"The Folly of Interventionism"

Great Debates
1

Someone I know from an outside message board wrote the following essay, and has given me permission to repost it in its entirety (it’s not published yet or anything) to thus be critiqued by the public.

Please debate the validity of the essay on any point you wish.

[I’ve never posted a debate where I instruct people to openly debate, without involving myself solely as a medium. Strange.]

"Ben Kilpatrick

The Folly of Interventionism

My dictionary defines Interventionism as “The policy or practice of intervening in the affairs of another sovereign state.” I’m going to tell all of you a little story about how interventionism has gotten us where we are today and why further intervention can only make the situation worse.

The late Nobel Prize laureate F.A. Hayek wrote a book called The Road To Serfdom in 1944. Though his book concerned economic interventionism, its message applies here. He said that any intervention would require ever larger interventions until there is a general collapse or people see the folly of intervention. I believe an overview of the history of the last 100 years will readily prove him correct.

In 1914, a Serbian assassin shot Arch-Duke Ferdinand. The Balkans had been embroiled in war since 1912. Austrian militarists were almost desperate for Austria to enter the war, and this assassination provided a ready excuse. Thus began the first World War, in which 10 million people died. This war began as a result of Austria’s desire to intervene in the affairs of another nation. The seeds for WW2 were sown in WW1. Nations with no ties to the
original combatants were pulled in, and the final result from all of this senseless slaughter was a massive repayment program that Germany was forced to bear.

These reparations destroyed the German economy and made it possible for Hitler to come to power. The actions of Hitler and other fascists/socialists such as Mussolini and Fumomaro Konoye got 50 million people killed. All of this happened because of intervention 30 years earlier. WW2 holds a
somewhat direct link to where we are today. The tragic events of WW2 gave a push to Zionism, which ultimately resulted in the founding of Israel (and the expulsion of nearly 1,000,000 Arab civilians.)

American intervention in the Middle East has a long and rather nasty history. In late 1953, the United States intervened in Iran and overthrew Prime Minister Mussadeq of Iran because his government had nationalized the oil fields. After the overthrow, the American government propped up the Shah’s regime by such methods as by training his brutal SAVAK secret police. These interventions into Iran caused popular discontent and brought about a
revolution, which put Ayatollah Khomeini into power. And thus, the most recent Middle Eastern “regime change” had some really nasty consequences.

After the Iranian revolution, the US adopted Iraq and the now much-vilified Saddam Hussein as a buffer against Iran. In 1980, border skirmishes erupted between Iraq and Iran, and the war that would eventually kill 800,000 people had begun. During the war, Iraq used American-supplied chemical and conventional weapons.

Also during the 1980s, the American government intervened in another place: Afghanistan. One of the people that the CIA used in its support of the mujahideen was a rich, Saudi Arabian expatriate named Osama bin Laden. At any rate, things really got going after a little “pep talk” from ex-Senator Zbignew Brezinski, in which he urged them to launch a jihad. (They hadn’t used that term in a war context for centuries, but they sure are good at using it
now, aren’t they?)

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, it’s now 1989, and the whole Iran-Contra scandal has told Saddam that he’s been double crossed. (America sold arms to Iran and used the money to fund the Nicaraguan Contras. This got people quite angry because Iran was under embargo.) Anyways, Saddam went to the Kuwaitis, asked them to pay off all of the money he’d spent on keeping the Iranians away, and they tell him no. So he decided to make trouble on the border with

Kuwait, which gets him an embargo. After several months of diplomatic crises, Saddam gets an implicit “green light” to invade and does so. To his utter surprise, he is attacked by a UN coalition.
And that’s where we are today. Foreign intervention led to both world wars, terrorism in the Middle East, the rise of Iranian fundamentalism, the rise of Osama bin Laden as a major figure, and Saddam’s rise to power.

In light of the horribly legacy of interventionism, how can anyone advocate it now?"

2

From the essay quoted in the OP:

The two clauses I’ve underlined are false. Prior to World War I, every nation in Europe was embroiled in a complicated interconnecting network of alliances, in which each country promised to attack any other country that attacked one of their allies. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia because Serbians shot and killed an Austro-Hungarian Archduke. Russia was allied with Serbia, so Russia had to declare war on Serbia’s enemies (Austria-Hungary). Germany was allied with Austria-Hungary, so Germany had to declare war on Austria-Hungary’s enemies (Russia and Serbia). France was allied with Russia, so they would have declared war on Germany for declaring war on Russia, but Germany beat them to the punch and declared war on France as a pre-emptive move.

There was no interventionism involved in the outbreak of World War I.

3

Nitpick: Gavrilo Princip was Bosnian.

4

Tell you friend to start editing, and soon. His style of writing is barely high-school quality and I’m naturally suspicious of anyone who tries to mash 100 years of international politics into 500 words or less. His facts are superficial or misleading, including this little chuckler:

It suggests the Americans got bored one day and decided to mosey on over to Afghanstan, where they whipped the peace-loving locals into a frenzy. There is no mention of the Soviet invasion that prompted American aid to the mujahaddin, and no mention of the fact that the Afghans have been fighting wars among themselves for centuries, including after the Soviets and Americans went home. The Taliban was a home-grown piece of fascism.

In fact, the American’s greatest single foreign-intervention failure of the last century, Vietnam, is not mentioned at all, which strikes me as odd. If anything, Vietnam showed the dangers of foreign intervention when no definite or attainable goal exists.

It’s not enough to jump into a situation, one has to have a definite plan. Victory conditions, as it were. The Gulf War of 1991 had the goal of removing Iraqi forces from Kuwait. By any measure, it was a spectacular success. Goals were set and met. The liberation of Kuwait is comparable to the destruction of the Taliban in Afghanistan, if you squint. Why are these being held up as failures of interventionist policy? For that matter, how is Zionism connected to interventionism? If the orignal Balfour Declaration had been implemented, you might have an argument, but the Jews had to fight for the modern state of Israel while British forces were trying to stop them.

If your friend has his own little axe to grind, he should try to be more subtle and focussed about it. Pick a single historical situation that matches the current condition and write about it in detail. Connecting Islamic terror to two German invasions of France (i.e. the world wars) isn’t going to work.

Easy there, killer. This kind of writing might pass in high school (as I mentioned) but if your friend is writing for adults, he’ll need phrasing with a bit more tooth than “some really nasty consequences.” As it stands, it sounds like the regime change sent dissidents to bed without supper and cancelled all Nintendo priveleges.

Ultimately, though, the premise is flawed. Your friend is arguing for isolationism where, presumably, every nation minds its own business. Increased international trade and terrorism has made it impossible to ignore violent conflict among your neighbors. You can stay out of it when your stakes are low (i.e. Rwanda) but a Pearl Harbor or Sept.11 demands a response. You can pick and choose when and where and to what extent that response will take, of course, but a blanket “see no evil” policy only ensures that evil will go unchecked. If you’re okay with that, fine. I’m not.

5

Pointless example. The two types of intervention are so very different.

According to Barbara Tuchman in IIRC The Guns of August, the Germans wanted war and merely used the assassination as an excuse.

6

Well, I can see that my article has not been well recieved, and that is fine.
Just a note to the person who called my article “barely high-school quality”, it is more than a bit difficult to compress 100 years of history into a one-page article.
I will be back soon to defend my article.

7

December Franz Ferdinand murder was “the spark that lighted the fuse of WWI”, you are wrong in saying that “the germans” wanted war. In fact all did, the english and french were as guilty of that war as the germans. The problem was the system of alliance that literally tied the contenders hands.
To answer the op, the essay as someone already said is very poor. It’s superficial, you can’t compare WWI with Afghanistan. He also didn’t mentioned Vietnam (someone siad that already) and the intervention of U.S.A in Latin America (specially Cuba, Nicaragua and Guatemala).

8

A Bosnian Serb, in a terrorist group paid for by the Serbian government, with the goal of making Bosnia part of Serbia.

9

(emphasis added)
Excuse me?

Who? There was a Zbigniew Brzezinski who was Carter’s National Security Adviser, but there has never been a Senator of that name.

Sua

10

Now for the substantive critique:

  1. Ben, your examples of interventions are amazingly selective. You ignore the two largest interventions of the past 100 years - American entry into WWI and WWII. Those interventions helped end the slaughters you mention.
    You also ignore such interventions as the Korean War, the ongoing British intervention in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Bosnia (eventually), etc.

  2. Just as crucially, you ignore the horrors that have resulted when countries failed to intervene.
    For example, you blame WWII on “interventionism” in WWI. While WWI laid the groundwork for WWII, it didn’t make WWII and the Holocaust inevitable. At numerous times, WWII could have been prevented, and Hitler overthrown, had simply France and Britain intervened. The best-known of such failures to intervene was Munich in 1938.
    Other examples of slaughters that could have been prevent if countries had just intervened include the Killing Fields of Cambodia and the Rwandan massacre.

In sum, Ben, interventionism is effectively neutral. Whether a particular intervention is “good” or “bad” depends upon the goals and methods of the particular intervention.

Sua

11

The Black Hand was paid by the Serbian government? Cite?

I always read the Black Hand was a group of a couple dozen radicals, and that was all.

12

Minor quibble with december, based largely on my admiration for the author cited, the redoubtable Ms. Tuchman. The theme was not so much that “Germany wanted war” but that the aforesaid alliances created a situation no one knew how to cope with: the plans for mobilization and war gained a momentum of thier own that proved to be unstoppable. Over all, very few people actually wanted war, but no one knew how to stop it. To paraphrase George Kennan, the more a war is prepared for, the more likely it is to occur.

Also, as regards Munich: the supposed spinelessness and “appeasement” at Munich was less an expression of a lack of moral vigor or interventionist will as an utter lack of any ability to do anything about it. Churchill exploited the popular sentiment about Munich for political purposes, though he knew full well that England had no standing army to speak of, no artillery worth the name, etc. France was hardly in any better shape. And though Germany was nowhere near the level of military strength that she would one day attain, she would have been a formidable foe if confronted on her own territory by an invading force.

Churchill might very well have demanded a regime change in Germany. He might have demanded to be installed as Queen of Romania, for all the good it would have done. Churchill knew perfectly well that Hitler’s pledges of good behavior were worthless, as he knew perfectly well that he could have done nothing more than Chamberlain did. Nor had he any qualms about letting Chamberlain take the fall for it.

13

Wow. Unfortunately for your argument, the German generals of the time don’t agree with you.

General Jodl testified at Nuremburg:

June 4, 1946 testimony, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol. XV, p. 361

Indeed, the German generals thought that Germany did not have the military strength to successfully defeat Czechoslovakia, much less defend themselves against France and Britain at the same time.

Field Marshall von Manstein, also at Nuremburg:

August 9, 1946 testimony, TMCW, vol. XX, p. 606.

Indeed, most German generals were so convinced that a war in 1938 would be disasterous for Germany that it is highly likely that there would have been a coup d’etat against Hitler if Britain and France hadn’t caved at Munich. (no direct cite right now; I’ll get back to you if you want one.)

On September 12, 1938, two weeks before the capitulation at Munich, General Gamelin, Chief of Staff of the French Army at the time, assured the French Premier, Daladier, that if war came in 1938, “the democratic nations would dictate the peace.”
Gamelin, Servir, pp. 344-346.

So – France had 100 divisions to attack 12 German divisions (of which 7 were reserve formations), holding unfortified positions, and Britain and France had an “utter lack of any ability to do anything about it”??

What the hell have you been reading, elucidator?

Sua

14

Think again. Many members of the Black Hand were in fact Serbian army officers. Here’s a tasty link.

15

Sua,
1-Yes, chemical weapons. The fact that we supplied chemical weapons to the Iraqis is common knowledge today, but if you wish I can provide a good source for my claim.
2-Yes, our intervention in WW1 did “end the slaughter” but it also altered the outcome of an essentially European conflict so that the stage was set for WW2 and the German people were deeply humiliated.
3-Thank you for the factual correction about ZB. My mistake.
4-As for Munich in 1938, I am of the opinion that it was less a failure on the part of the British and French to intervene than an amelioration of what they had come to see as unjust demands. Unfortunalty, I do not currently have access to the essay that I got this opinion from - it is part of a book that I left in a friend’s car after we came back from some seminars at the Mises Institute at Auburn. I’ll present my evidence when I get the book back.
Estilicon,
It was fairly inevitable that my essay was superficial. It was intended for publication in my school’s newspaper, and I was severly limited on space. If it was intended for, oh, say, a scholarly journal, it would have been much longer and extremely well-referenced.
December,
It is my fundamental viewpoint that all interventions share the common quality of causing consequences that are not anticipated, thus necessitating ever larger interventions. I do not believe that the two types of intervention (as well as a third, intervention into the personal lives of others) vary in this regard.
Tracer,
When I said that the nations were unconnected, I meant to say only that no French government officials were killed in Sarajevo, yet a huge amount of French people died in WW1. To say that they had no connections in the sense of alliaces would be quite stupid.

16

Please do.

This, my friend, is a wonderful example of the neutrality of intervention. The U.S. intervention was a predicate of the Versailles Treaty and the humiliation of the German people, but was not the cause-in-fact. The Entente Powers, including the U.S. could have equally easily defeated the Germans and imposed much more fair peace terms on the Germans. Indeed, that’s what the U.S. wanted.
OTOH, it can easily be argued that the U.S. intervention caused the problems it did not because it occurred in the first place, but because it was incomplete. The “humiliation” of the German people occurred because they adopted the myth that the German Army was “stabbed in the back” - that it was capable of continuing the fight, but the armistice was imposed on it by a conniving civilian government.
In point of fact, Germany was militarily defeated. Had the U.S. and the Entente Powers refused to sign the armistice and instead continued their march into Germany, they perhaps could have done to Germany then what it did to Germany in 1945 - uprooted the antidemocratic old order and imposed a democratic civilian rule that was free of the taint of the “stabbed in the back” myth.

So, the U.S. intervention in WWI could equally validly be looked upon as a unmitigated good, for stopping the slaughter, an unmitigated bad for setting the stage for Hitler, or a neutral act, with good and bad aspects, that did not make inevitable either Versailles or Hitler.

de nada.

Amelioration of what unjust demands? The Sudetenland had never been part of Germany. It had been part of Austria-Hungary. Even then (IIRC) it had been part of the Hungarian part of that dual monarchy, so if you think that the Anschluss - otherwise known as the military occupation of a nation that also had never belonged to Germany - gave Hitler the right to make revanchiste demands on behalf of Austria (a position I would take great issue with), that still doesn’t get you anywhere. The Sudetenland didn’t belong to Austria in the first place.
And of course, if that was the British-French intent, they were oddly inconsistent. They did nothing in opposition to German occupation of Austria, the Sudetenland, and the rest of Czechoslovakia, all of which had never belonged to Germany and thus could not possibly “ameliorate unjust demands” made in Versailles, yet when they finally went to war, it was over Poland, where Hitler had been demanding the return of Danzig and the Corridor, which had been part of Germany prior to WWI - and therefore was the only one of the bunch where Germany conceivably had a valid claim. Most peculiar amelioration there.

But anyway, what about the Killing Fields and Rwanda?

Sua

17

Ben, a few observations:

  1. I agree that it’s very difficult to compress 100 years of history into a few paragraphs. My suggestion would be that you don’t try to. If the only way you feel you can make your point is by complete summary of a century’s worth of world events, then you need to find a venue other than a brief newspaper op-ed to do so. Better to not do it at all than to be forced to do it half-assed.

  2. I believe that a reasonable person could give a reasonable argument for a generally isolationist foreign policy (though not completely isolationist). I don’t happen to agree, but that doesn’t mean a good argument couldn’t be made. To put it bluntly, yours isn’t a good argument. It’s merely a list of events in which interventionist behavior allegedly had bad side effects. I could pose a list of similar length that “shows” how wonderful interventionism is. What you need to do to formulate an effective argument is:

  • Give specific reasons why you feel interventionism is bad. You address this briefly in your article, but not enough to really say anything meaningful. You need to show a mechanism by which your argument is valid, not just a bunch of bullet points.

  • Give a few examples of the negative side effects of intervention, and explain how these examples fit in with your argument above.

  • Give at least one example of a case in which interventionism was good. Explain what is different about this example, and why it is the exception, rather than the rule. It’s important in any good argument to concede a point to the opposing view - it’ll make your opinion much more credible.

  1. Sorry to say it, but your writing style is fairly undeveloped. If you’re writing for a college paper, you can get away with it, but if you hope to someday compete in The Real World, I highly suggest you read the works of other political commentators and see how they write (I recommend Thomas Friedman and Jonah Goldberg - Goldberg, in particular, is excellent at making an article both entertaining and informative). Take some classes. Mostly, though, just read as much as you can get your hands on. I find that learning by example is best. Also, if you find a style that you absolutely fall in love with, don’t be afraid to plaigerize the hell out of it (the style, of course, not the actual writings). Eventually, it’ll warp into something you can call your own.

  2. If you’re going to philosophize, man, stay the hell away from Nietzsche. That Total Disdain For All of Mankind schtick of his is a real downer. :wink:
    Jeff