A HISTORY OF SERVITUDE
THE DANGERS OF FORCE AND SUBMISSION
CHALLENGING HISTORY'S PARADIGM
DE COMPRENDRE LES DEVOIRS
A BLURRY VISION OF UNIVERSAL LIBERTY
THE FAILURE OF APPEASEMENT
FOUNDING FREEDOM TO EXCISE TYRANNY
FRUITS OF UNBECOMING ALLIANCE
UNBECOMING ALLIANCE
COLLUSION AND BAD INFLUENCE
MUTUALITY AND PRACTICAL NECESSITY
It is with much consternation and cast aspersions that the apperception of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein�s possession of biological, chemical and atomic weapons in Iraq has ruptured. Intellectual and political groups who broadly opposed military action to remove Hussein�s Ba�athist regime presently maintain that Iraq�s pursuit was insufficient to justify war. They are verbally combated by groups that, having supported the casus belli against Saddam Hussein, focus on the precise definition of the case presented primarily by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. The arguments remain largely on the question of what statements were made by which party, and in what chronological order.
This is a direct consequence of the decision made by Bush and Blair to speak against the crimes of Saddam Hussein from within a moral paradigm that is problematic to not only the resolution of the current disagreement but the further prosecution of terrorists and their supportive entities.
The mere presence of large-scale weaponry in a nation�s arsenal is itself not an infraction; the inevitable creation and distribution of such weapons, beginning with poison gas in the First World War and culminating in modern viral agents and nuclear devices, has established for most industrialized nations a reluctant understanding of mutual privilege � that, notwithstanding the inherent difficulty in forcibly removing an active large-scale capability, self-defense and deterrence in this stratum are nearly as much a part of common law as firearms and military craft. International efforts made through legal recourse to stymie the proliferation of weapons, such as atomic bombs, are arbitrary and grandfathering: most countries that have them may keep them but some may not pursue them. This is inconsistent application in no uncertain terms, resulting in the denouncement of certain liberal democracies as no more deserving of weapons than Stalinist North Korea or Islamist Iran, despotisms both. Qualifying nations on degrees of armament drives deeply into the heart of a great error in judgment that instructs contemporary world politics; indeed, current or future weapons debates are little more than destructive squabbling over semantics of a larger question of mankind�s maturing ethical clarity.
That question is one of freedom and culture � from which all other concerns, including warfare, are derived. Today�s consideration of the matter is often denied historical comprehension by the violent effusion of the last century � circumstances and apothegms thought to be age-old are in fact decades-old inventions. At the same time, elementary properties of mankind are not properly addressed, resulting in shallow reflection.
It is necessary to begin at the primary demarcations of human experience: self-determination, governance and the collection of both into nations.
All free nations have been taken from the jaws of tyranny; all free cultures have been born into slavery before their emancipation.
Force serves man�s desire for material of the earth and capitulation of other men. The surest mark of our animal mortality, matching strength is an immutable law of the physical world; obeying it, a man takes what he wants from whomever he sees fit. Boundary, dignity and respect are meaningless to the rule of force. Human history has been cast in this light: from dawn men competed, the strongest prevailed, and civilizations were forged under the supervision of might.
Negotiation is a secondary utility for gain. Grievance warrants recompense, greed warrants invasion. With all men inclined to struggle with others for their livelihood, a compulsory reign is transient and ever threatened by violent overthrow. Those governed being less dangerous to their rulers and peers when affairs are forcibly managed, laws and codes for the respect of body, property and authority have been written, rewritten, forgotten, ignored and then recalled. Rulers have, on occasion, recognized their deciduous being and sought to ordain the right to power by petitioning that which they saw greater than themselves; and on other occasions, seeking civil fairness and enumerated obedience among men: Urukagina, Ur-Nammu, Hammurabi, the Laws of Manu; Dracos, Lycergus, Solon; the Book of Punishments, the Twelve Tables, Justinian�s Code; Japan�s Seventeen Articles, China�s T�ang; England�s Magna Carta and Bill of Rights.
Seldom in history, however, have the laws of force stood inferior to the rule of law. No ruler would set himself as equal to his subjects in the judgment of law and morality, nor would one willingly leave his seat of power; blood, royal in familial veins or else spilled from rivals, sustained him and his progeny. Law and justice were subjugated to preserve the powerful so their reigns, inviolable by the same standards as their subjects, were defined by their own needs: a selfish rule. Commerce and peace were preferable only when conquest by war was unachievable; otherwise common men would be compelled to risk life and limb for their rulers� swallowing of a neighbor. Coexistence among nations, when inopportune, was hardly bearable. Aiding another country�s autonomy was, for a world ruled by strongmen, suicidal; unspeakable.
In Asia and the Mediterranean, Africa and South America, empire followed empire in grand-scale games of king-killing spanning centuries; those lucky enough to escape complete destruction by pillage, slavery, famine or disease lived with transient identities, passed from one strongman to the next. Within societies, the common good so necessary for civility was blurred by amorality - how could law be fit for one man but not another? And if not, what authority could law then possibly claim? For all the kings and emperors browbeat by vassals to push the power of governance away from central authority, tenure was never answerable to popular judgment. Years passed and struggles continued as thrones moved from line to line, and colonial unions stretched to great earthen lengths � but for exclusive largess. Many toiled and suffered for the wants of a few.
THE DANGERS OF FORCE AND SUBMISSION:
No offering of abridged rights can substitute representative parity, nor can anything good come from a man indefinitely bereft of his natural right to free will. If he cannot break his bonds, he is left to despair, distrust and anger. If not otherwise inclined, he will seek to dominate for his own through the use of force.
The absence of freedom is a foothold for evil. History testifies that from either the exploits of a dictator�s rule or the mischief of his oppressed people, it is from unelected, unrelenting, compulsory rule that the world�s greatest miseries spring.
Against human tragedy rose the achievement of modern democracy, born out of principled American rebellion and baptized with a robust and historically chary constitution. The United States government, ordained by consent of its subjects, was cast to be the first and, in Abraham Lincoln�s transcendental words, last and best hope of earth.
The sovereignty of man is a struggle between bestial strength of force and reasoned dignity; it was, indeed, from primal origins that man arose. The 18th-Century American ideal rejected that disposition, establishing a precedent of free will and self-determination to be protected by government deriving its consent from the people.
Six thousand years of historical culmination is falling away like chaff from the bloom. It is the very palpable present � the industrial Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, particularly the span of time that began less than twenty years ago � that offers the greatest potential, brilliance or catastrophe, for humanity. Democracy�s halting youth and newfound opportunity to decisively alter the course of events is as important to understand as its timeliness: a tragic conjunction is at hand. Worldly knowledge and scientific advances that helped to establish and have since been sustained by democracy engendered those wielding force a prodigious, worldwide reach that threatens all of humanity. No longer do oceans, nor boundaries, nor wealth, nor prestige separate free civilization from those who would destroy it. The technological surge begun over a century ago leaves the world more intertwined with each passing year. The esurient disposition of strongmen has not changed, however; nor has their stature in the world, a legacy from the husk of the prior age.
Free nations will survive only by defeating tyranny, defeating the rule of force and asserting liberty in lands otherwise possessed.
CHALLENGING HISTORY�S PARADIGM:
To accomplish this, a champion representative is required to rally free nations in the protection of the democratic ideal and its provision of liberty, done in the name of international security; and the liberation of those oppressed, done in the name of human compassion educed from precepts unique to democracy. What better vanguard of liberation than the economically and militarily unparalleled United States of America?
Success of an action, regardless of how certain its moral authority may be, is determined by the strength behind its conduction. The prospect of extended struggle around the world felling dictators and laboriously constructing consensual governments in their stead is a daunting and frightening task to people who wish to lead simple, discreet lives. Free societies� aversion to conflict and America�s resultant history of isolationist reasoning are formidable obstacles to this ambition.
Nevertheless, those arguing against America�s premier standing in the modern world are in error to condense the remarkable dynamics of this country�s brief two hundred years into a political monolith, and belabor its account with that of six thousand years of history without pluralist democracy. Skepticism holds that freedom �has never been� a universal value, that cultures uninitiated to individual dignity are places where �there will always be bad guys,� or that �America has never challenged dictatorship.� This is impotent argumentum ad antiquitatem. Civilization did not begin with some nations allotted freely elected governments and some not. Rule of the strongest has dominated the human narrative. Not only is liberty an exception to historical governance, it has had barely enough time to appreciably mature, let alone be held culpable for either causing prior events or failing to prevent them. The absence of something does not preclude its present function, for by definition, every step in civil evolution will only benefit those to achieve it. As humanity did not immediately arrive upon the practical creation of a democratic republic, America did not immediately awaken to both a necessity and ability to assert universal liberty.
Before the last century, the United States was almost entirely engrossed in its own affairs; suffering the growing pains of an �experiment� in democratic rule - including its own painful lesson with the hypocrisy of keeping black slaves - and laboring on the often brusque physical expansion available to a nation set on a wide-open continent.
The world grew smaller with the onset of modernity, its affairs disrupting America's dreamy autonomy. Three worldwide conflicts have impelled America's transformation from self-centered adolescent to premier democratic republic, to conscientious superpower. The First World War heralded the death of European colonial empires and the birth of America�s altruist purpose; the Second World War demonstrated the futility of bargaining in good faith with totalitarians, offering at war�s end the greatest promise of American-led democratization; the Cold War, a decades-long stalemate between the free and authoritarian world, dictated a turn to cynicism and expedience, resulting largely in an obviation of a pursuit for universal liberty that tragically lead to the relentless incarnation of bestial will threatening freedom today.
But constant through conflicts, vicissitudes of domestic parties, politics and culture, America has, aided by the brilliance of bellwethers - Americans and others - slowly arrived at a realization of its identity as a democratic paraclete.
A BLURRY VISION OF UNIVERSAL LIBERTY:
In 1914 the fervor of monarchical nationalism ran to a deadly boil. Not since the Napoleonic Wars had Europe experienced such a scale of military fare. Tactics and philosophy of warfare remained intellectual property of nobility and chivalry � far outdated by the cold-riveted lethality of industrial weaponry. With the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand came the perfect justification for belligerence. Alliances eagerly postured; treaties were refused, front lines were drawn and citizens charged to duty. Anticipating what tradition had taught them, Europe�s kings and medaled strongmen spied land and resources to once again be laid for taking. But to the horror of the world, a mechanized age had arrived and consumed upon its inauguration millions of lives through nearly four years of stagnant, bleak struggle in fetid trenches.
America, a lone democracy geographically and ideologically isolated from the conflict, remained militarily uninvolved, unromantic in its observation of a struggle between divergent, vainglorious desires of European powers. President Woodrow Wilson was not at all satisfied with a course of neutrality and surreptitiously aided friendly Britain and France. But only an unmistakably unprovoked attack on the liner Lusitania by Germany would rally the United States� citizenry and industry to support the war effort of their declared allies.
Germany sued for a bitter armistice in 1918; Europe stepped back from its carnage, traumatized. Primary blame for the war�s initiation was laid upon Germany and Austria; Wilson�s pleas to avert what he understood as damaging and humiliating reparations were defeated by his Anglo-Franco-Italia counterparts.
Wilson�s motivations were dual. Only months before American entrance into the war, he demanded responsibility to be shared by what he perceived as the reckless nationalism of all European nations, insofar as no clear victors or debtors would be identified. From his January 22, 1917 address to the nation:
[The European powers] imply, first of all, that it must be a peace without victory. It is not pleasant to say this. I beg that I may be permitted to put my own interpretation upon it and that it may be understood that no other interpretation was in my thought. I am seeking only to face realities and to face them without soft concealments. Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last, only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit.
Secondly, he expressed overtures to the fortifications, social and governmental, necessary to establish and preserve a lasting peace:
I am proposing government by the consent of the governed; that freedom of the seas which in international conference after conference representatives of the United States have urged with the eloquence of those who are the convinced disciples of liberty; and that moderation of armaments which makes of armies and navies a power for order merely, not an instrument of aggression or selfish violence.These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others. And they are also the principles and policies of forward-looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.
But Wilson stepped back from insisting that these ideals should be asserted � more specifically, asserted against the designs of whichever strongmen remained in power. What is critical to the question of culture and freedom, universal morality against local mores, was Wilson�s appeal to good intentions that appear otherwise relativist in their proposed execution:
I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people, but that every people should be left free to determine its own polity, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful.
For Wilson, culture � and the will of local powers � would ultimately stand superior to freedom of the individual. Underestimating or else ignoring the fragility of the rule of law against the compulsion of strength, Wilson proposed peace through good intention. As per his remarks on �peace without victory,� Wilson failed to believe that military success against a culture of imperialist nationalism would either occur or be successful in expunging any country�s thirst for extranational conquest. While his lack of faith in the moral authority of Europe may well have been justified, his decision to geopolitically leave well enough alone was central to the defeat of his aspirations.
Indeed, the absence of consequential force behind Wilson�s assertions � force subverted to lawful will � spelt the death for his policy objectives. Rankly outmaneuvered by his coldly practical European allies, Wilson�s ideals for democracy�s provision for international stability were absent in both the Treaty of Versailles and his own Fourteen Points.
Wilson�s vision for the League of Nations was similarly plagued by its impracticalities, built upon the expectation of moral cooperation from dictators rather than dictatorship�s expulsion from legitimacy. Prophetically and astutely, Wilson observed that �What we seek is the reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed, and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.� But, again, insisted that rather than universal democracy, �Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together,� or that "Political liberty can exist only when there is peace. Social reform can take place only when there is peace."
Peace and friendship were to become, over the next decade-and-a-half, vanishing resources. Wilson�s failed resolve and Europe�s ethical lapse set the stage for the German Weimar Republic�s unsteady first steps before its expiration; unprotected both militarily or philosophically, free elections soon fell to manipulation by the Nazis. Russia had fallen before the war�s end, in 1917, to Nikolai Lenin and his Bolsheviks; and Italy to Benito Mussolini and his Blackshirts in 1922. Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933 and, just a few months before militarist-seized Japan would do so, withdrew Germany from the League of Nations. The unsteady, self-serving truce offered up in Versailles and the failure of the League to check Italy�s incursion into Abyssinia in 1935 condemned to practical irrelevance any shared rule of law. In 1936, Spain�s crumbling to fascist revolt provided a military playground for Germany and Italy�s next generation of mechanized weaponry. Japan had swept into Manchuria by 1931.
Isolationism continued to dictate the American spirit, defeating aspirations for the country�s entrance in the League of Nations and leaving it withdrawn as the shadow of tyranny lengthened.
Resistance was left to democratic Europe, whose leaders grossly underestimated the pathological untrustworthiness and moral incapability of the totalitarian mind. Basal to their custody of the matter was evasion of military conflict, even while such actions only strengthened the resolve of the emerging Axis powers and increased war�s likelihood. Through a series of treaties and acts of deference to German and Italian conquest, Prime Ministers Neville Chamberlain of England and Eduoard Daladier of France � empowered by the consent of their people and therefore indebted to protect the rule of law � nevertheless defined for modernity the futility of appeasement. Seeking peace through good intentions unfortified by the strength of arms, they misunderstood the practical tenacity of selfish rule. They attempted to parley. Met instead by Germany and Italy�s rapacious appetites, Anglo-Franco conditions and expectations became more diffident with every nullified agreement and frangible conciliatory measure offered them.
Said Chamberlain:
We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will. I cannot believe that such a program would be rejected by the people of this country, even if it does mean the establishment of personal contact with the dictators.
Hitler�s annexation of the Rhineland in 1936 went physically unchallenged by England and France. In 1938, Germany swallowed Austria. In September of that year, when Hitler demanded the Sudetenland, Chamberlain and Daladier negotiated with him in Munich � absent the Czechoslovakian government � to force Czechoslovakia�s disclaim of its own territory. The Munich Pact�s consequence is obvious today: the completion of Hitler�s defiance of Anglo-Franco opposition and a territorial gain that allowed Germany to consume the rest of Czechoslovakia and its vital military industry. But to Chamberlain, strongmen were not to be feared, nor to be refused trust:
My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.
Sleep � or any other inattention � was a fitting invocation. At the height of delusion, Chamberlain�s sentiments lauded both the trampled Armistice and a worthless treaty signed during the final deterioration of Europe�s pause from war.
Winston Churchill, then a backbencher in the House of Commons, had, since the beginning of the decade, been warning his countrymen of Germany�s militarization and societal bloodlust. He derided Chamberlain�s diplomatic event as meaningless and fatal:
This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of the bitter cup, which will be proffered to us year by year, unless, by a supreme recovery of moral healthy and martial vigor, we rise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden times.
In September of 1939, not a year after Munich, Hitler invaded Poland and gave England and France, in spite of the countries� appeasement, a conflict for which their very existence would be fought. In 1940, as the whole of the European continent fell to the Nazis, Churchill, elected to Prime Minister in the stead of Chamberlain�s ignominious falter, was adamantine in his indictment of the rule of force:
You ask, What is our policy? I will say: �It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give to us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surprised in the dark, lamentable catalog of human crime. That is our policy.�
Far be it to negotiate - Churchill implored �Victory - victory at all costs, victory,� for appeasement had proven to be for the doomed man who �feeds the crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.�
The horrors of the Second World War were countless, though but six years the mouth of hell opened: nearly every corner of the earth a battleground; every nation not committed to the silence of neutrality caught instead in open warfare; the blood of millions spilled; the calculated genocide of Jews, Chinese and others; the immolation of cities and landscapes.
FOUNDING FREEDOM TO EXCISE TYRANNY:
Back in 1937, President Roosevelt would not stay his hand without at least a principled herald of the danger to freedom from the rule of force. Like Wilson, he understood the universal powers of both law and force � that to either utility the world was malleable and spoke so on October 5 in his �Quarantine� speech:
To paraphrase a recent author, �perhaps we foresee a time when men, exultant in the technique of homicide, will rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing will be in danger, every book, every picture, every harmony, every treasure garnered through two millenniums, the small, the delicate, the defenseless - all will be lost or wrecked or utterly destroyed.If those things come to pass in other parts of the world, let no one imagine that America will escape, that America may expect mercy, that this Western hemisphere will not be attacked and that it will continue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics and the arts of civilization.
No, if those days come, "there will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. The storm will rage until every flower of culture is trampled and all human beings are leveled in a vast chaos."
Even in the world of last century�s first half, still separated by oceans and fumbling with the telephone and radio, Roosevelt foresaw the cascade of derangement caused by even a single international belligerent:
There is a solidarity and interdependence about the modern world, both technically and morally, which makes it impossible for any nation completely to isolate itself from economic and political upheavals in the rest of the world, especially when such upheavals appear to be spreading and not declining. There can be no stability or peace either within nations or between nations except under laws and moral standards adhered to by all. International anarchy destroys every foundation for peace. It jeopardizes either the immediate or the future security of every nation, large or small. It is, therefore, a matter of vital interest and concern to the people of the United States that the sanctity of international treaties and the maintenance of international morality be restored.
�International morality� that, of course, transcends culture or circumstance. Roosevelt also drew a clear distinction between the nations that abhor and nations that desire military conquest for the absorption of the defeated � free nations and despot nations, respectively. The rule of law, of course, can only be respected by leaders whose reigns are so accountable:
If those days are not to come to pass - if we are to have a world in which we can breathe freely and live in amity without fear - then the peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort to uphold laws and principles on which alone peace can rest secure.Those who cherish their freedom and recognize and respect the equal right of their neighbors to be free and live in peace, must work together for the triumph of law and moral principles in order that peace, justice, and confidence may prevail throughout the world. There must be a return to a belief in the pledged word, in the value of a signed treaty. There must be recognition of the fact that national morality is as vital as private morality.
The peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those [ignorant] of human instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality.
Roosevelt�s thrust in the speech was a reasonable avoidance of war, but he correctly defined the bestial will of authoritarians as a communicable malady:
When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.
Disease, as a consequence of human existence, can never be destroyed; only its particular strains. It is the same with the rule of force. Manifestations can be cordoned off and choked, as Roosevelt initially sought. They can be fought and defeated, as Roosevelt, then Harry Truman, and Churchill finally accomplished.
More effectively, a body can be protected from disease through inoculation. Again, it is the same with the rule of force. For each patient nation, as it were, the antibody not only protects it from easy infection - from within or without - but serves as a foil to the disease of bestial will. If a disease can neither infect nor spread, it will first lose its warrant of mortality - before a practical disappearance.
As the consequences of allowing totalitarianism to fester throughout the 1930s were horrific, both conscience and wisdom guided the democratic allies to excise authoritarian abscesses in each offending country. After its mid-war defeat, Italy elected a representative government abhorrent of Mussolini�s brutal legacy. Under Harry Truman the United States led efforts to reconstruct, reindustrialize and democratize Germany and Japan, building stable foundations to thwart the return of tyranny.
General protests and skepticism came from nations unconvinced that societies historically unfamiliar with consummate democracy � and so recently under tyranny � could either comprehend accept freedom. Recognizing the strength with which the United States Constitution had protected individual liberty for nearly two hundred years and assuming the authority granted from unconditional surrenders, American reconstruction nevertheless provided each defeated country a tailored constitution for the preservation of the rule of law and human dignity. Determined efforts were made to expunge the cultures of propaganda and disinformation that had, for over a decade, twisted two societies to demented capacities. Germany�s Nazis and Japan�s militarists were brought to justice wherever possible and, at least as a cohesive force, prevented from interfering with restoration. Secular, regularly elected governments with legislative, judicial and executive branches were refined to protect each country�s citizens� newly granted freedoms.
Despite the different methods of American administration in culturally dissimilar Germany and Japan, the same inalienable rights, essential to a stable democracy, were firmly embedded in both constitutions.
FRUITS OF UNBECOMING ALLIANCE:
Necessary during the conflict were alliances borne not at all out of ideological concord but pragmatism. Russia�s murderous, Communist regime of Joseph Stalin and the militarists of China, led by Tsiang Kai-Tsek, found the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo axis to be an enemy shared with the Anglo-American alliance. A resulting collaboration was struck between those ruling under law and those ruling with force; for America and Britain this was a dangerous bargain, for long-term interests with their Russian ally would ultimately be fatally incompatible. As the Soviet Union did indeed cast off its cooperative yoke after the war, seeking domination of its erstwhile allies, unbecoming collusion with regional dictators would yet become part and parcel to free Western nations� foreign policy over the next decades.
The danger of nations being forced into cooperation with authoritarians when no other national powers are tenable � particularly exacerbated by the far reach of modern technology � helps to establish a preventative justification for global democracy�s pursuit. The sleeping evil of Stalin - obscured by the presence of Hitler�s axis and thus allowed to grow, undisturbed by the allies in war - awoke.
Tensions between elected hand and totalitarian fist grew after the war and by 1946, it was clear that Stalin was turning on his allies to devour them.
Winston Churchill, no longer Prime Minister and speaking on March 5th in Missouri, artfully encapsulated the looming threat from Communists:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.
He took care to refine the West�s caution against surreptitious Communist advances, a sober account that foresaw future American reluctance to engage in the delicate work of democratization for fear of Soviet infiltration:
[I]n a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center. Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.
But Churchill made no dilution of the executive responsibility America had both earned and inherited:
The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American Democracy. For with primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. If you look around you, you must feel not only the sense of duty done but also you must feel anxiety lest you fall below the level of achievement. Opportunity is here now, clear and shining for both our countries. To reject it or ignore it or fritter it away will bring upon us all the long reproaches of the after-time. It is necessary that constancy of mind, persistency of purpose, and the grand simplicity of decision shall guide and rule the conduct of the English-speaking peoples in peace as they did in war. We must, and I believe we shall, prove ourselves equal to this severe requirement.
President Truman, one year later, was preparing America for protracted opposition to Soviet advances. His speech to Congress on March 12, 1947 squarely framed his policies as a recognition of the country�s nascent global responsibilities:
The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive.The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.
If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world - and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.
Great responsibilities have been placed upon us by the swift movement of events.
Relations between the United States and Soviet Union deteriorated to adversarial positions, a frightening military stalemate driven home by the Russians� acquisition of the atomic bomb in 1949. The influence of Communism continued to spread; the Kuomintang were forced off the Chinese mainland later in the year as Mao Tse Tung draped the country under the totalitarian shroud.
American strategies against a belligerent Soviet Union were defined by hallmarks such as 1950's classified National Security Council article �NSC 68.� The document eschewed direct confrontation, instead a policy of defensive military containment measures in response to Soviet expansion while endorsing a demonstration of freedom�s superiority to that of compulsory rule, in the hopes of not only separating populace from oligarchy but in fact �frustrating the Kremlin.� Though the introduction of atomic weapons, immediately precluding conventional strategies of the Second World War, was certainly motivation for this custodial posture, such a refusal to accept the incorrigibility of authoritarians — whatever their ancillary ideology — clearly led to the lengthy and fragmentary nature of the Cold War.
Over the next four decades, America led an often informal alliance against Communist world domination. Vast resources and nearly all foreign endeavors operated in tune to this objective: defend the western United States, Europe and the Pacific; counter Soviet machinations in the oil-rich Near East; compete with the Communists culturally and economically. Numerous treaties and summits - Open Skies, Limited Test Ban, Outer Space, Nuclear Arms Non-proliferation, SALT, Paris Peace Talks, ABM, SALT II, START, NST - were attempted in spurts of detente, most often for strategic advantage. Nearly all agreements that survived initial stages were abandoned or violated by the Communists. Moscow and Beijing were militarily opposed on several fronts, some engagements involving direct American involvement, others employing local and regional forces: Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Chile, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador.
Two generations came of age in the free West during this conflict and were unquestionably left with a lasting impression of the grim, fatalistic task of outlasting the Communist empire. American foreign politics, though driven by the strategic objective of defeating the Soviet Union, were a cynical affair as carried from administration to administration. Practicality consistently trumped principle, ideal supplanted by efficiency. Only a few scant attempts at democratization were mustered and even less succeeded, one such victory the liberation of Panama from under Manuel Noriega near the end of the Cold War. A lack of faith in liberty�s resilience under the shadow of Communists heightened fears of Communists corrupting nascent democracies, discouraging any more effort. Additionally, a focused distinction was drawn between authoritarians to make allies out of strongmen merely for their appurtenant discord with Communists. Existing governments, whatever their ethical and moral composition, were prized for their �stability.�
�Unbecoming alliance,� the difficult and treacherous contract signed between Stalin and the Anglo-Americans, was an unfortunate exigency. But for the realpolitik and detente of the Cold War, this betrayal of the rights of men in the world was common practice.
As long as the world�s nations include dictatorships, free nations unwilling to declare unequivocal, ideologically motivated opposition to authoritarianism will work with strongmen when regionally intertwined or when strongmen are found to be indispensable to immediate national interests. Upon expiration, these agreements often end disastrously; the authoritarian seeks the intimidation and consumption of others through military or political means, seizing upon its erstwhile allies if they refuse to appease. Methodology of unbecoming alliance as practiced over the last century is divided into two ethical aspirations.
COLLUSION AND BAD INFLUENCE: This highly opportunistic activity is engaged in by utilitarian or amoral freely elected governments unwilling to depart from old standards. Dictators are selected according to various needs and uses; often lucrative, asymmetrical benefits to be exploited by the economically superior free nation.A free nation unwilling to defend against the aggressive postures of an authoritarian neighbor may submit to diplomatic blackmail. This, the bad influence of dictators, is the making of appeasement as well as the countless political flinches and snubs committed by democratic allies against one another paying tribute, sadly and treacherously, to the currency of their geopolitical predicament.
MUTUALITY AND PRACTICAL NECESSITY: A free nation that is otherwise committed to the protection and promotion of universal liberty may face such sufficient danger from a dictatorial or lawless entity that survival is believed to require ideologically inconsistent strategic alliances. This conduct, while problematic to the larger sense of legitimizing compulsory rule, is often deemed necessary for when the prosecution of the rule of law is tactically of greater national importance than the incompatibility of dictators with whom a free nation chooses to temporarily ally. A physical world demands the use of its existing resources when no alternative can be selected. In rebellion against the British Empire, America sought and received aid from the corrupt, tottering French monarchy. From democracy�s beginning, interaction and cooperation with compulsory governments was necessary and continues to be so today, peril notwithstanding.
As demonstrated by the invaluable efforts of heinous Stalin against the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis, practical success demands practical application. But these alliances are evanescent. A dictatorship will eventually pose a threat to its democratic partners - a disturbing, historically illustrated certainty.
America�s cold resolve defeated the Soviet Union; by the end of the 1980s the empire was stumbling and in 1991 it shattered, a self-destructive command economy mortally starved of conquest. Its satellites rebelled or simply broke away from Moscow�s dead hands, most of them quickly establishing self-government.
But the damage of qualifying the rule of force for decades had been inflicted.
THE NEAR EAST�S SLEEPING EVIL:
The oil-rich Arab, Persian, African and South Asian lands remained a strategic battleground between the West and the Communists throughout the Cold War. Authoritarian regimes were pawns and prized for stasis. Every president, from Truman to Reagan, sacrificed sustained progress in the Near East for advantage against Moscow. Each one failed to directly challenge either the autocrats themselves or the extremist, terrorist religious culture burgeoning within the region�s populations.
The first ten years following the death of the Soviet Union were largely wasted. Besides a constrained expulsion of Saddam Hussein�s Iraqi army from Kuwait, America and her allies sat complacent with their momentary victory over the Communist menace. Heedless of instability simmering in the repressed Near East, the free world allowed a sleeping evil undisturbed growth.
Repressive state entities in the Near East, their reigns continuing through the burgeoning modern age, have brought the region into economic chaos and social despair. In Iran and, until very recently Iraq, destitute, frustrated populations are kept in line by the violent hands of their failed governments. In others - Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon - hopeless, jobless populations have been cajoled into distraction through anti-Western doctrines and fundamentalist Islam. Even in states considered nominally friendly, hatred towards the West has become a way of life, as has a worship of slaughter; violence has been exported across the globe through the vessel of terrorism. Over the past decades of escalating terrorist mayhem, the West has at best mollified this cultural spiral - at worst, it has inadvertently abetted it through constant displays of irresolution and ambivalence.
The terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 was an opening fusillade from the next mortal threat to free civilization; a vinculum between the bestial will of terrorists and dictators, and the unprecedented, devastative capabilities of atomic, chemical and biological weaponry.
The present conflict comes from the Near East because Islamofascism has finally boiled over; terrorism is the mode of choice for authoritarians in the information age, seductive in its ease to achieve psychological domination. But authoritarians will eternally set about permeating the affairs of other nations as long as they remain in control of any nation and its culture. Every region blighted by dictatorial instability, whether traditionally strong quarters in the Far East such as China, or less conspicuous but unquestionably troubled lands in Africa, is a threat to the free world. In a devil�s concord, strongmen will conspire with strongmen for selfish acquisition whenever opportune. The rule of force is universal, surpassing ancillary tradition and binding authoritarians to a common disposition that temporarily belies their disparate and exclusory objectives. Methodologies are window dressing. An inevitable coincidence of objectives and labor will occur, covertly if necessary. Democracies will be infiltrated, lies spread and civility torn down at every opportunity.
The so-called force multiplier of technology only enhances these consequences. Dictatorship must be destroyed as a reality of the human experience and to that end, accepted laws of just war and sovereignty must be redefined.
CONFRONTING DICTATORSHIP�S ILLEGITIMACY:
Sovereignty is defined as the absolute power of an entity to govern exclusive affairs. It is traditional of democratic peoples to generally respect the perquisite of a nation�s internal conduct. This is driven by a free society�s appreciation for independence; a graceful humility that often inhibits justified moral condemnation so as not to repress individual autonomy. Such latitude fails to account for dictatorship, where sovereignty is violently coveted by a few and perfectly absent for most. Concluding that the course of an authoritarian nation has come to pass by popularity acutely misidentifies the fulcrum of that nation's political power.
This argument returns to the traditional ethical impasse dividing men; moral relativists and moral absolutists. Relativists will be inclined to consider analysis and censure of a physically nonbelligerent nation, however despotic, to be officious and unlawful, citing the maxim of autonomy. Absolutists believe in the desire of all men for self-determination and as a means of fulfilling this under the guidance of natural law, the punishment of strongmen who would actually deny autonomy to others.
Both inclinations should be able to meet in some agreement when the dictatorship is no longer conceptual but a historical or modern example: a totalitarian state where the otherwise hygienic �rule of force� can be described in graphic terms of tyranny, barbarity and slaughter.
And it is not a dictatorship�s populace that either group is judging. How can it be �every people should be left free to determine its own polity,� in Woodrow Wilson�s words, when people under authoritarian rule are entirely unable to direct the course of their nation? Can the institutional slavery and selfish, violent conquest of compulsory rule be considered anything but a perversion of autarchy? Jean-Jacques Rousseau�s The Social Contract tells us that as Grotius and Hobbes observed, autocratic rulers are considered shepherds and those they govern sheep; �sovereignty� entitles them to unmolested prerogative to command or �devour� their people as necessary.
Since the advent of American democracy, respecting �sovereignty� of any form of government � whether settled by the rule of law or the rule of force � has become starkly anachronistic. Yet after two centuries, dictatorship�s illegitimacy has hardly been challenged unequivocally by free nations - physically or rhetorically, militarily or politically - inviting a troubling moral contradiction. Gradations of acceptable government still prevail; despotisms are cloaked under euphemisms like �rogue state� and �developing country.�
This is not surprising, as for most of history rule has been compulsory; the last century�s wars made judgment impractical and, as has been pointed out, free societies are ideologically loathe to invade the affairs of others. Such temporizing of the meaning of sovereignty, unfortunately, effectively condones an authoritarian entity - however contemporarily non-aggressive - the right to dictate the will of its populace. Free nations are built upon the belief that liberty is indigenous to the desires of all men. How can this self-evidential, inalienable right be reasonably preserved for humanity and yet remain attenuated by parochially oppressive cultures maintained by force? If it cannot be so, then equal representation and protection under the rule of law are relative and ephemeral, and therefore meaningless.
Concludes Jean-Jacques Rousseau, �Let us then admit that force does not create right, and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers.� Or Abraham Lincoln, who intoned that �Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.� Legitimacy can only be claimed by leaders selected by those whom they govern. Every man who holds his country by force, against natural law, is a fugitive, the price of human dignity impressed onto his head. He is owed no lasting audience, nor succor, nor protection from free nations.
The implementation of universal liberty - declaring existing dictatorships, unbecoming ally or not, illegal - cannot be done directly nor immediately. Difficulties raised in this essay are primarily the interrelationships heretofore of free and despot nations; and the understandable military, logistical and philosophical reluctance of the former. No judicious leader desires war. That same judicious leader will not, however, put to risk his nation�s safety refusing military necessity at the first signs of authoritarian aggression, nor should he abstain from the prospect of offense when costs of inaction are clearly greater. The diplomatic obstinateness leading to Axis advantage in the Second World War is reason enough to hold parleying with dictatorships in little regard, however politically attractive and expedient it may be - especially to civilian leaders of modern democratic nations, who will be accused, relentlessly, of unauthorized warmongering by opponents of military action. To be fair, negotiating in good faith plays to a similar hopefulness in the potential of humanity - the ability to prevent bloodshed and foster concord - as those who would eschew it. Ultimately, one must be sober about the limited parties who are indeed interested in such a future. To that end, the force of arms has most effectively defeated dictators and excised diseased cultures: the Nazis, militarist Japan, the Taliban, Noriega�s Panama, Ba�athist Iraq. To a lesser significance, diplomacy combined with limited military actions has freed and defended nations: South Korea, the Philippines, the Slavic nations.
NATION-BUILDING AND THE �IRREPLACEABLES�:
The reconstruction of Japan and Germany was aided by fortunate post-war circumstances. The American-led effort was aided in overcoming cultural resistance from the Japanese and Germans by the prerogative due from unconditional surrender, and carefully albeit firmly reshaped society in both countries.
Though American occupation of these two countries was inevitably complicated by conflicting voices from both Washington and collaborating nations, not all victories against dictators will be as politically clear - a liability to reconstruction, particularly in the present time of a scant plurality of strongly democratic nations. It is the same trepidation with which free people wield force that they deliberately impart their ideals and virtues; the more self-critical, the less inclined they will be to confidently build free and civil society in a land broken by the rule of force, or face the often mortal challenges therein. The American preoccupation with international reputation - far more than critics would care to conclude - while admirable, tempts a slough of comfortable relativism; excusing tyranny as the natural yield of a given culture.
It has been shown that dictatorship is the most expedient form of government, that which every people on every continent initially lived under. Can it not also be posed that the inclination to a given form of governance is simply out of habited compulsion, and not at all consistent with the natural desires of humanity? Americans are drawn from a number of cultures, every one of which has been under authoritarian rule through history; many are immigrants who fled dictatorships. So is the American spirit of liberty a matter of culture - a relative phenomenon - or is it the miraculous realization of every man�s aspirations? A Chinese, an Iranian, a Cuban and a Zimbabwaen; all are born to mankind before they are, through geographical providence, assigned to a nationality and thus a predominant culture. In each of their respective nations, they do not enjoy a pittance of American freedoms. But are these four people then, sharing our blood and innate senses to survival and sentience or love and reason, not worthy to the same rewards of that essential property?
Bigotry masquerading as science once claimed that the black man was less developed simply because he was a black man. A mixture of misidentification and smug contempt, this quackery could not accept an attribution of the slave's apparent mental deficiencies to education and enlightened polemics absent or underdeveloped in his native land - when in fact, on Western shores, had he been born into opportunities for schooling, the African most certainly would have pursued learning and reason. Racial hatred is less likely a motivation for assuming a culture alien to free living, though concluding that the Chinese, Iranian, Cuban or Zimbabwaen has no lien on individual liberties is similarly prejudiced. Even so, might those born to the four cultures not care for the alternative offered here in hypothesis? These claimants should be confronted with the most compelling indication of all men seeking freedom: an incommunicably disproportionate amount of people departing from these lands to American shores than from America back.
Most striking in disassembling this antiquated notion are the Japanese and Germans. One might have assumed frustrations and obstacles in the first months and years of reconstruction indicated a lack of ambition for freedom, yet, within a decade, from the darkest of cultural episodes sprang thriving, liberal democracies.
No party or body has the natural right to foist authoritarian rule on a population. "Whatever the people want" is misleading and contrary to what freedom is: enjoying life under the constraints of civil responsibility, protected by a representative government, and not the opportunity to be coerced or cajoled into a new servitude. Most likely, sentiments such as these are instigated by parties adjutant to authoritarianism. They must be countered by a democratic occupation force. It can be done practically. The directed censure of political congregation and speech has been exercised without harming democratic values as a whole; particularly the extended �red purges� conducted by Occupation forces in Japan in 1950, uprooting much of a Soviet-backed, aggressive Communist presence among the country�s sprouting, American-encouraged industrial unionization.
If sheepishness excused as magnanimity prevails, a reconstituted nation left with incomplete liberties is doomed to collapse into tyranny. A hierarchy for liberties is therefore difficult, as all are reciprocal. One is hardly less important than the others:
Freedom of expression through press, assembly, petition and suffrage is the channel for a fluid exchange of ideas. Debate is won by the solidity and popularity of an argument. When the state is prevented from a monopoly of information and discourse, civility arbitrates disagreements and propagandizing faces high criticism by a competitive spirit inherent to a robustly free press. Leaders are brought up and thrown down by a society allowed to judge him as they see fit.
Freedom of worship provides for a bulwark against theocracy and religious persecution. The laws of God are the ballast of man�s dignity and the rule of law, true; but the laws of God are inseparable from free will. The divide between church and state is a leap of societal faith insofar as a citizen is expected to follow, through secular law, traditionally sacred moral tenets; but they are not compelled to do so, instead entrusted to obedience by the common good, established by the people and protected by the government.
Freedom of property preserves for lawful men the right to economic franchise as the foundation for self-determination in a market culture. Innovation rises from competition for the rewards of success; the risk of failure encourages ingenuity, wise frugality and generous provision. As with America, free enterprise brings the greatest prosperity to nations where it is the most dynamic. Commerce law must avoid a statist, control economy from overregulation and corrupt plutarchy from a lack thereof.
Separations of power and reservations of power to the populace protect the rule of law. A testament to the longest-lived constitution is America�s legislative, executive and judicial branches; law creation, enforcement and review, each committed to independent sources and aided by the citizenry. Where the jealousy and selfishness of human nature may seek to aggrandize, checks and balances mitigate governmental consolidation and authoritarian usurpation.
In 1989, amidst the heady final days of a crumbling Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay (which led to a 1992 book) entitled �The End of History� that asserted an inevitable end to contending ideologies against liberal democracy, as self-government and free enterprise benignly overwhelmed the world. Fukuyama�s concept of �history� was sociological evolution ending in liberalism, thus at the end of the Cold War dividing free and unfree states as, respectively, those beyond history and those still living in it. The apparent Westernization of traditionally resistant locales - as Fukuyama described it, �peasants� markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past year in Moscow...and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon and Tehran� - suggested the extinction of free nations� greatest rivals, fascism and Communism, and therefore �the growing �Common Marketization� of international relations, and the diminution of the likelihood of large-scale conflict between states.� Fukuyama reserved a margin for continuing international conflict, but not from �large states still caught in the grip of history, [which] appear to be passing from the scene.�
Where Fukuyama seems to have been in err is ascribing an ability of liberal culture alone to dissolve authoritarianism; the emergence of Islamofascism to be, as it were, a threat that has simply taken the place of international Communism demonstrates, at the very least, another chapter in Fukuyama�s history. But moreso this lends itself to ideas discussed in this essay: comprehending authoritarian ideologies simply as exponents of the rule of force, and simplifying the dynamic to a struggle between liberty and bestial will, with strongmen ever attempting to reclaim the self-governed and return to the authoritarian mean of objective history. With Fukuyama, however, the desired destination is the same: a realization of Kant�s �Perpetual Peace,� where the very nature of free nations would preclude violent assertion, insofar as a world full of them would sustain harmony indefinitely. But Fukuyama describes an exo-historical world as nearly utopian, with an absence of �the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one�s life for a purely abstract goal.� This at once seems at odds with human nature; indeed, it is more likely that the rule of force would logically threaten any liberal democracy not just from without but from within, and in failure a state might be wrenched back into Fukuyama�s �history.�
By no means is the failure of a well-established free state surrounded by stable democracies nearly as likely as its being consumed by a foreign, authoritarian entity in the present time. Mortality of human conscience requires the protections invested in constitutions and common laws of liberal democracies as described above because potential antagonists of free societies can be counted as those living within them. This should diminish neither the authenticity of consensual government nor the prodigious danger of the external rule of force, but instead emphasize bestial will as a constant of man�s affairs and the source in abstraction for all ideologies that have and will challenge the rule of law. Human nature cannot be changed but isolated and relatively unaccoutred forceful means would, in a free nation, likely remain limited to theft, murder, immorality and corruption: all indigenous and manageable flaws of democracy.
Thomas Jefferson was warily hopeful in humanity�s sustentation of its own natural rights when he advised that �The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.� It would be prudent to interpret vigilance as protection through abrogation, to physically defeat international remnants of the rule of the strong and guide oppressed peoples to found and then guard their legal, consensual sovereignty. To that end, vigilance is a thing that can and must soon be shared by all nations as a gracious consequence of their acquired common purpose.
[February 4, 2004: Slight revision]
[April 1, 2004: Slight revision]
[August 10, 2004: Slight revision]
[January 22, 2005: Slight revision]