Grand purposes or catchphrases? - National Interests

Naval War College Review, Autumn, 2002 by James F. Miskel

It has become virtually a matter of faith among statesmen and academics that foreign policy is best made when national interests are clearly defined and articulated. (1) How best to define and prioritize national interests can, of course, be a matter of considerable dispute. Thus the controversies that swirled around U.S. policy toward Bosnia and Kosovo, for example, have been sometimes understood as reflections of fundamental disagreement about how U.S. national interests in the Balkans should be defined and prioritized relative to other national interests in the region and other parts of the world. Implicit in these and similar debates about national interests and foreign policy are two assumptions. One is that national interests can be defined precisely. This assumption is obviously true, although actually defining and prioritizing specific interests may be rather difficult in the contemporary era, with growing interdependence among nations and no superpower competition. The second assumption is that state smen actually attempt to define national interests with precision. Judging from recent history, this assumption warrants challenge.

At least in recent years, statesmen have been reluctant to define national interests with anything other than Delphic ambiguity. Like the ancient Greek oracle, famous for its double-entendre predictions and deliberately obscure advice, today's statesmen routinely offer "definitions" of the national interest so broad that they can be, and in fact are, interpreted in more than one way and in any case reveal little about the actual long-range goals of the nation.

Very generally speaking, there are two basic schools of thought about how national interests should be defined. One school, the avatars of which might be realist statesmen like Otto von Bismarck in the nineteenth century and Richard Nixon in the twentieth, holds that national interests should be defined in terms of a state's tangible power and sphere of influence relative to those of other states. The single most important form of tangible power for this realist school is military (cannons and rifles in Bismarck's era, nuclear missiles and bombers in Nixon's); the statesman's ultimate challenge is to maintain a balance of military power that is favorable to his or her state. Hence, realists tend to believe that the United States has no important national interests at stake in places like Bosnia and Kosovo, because events there have only a marginal effect on the global distribution of military power.

The other school holds that national interests should be defined more broadly to encompass intangible, but nevertheless highly prized, values like human rights, freedom from economic deprivation, and freedom from disease. In their vastly different ways, Woodrow Wilson and V. I. Lenin might be thought of as exemplars of this school. Both leaders employed the military power of their states to promote, respectively, the values of national self-determination and economic egalitarianism. Advocates of American military action in Bosnia and Kosovo, for instance, tended to argue that events in the Balkans are direct affronts to important intangible values and thus must be confronted. They further argued, perhaps as a sop to realists, that if Washington had ignored them, the ability of the United States to wield "soft power" in other areas would have gradually eroded.

For the last century, the foreign policies of the United States and many other countries have been largely shaped by the decisions of statesmen who have charted courses in the middle ground between the two national-interest schools. This hundred-year database suggests that there has been a collective, albeit unexpressed, judgment by practitioners that neither school has it exactly right. It also suggests that whatever they say in public, practitioners have realized that attempts to define national interests in enough detail to serve as actual guides for foreign policy are, all too often, frustrating and ultimately sterile exercises.

Why, then, are Delphic bows toward the altar of national interest virtually de rigueur in public policy and academic circles? The reason, to the cynic's mind, is that justifying decisions on the basis of supposed relationships to national interests-even vaguely defined national interests-is both intellectually and sentimentally gratifying. Obligatory tips of the hat to the national interest have intellectual appeal in that they appear to validate the expectation of scholars, legislators, and voters that statesmen will base their decisions on reasoned evaluations of the connection between ends and means. After all, without a clear picture of the ends--national interests--objective comparisons of alternative courses of action would be (and, as importantly, would be perceived by voters as being) little more than guesswork.

Allusions to the national interests are sentimentally attractive because they reaffirm the presumption that the expenditures and exertions that result from strategic decisions are made for worthy purposes. Even in nondemocratic regimes, creating the sense that worthwhile ends are being served is often vital to the mobilization of national effort. Domestic political support from key interest groups, if not from the population as a whole, is often the sine qua non of successful policy implementation, regardless of the nature of the regime. After all, even Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, the most ruthless of twentieth-century dictators, felt compelled to justify the sacrifices they demanded of their people by connecting those sacrifices to the grand purposes of "socialism in one country" and German territorial expansion, respectively.