Why is it that Americans think we have “moral standing” in the world? Not only do we not presently have moral standing we’ve never had moral standing. I write in reaction to this headline in the Washington Post: “Are We Willing to Sacrifice Our Moral Standing For This?” (referring to the disappearance and presumed murder of a Saudi journalist).
We have military and economic standing. We’re doing what we can to erode the latter and every non-decisive year we spend in Afghanistan damages the former.
Where did the idea of our moral standing come from? Why does it persist?
I assume from John Quincy Adams.
That comports with my view that our times of greatest moral standing were when we refused to embroil ourselves in the intrigues of other countries, e.g. the Suez crisis, than when we did. I’m sure that some will see WWII as our moment of highest moral standing. I think we perceived it as a matter of survival. We certainly didn’t fight WWII to save the people in the concentration camps. There is ample testimony that the situation in the concentration camps came as a bolt from the blue to most Americans. I knew American soldiers who were among the first into the camps and that was certainly their reaction.
If we believe that we have a moral standing in the world, some of our actions will be based on maintaining our fictional moral standing.
If we don’t think we have a moral standing, we will never act for anything but our own immediate self interest.
It’s why we have to intervene against other nations and groups that use weapons of mass destruction, and why we have to try to relieve some of the famines and food shortages, and possibly why we will punish Saudi Arabia for chopping up a journalist in their consulate.
We may have no moral standing, but when we think we do we try to live up to it. It’s a good thing.
I wonder. How good is it if you think your standing is moral by definition? There is no universally accepted system of morality.
I think that in the cases where we have intervened based on our moral judgements, we haven’t made anything worse, and we have reinforced international norms that are close to universally aspired to if not accepted.
Here are what I consider our “morally motivated†interventions since 1990 or so. These are ones where we weren’t directly involved before the intervention, and where we led the intervention (us contributing to the French led intervention in Libya doesn’t count, as that was determined by NATO politics more than a moral sense)
– Somalia: we attempted to establish some semblance of order so humanitarian aid could get to people who were starving. We failed, but it was a worthy effort that didn’t make things worse (and, which we should have learned from for our George W. Bush Middle East Adventures, but that’s another matter)
– Bosnia, Kosovo: genocide is unacceptable, and where we have the power, we should put a stop to it. I am disappointed that we didn’t intervene in Rwanda, but that would have been a harder intervention — air power is more effective against armies than machetes.
– Syria: the use of chemical weapons against anyone, but especially civilians, is unacceptable and must be opposed. I don’t think we went far enough in hurting Assad — airstrips were repaired a few days later. We shouldn’t have taken him out, but we should have seriously degraded his abilities.
I think those three things — relieve humanitarian crisis, stop genocide and make the use of chemical weapons too expensive to consider — are pretty universally accepted.
There are some morally tinged aspects in Iraq and Afghanistan, where after a strategic invasion, we have attempted to impose a democracy. That hasn’t worked well. We have never, however, just up and invaded a country to install a democracy without strategic reasons for the invasion.
” Syria: the use of chemical weapons against anyone, but especially civilians, is unacceptable and must be opposed”
I understand the sentiment and I believe that may also be in the Geneva Convention, but when determined religious zealots hide among civilian populations as human shields, sometimes to bring a war to an end, you do what you must.
Hiroshima, Dresden, Napalm, cluster bombs, starvation blockades of entire cities. We like to pretend that there is a Democratic alternative to Assad, but the enemy he fights are what we would call terrorists. Islamic Jihadists. We need to take off the blinkers, some parts of the world aren’t like the West.