March - April 1994
American Purpose
Issue 2, Volume 8

Publication Date: April 1, 1994
Posted: Friday, April 4, 1994

This issue includes 'Wirth's Law, Havel's Woodshed'; 'Those Who Rule Us'; 'The Old War, Revisited'; 'Havel's Challenge'; 'The Truth of the World'; 'Calibrating Our Response'; and 'Taking Our Medicine'.


In This Issue :

Wirth's Law, Havel's Woodshed
And Other Notes on the Current Disarray
Like others before me, I have been known to complain from time to time about the circularity of the standard-brand debate over morality-and-foreign-policy. "Realists" typically argue that foreign affairs are the realm of amorality and that introducing moral categories into the debate uselessly complicates an already difficult task. "Idealists" seem to think that treating with sovereign foreign powers, some of them of a decidedly unsavory nature, is an exercise on the order of dealing with children and other relatives: fractious children, perhaps, and difficult, even recalcitrant relatives, but, at bottom, people who are really Just Like Us. And so it goes, around and around the rhetorical maypole, with the notion that social ethics may be a distinctive form of moral reasoning getting its usual short shrift.  [More]

Those Who Rule Us
David Ignatius, the assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, recently tried to answer a question about the Clinton administration that has been on many minds over the past year: "Why are these smart people having so much trouble, especially in foreign affairs?" Ignatius's suggestion was that there were, in fact, two problems: the kind of "meritocratic education" that had produced this administration's 1990s reprise of the Best and the Brightest; and the fact that history had thrown the Clinton people a curve ball, such that the new elite "had been trained to fight the last war, not the next."  [More]

The Old War, Revisited
As for David Ignatius's second point, one can surely sympathize with the difficulties of policy-making in the strange new post-Cold War world. It is a new ballgame; many of the old reference points don't apply; the new dilemmas aren't readily susceptible to the traditional solutions; and to top it all off, the country is in a surly mood about international entanglements. These are circumstances that would test the wits and the mettle of anyone.  [More]

Havel's Challenge
The thrashings in the policy community and the rise of a new isolationism notwithstanding, some people, at least, still think of the United States as the world's premier power, and believe it has a special obligation at this fluid moment in world history to take the lead in determining at least the major outlines of the post-Cold War world order. One of those people is Václav Havel, president of the Czech Republic. And in his elegant way, President Havel took America to the proverbial woodshed in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.  [More]

The Truth of the World
During the hardest days of the anti-Communist human-rights resistance, a lot of thought was given to the relationship between truth and freedom, between truth and democracy. And in those dark days, Havel argues, the leaders of the human-rights resistance learned that "the only genuine values are those for which one is capable, if necessary, of sacrificing something." What we take for granted as the core values of Western civilization—what we often perceive as givens—Havel and other leaders of the resistance perceive as moral accomplishments: "... [Democracy, respect for human rights and for the order of nature, the freedom of the individual and the inviolability of his property, the feeling of co-responsibility for the world, which means that if freedom is threatened anywhere, it is threatened everywhere—all of these things [are] values with moral, and therefore metaphysical, underpinnings."  [More]

Calibrating Our Response
Some of what Havel had to say in his Foreign Affairs article struck me as a bit overwrought. His forebodings about global "ecological catastrophe" and his criticisms of an "anthropocentric" view of the earth are unhappily reminiscent of the circles of Western self-deprecation that Havel quite rightly criticized once for their incomprehension of what was at stake along the Yalta fault line.  [More]

Taking Our Medicine
All that being said, however, President Havel is surely right that "the headaches are never over," and that the present American and Western insouciance toward world politics, and especially toward the future of freedom in those countries whose effective resistance to Communism immeasurably enhanced the security of the West, is unworthy of us. But rousing the American people (not to mention people of the western European democracies) to "win the peace" is going to require political leadership. And that, alas, seems notable for its absence these days.  [More]

Endnotes
Click here to view the endnotes. [More]