View the h-diplo Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in h-diplo's December 1999 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in h-diplo's December 1999 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the h-diplo home page.
Andrew Preston wrote: "Diem was as barbarous as Ho, Thieu and Ky as wicked as Giap and Pham Van Dong; Saddam was the same butcher he was in the 1980s when he received American support; and Milosevic did not become as ruthless as he is overnight. The US supported a terrible regime in South Vietnam for two decades, and it tolerated the dictators Hussein and Milosevic for as long as it needed to. The motives for action in all three cases were not humanitarian in principle, although such results were fortunate byproducts." And: "...I see a definite continuation between the pre- and post-Vietnam eras, between FDR's foreign policy and LBJ's or Clinton's. Other examples to support my point would be the Dominican intervention in 1965, aid to the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s, or the invasions of Grenada and Panama." Professor Preston is mixing apples and oranges here, and seeing a "definite continuation" in American foreign policy motives where there is a much murkier pattern. First, there is a huge difference between *supporting* a government (e.g., Diem) and *tolerating* a government (e.g., Milosevic). The United States, and the rest of the world, "tolerates" all sorts of nasty governments. (Some are even celebrated by many, for example Castro in Europe.) What was different about Kosovo was that the Milosevic government was about to do something that was intolerable according to minimum standards of decency and NATO intervened to prevent it. On the other hand, most Americans then, and some of us now, would not see Diem, Thieu, and Ky (with all their faults) as being as "barbarous" as Ho, Giap, and Dong. (Similarly, Lon Nol left much to be desired as a national leader, but he was infinitely better than Pol Pot.) When trying to assess American motivations and intentions, one should take into consideration the decision-making framework within which these things are decided. Recent works such as *The Black Book of Communism* suggest that fighting communism of the Marxist-Leninist type in the Cold War was a morally commendable thing in and of itself. As Martin Malia has pointed out, communism not only committed criminal acts, it was a criminal enterprise. In this sense, Kirkpatrick's argument of supporting the lesser of two evils in an imperfect world was a sensible one. Secondly, Mark Peceny wrote an excellent article several years ago on just this subject in *International Studies Quarterly*. Looking at a number of Cold War military interventions, he found that the US often intervened for security reasons initially, but relatively quickly switched to a policy of the promotion of democracy. Indeed, I would argue that there is a very strong historical correlation between American military interventions and democratic development. From Italy, Germany, and Japan in the 1940s, to the examples that Preston cites (Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Grenada, and Panama - I would add Salvador, Haiti, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and hopefully Kosovo, among others) the *eventual* result was the establishment of imperfect yet working democracies. This pattern is so striking it goes beyond, in my view, a simple designation of "fortunate byproduct". The United States has backed a lot of nasty governments in the short run when the alternatives were seen as worse, for American interests and in terms of human rights. But in the long run it has aided, and in some cases directly caused, the establishment of democratic governance. American policy has followed a zigzag pattern between short term and long term democratic development, not the linear pattern of support for authoritarianism described by Preston. Thirdly, even when backing such nasty governments, often under conditions of a communist insurgency threatening their very existence, US policy has often been to try to bring democratic reforms under especially trying conditions, albeit often unsuccessfully or imperfectly. See Tony Smith's *America's Mission* and my own *Adventures in Chaos* for ample evidence of such attempts. When trying to capture the intentions and motivations of US foreign policy, we must look at the number of attempts, not just the number of successes or failures. Lastly, in the Diem case, let us not forget that the US backed a coup against that government (in retrospect, a mistake in my view), largely based on dissatisfaction with its treatment of the non-communist opposition. American foreign policy in the Third World can be criticized on many grounds, but not for a continuous backing of authoritarian governments for security or economic based motives. It is much more complicated than that. Doug Macdonald Colgate University
|