a way to discipline the government - which, by extension, keeps it limited. That's not to say every action undertaken in defense of a more narrow set of interests is necessarily the right one. But a narrow set of interests is actually the one thing that ensures that our values remain secure at home.