How The Doves Became Hawks

By Charles Krauthammer

"If there is one overriding principle that will guide me in this job, it will be the inescapable responsibility to build a peaceful world and to terminate the abominable injustices and conditions that still plague civilization."

-- U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright,

Feb. 1, 1993

It has been a long time since American liberals have been accused of excessive interventionism abroad. About 30 years. John Kennedy in his Inaugural Address promised to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." It was the single most ambitious formulation of American goals in the cold war.

Such expansiveness led Kennedy into Vietnam. And that led liberals not just to desert the Vietnam adventure, but to desert the very vision of American internationalism that Kennedy, and Democrats from Harry Truman to Hubert Humphrey, had championed.

With Vietnam, American liberalism entered a period of profound isolationism. Just about every subsequent intervention, from Nicaragua to Kuwait, aroused loud liberal protest. The high-water mark was reached on Jan. 12, 1991, when Democrats led the fight to deny President Bush authority to use force against Iraq -- and came within three votes of carrying the Senate.

Another age, another presidency, another trumpet. Bill Clinton declared in his Inaugural Address that America will act "with force when necessary" to protect its "vital interests." But he did not stop there. He then pledged American action when "the will and conscience of the international community is defied."

Thus was enunciated the Clinton doctrine of humanitarian intervention. Yes, there will be interventions for our national interest. But there will also be interventions for reasons of conscience. It has been a long road from Vietnam: the conscientious objector has become the conscientious warrior.

This declaration was greeted as a breakthrough, a new vision of America in the post-cold war world. A breakthrough it is. And a dangerous one. It is getting us into Bosnia where, despite convoluted attempts at fashioning some rationale based on some vital American interest, everyone knows we are going in for reasons of conscience.

Is conscience a good enough reason? Many liberals think so. Indeed, for many, conscience is the only good reason. The new liberal orthodoxy is that only disinterested intervention is pure and pristine enough to justify the use of force. Violence undertaken for the purpose of securing American interests is not.

This is the key to understanding the amazing transmutation of cold war and Gulf War doves into Bosnia hawks: their deep suspicion of motives of national interest. In a recent debate, Anthony Lewis called George Bush a "gutless wimp" for letting the Serbs overrun Bosnia. It was pointed out that the gutless wimp took half a million Americans to war to liberate Kuwait. "Yes," replied Lewis triumphantly, "he did because of oil, O-I-L, the famous three- letter word." Any wimp, you see, can go to war for some vital national interest. Real men go to war for reasons of right.

For post-cold war liberalism, self-interest is a tainted, corrupting motive for intervention. It is not just a dispensable criterion for intervention; it is disqualifying. The apparent liberal flip-flops on intervention now begin to make sense. In the Persian Gulf, where American national interests are seriously engaged, they opposed armed intervention. In Somalia, where American national interests are not at all engaged, they supported armed intervention. And in Bosnia, where American national interests stand to be seriously jeopardized by intervention, they are positively enthusiastic for intervention.

Not, of course, out of any desire to injure America. On the contrary, out of ! the deep desire to purify, to redeem America by making it an instrument of justice. The critics do not lack for patriotism. On the contrary, they sincerely wish to ennoble America with a foreign policy of altruism. And because only intervention devoid of self-interest is morally unimpeachable, it is the only kind that a good conscience can support.

What to say of these liberal hawks? That they are marked by good faith but a terrible confusion. The confusion is between individual and national morality. In private conduct, altruism is the ideal. For a nation, it can mean ruin. In private conduct, self-interest is a suspect motive. Intervening in a fight for reasons of right is the stuff of western heroes. Intervening in a fight because you need the weaker party's oil is not.

But it is fatally naive to transfer such reasoning to foreign policy. Nations are not individuals. Nations live in a state of nature. There is no higher authority to protect them. If they do not protect themselves, they die. Ignoring one's interests, squandering one's resources in fits of altruism, is the fastest road to national disaster.

In such a dangerous arena, thinking with one's heart is a serious offense. Foreign policy is not social work. Yes, we should risk war when our will and conscience are challenged. But only when our most vital interests are challenged too.

God protect us from our better instincts. In the post-Soviet world it is difficult to enunciate firm principles of American action. But until we figure out what we must do, we can start by prudently deciding what we must not do: allow ourselves to be driven to war by unreflective, overweening moralism.