March 2000 resolution: “The intervention of one nation in the domestic affairs of another nation is morally justified”
I. Introduction
The March/April resolution is true. Provided that the government of a free nation does so for the purpose of protecting the security of its citizens, foreign military intervention is a necessary and proper policy.
II. Key Concepts
A. “Foreign Intervention”
Oxford English Dictionary defines “intervention” as “[t]he action of intervening, ‘stepping in’, or interfering in any affair, so as to affect its course or issue. Now freq[uently] applied to the interference of a state or government in the domestic affairs or foreign relations of another country.” Although this definition is not particularly helpful, it does highlight the meaning of “intervention” in the geopolitical context suggested by the resolution.
Foreign intervention is a type of governmental action. A government, in Ayn Rand’s definition, is “an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area” (“The Nature of Government,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 125). Because a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of force in a delimited geographical area, the attempt to enforce rules of conduct outside of that area, in an area subject to the jurisdiction of another government, is the essential trait of foreign intervention. The only way to accomplish such enforcement on territory under the jurisdiction of another government is to use military force; hence foreign intervention is an essentially military endeavor.
Because foreign intervention is a state-supported military action, it must be distinguished from the involvement of private individuals of one nation in the affairs of another. When a businessman, a teacher, or a religious missionary from one nation deals with citizens in another country, he does so by their consent, using only his power of persuasion to influence their conduct. He is not attempting to enforce any particular mode of conduct, and he is not, therefore, interfering in the authority of their government to do it. As discussed earlier, foreign intervention is an essentially military endeavor, and is fundamentally different from any non-coercive mode of interaction.
There are different ways in which one government can abridge a foreign government’s monopoly on the use of force. A government may, for example, send troops into the territory of another government without its consent in order to suppress conflicts (e.g., the dispatch of an expeditionary force against the Boxers in China in 1901, or against Poncho Villa in Mexico in 1916). Another possibility is a case in which a government militarily supports rebels, in order to overthrow a foreign government (e.g., U.S. naval support for Panamanian rebels against their Columbian rulers in 1903).
A limiting case of intervention is intervention on behalf of a foreign government, against an insurgency (e.g., U.S. support of South Vietnam against the Viet Cong). While such intervention is at the request of the foreign government, it is nonetheless a limitation on that government’s monopoly on force: the intervening troops still take their orders from the intervening government. (If troops take their orders from the “host” government, they are not intervening troops, but mercenaries.) Another limiting case is intervention in a foreign conflict in which many factions are vying for power: no actual monopoly on force exists, but each faction is trying to establish one (e.g., U.S. intervention in Somalia).
Foreign intervention is a particular kind of military action on foreign soil. It is not foreign intervention, for example, for one government to occupy a previously unoccupied territory (e.g., a potential U.S. occupation of Antarctica). Furthermore, outright invasion with the sole purpose of conquest cannot be classified as intervention, because the invading nation seeks not merely to interfere with or aid a foreign government, but to conquer it (e.g., German invasion of France). (“Invasion” and “intervention” are overlapping concepts: Some invasions do not seek outright conquest, but simply the replacement of a government and may, therefore, count as forms of intervention, as well [e.g., the U.S. invasion of Grenada or Panama].)
It must also be remembered that foreign intervention is, fundamentally, a type of governmental action with respect to other nations. Obviously intervention is not, therefore, a type of inaction towards other countries, as when a government has never involved itself militarily in the affairs of another. Nor, of course, is it a type of cessation of action towards other nations, as when a government withdraws troops from the soil of another. Since intervention is fundamentally governmental action towards another nation, even those governmental measures that affect a foreign nation, but require only action at home for their implementation (such as the imposition of economic sanctions) do not count as intervention, since they do not involve governmental action on foreign soil.
Intervention, then, is fundamentally a type of military action undertaken by a government, on foreign soil (i.e. under the jurisdiction of another government), that involves the limitation of the foreign government’s monopoly on the use of force.
B. “Domestic Affairs”
In discussing foreign intervention, we have already been assuming a definition of “domestic affairs,” implicitly: foreign intervention is interference in the domestic affairs of another nation.
In this context, “domestic” merely means falling within the jurisdiction of the government of a particular territory. “Foreign” merely means falling outside this jurisdiction.
A “domestic affair,” then, is a matter subject to enforcement within a government’s jurisdiction. A government charged with protecting the individual rights of its citizens will, for example, consider it a matter of “domestic affairs” to prevent burglaries, uphold contracts, pursue criminals, undertake judicial procedings, etc. Each of these examples relates to affairs conducted within the geographical boundaries of a government’s jurisdiction.
A “foreign affair,” by contrast, is a matter related to a conflict between a home government and foreign government. If a foreign nation declares war on the United States, for example, this is obviously a matter of foreign affairs. So, by extension, is an alliance forged with friendly foreign governments to combat the enemy nation.
Matters of domestic affairs can become matters of foreign affairs. What begins as a simple murder, normally the domestic concern of the police, becomes reason for war if the victim is the president and the murderer is an agent of a foreign government. What begins as the attempt to protect the free speech of a particular author, like Salman Rushdie, quickly becomes a matter of foreign affairs if a foreign nation like Iran puts a price on his head.
What makes a merely domestic affair a matter of foreign affairs is one government’s use of force or threat of the use of force against another. Nations do not deal with one another except in terms of their governments, and when they do so, they do so in terms of force. (Peace treaties and trade agreements are matters of foreign affairs insofar as these represent the cessation of force between nations, either by ending a war, or by ending trade sanctions.) One consequence of this view is that not every domestic affair that has some effect on another nation is to be classified as a matter of foreign affairs. If, for example, the U.S. Federal Reserve raises interest rates, affecting the economies of other countries, this does not become a matter of foreign affairs unless another country makes it a matter of foreign affairs, by threatening the U.S. with force if it does not set the rates at a more satisfactory level. A foreign government’s mere discontent with the Fed’s policy does not suffice to raise the issue to the status of a matter of foreign affairs. Even diplomatic communiques are not real matters of foreign affairs unless their messages are backed up by force or the threat of force.
Whether or not a particular domestic affair should become a matter of foreign affairs is a question to be addressed in due time.
III. The Moral Justification of Foreign Intervention
A. Foreign policy implications of the function of government
A nation’s foreign policy is an integrated set of principles employed by a government for the purpose of guiding its dealings with foreign nations. The purpose a government adopts for its foreign policy will, however, be determined by a nation’s views on the function of government as such. More fundamentally, however, a nation’s predominant political philosophy is determined by its guiding ethical philosophy. Hence a view of foreign policy presupposes a view on ethics.
A government founded on an ethics of rational egoism will concern itself only with the protection of the individual rights of its own citizens, adopting a foreign policy that protects them, by identifying enemy nations and working to oppose them. It will resort to foreign intervention only when a particular foreign situation poses an objectively demonstrable national security threat. On an ethics of rational egoism, U.S. intervention in Nicaragua might have been justified on the grounds that a communist regime so close to American borders would serve as a base for Soviet missiles to be aimed at the U.S. and for spreading further communist insurgency throughout Central America.
A government subscribing to the moral code of altruism, by contrast, will seek to shoulder the economic or military burdens of other nations — whether through foreign aid programs for poor nations or through foreign intervention to stop ethnic wars in distant lands, irrelevant to its citizens’ interests — and thereby regard the security of its own citizens as of secondary importance at best.
B. A proper foreign policy
Of the two views of government and foreign policy presented, only the first is morally justifiable. According to Objectivism, each individual possesses the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. (See “Man’s Rights” and “The Nature of Government” in The Virtue of Selfishness.) One derivative of the right to life is the right to self-defense, the right to use retaliatory force against those who initiate force. Citizens delegate this right to the government, which therefore holds a monopoly on its use, placed under objective control, to protect individual rights. This monopoly is justifiably invoked in the use of the police and the courts to protect citizens from criminals at home, and in the use of a military to protect citizens from criminal nations abroad.
It is with this last form of protection — protecting citizens from foreign aggression — that a proper foreign policy concerns itself. A proper foreign policy identifies a nation’s crucial interests and security concerns, as a means of objectively coordinating its diplomatic and military policy to protect the individual rights of its citizens.
Note that building a “Fortress America” is not enough to defend the rights of American citizens; a nation’s security concerns do not stop at its borders. Particularly in a world increasingly integrated along economic and technological lines, a world in which weapons of mass destruction can rain terror across continents, a free state must acquire global military readiness. If China, for example, points its nuclear missiles at American shores, it has announced itself as an enemy of the U.S., and deserves to be opposed actively. Any nation that threatens domestic security, regardless of its distance from the homeland, must be identified by a proper foreign policy in order that it might be defended against and actively opposed. Both the threat and the initiation of force are logically and morally inseparable: each must be defended against, even if the latter warrants a proportionally greater response than the former. A mugger who threatens murder, but doesn’t commit it, is still a criminal and should be punished for the threat.
C. The proper use of foreign intervention
The proper use of foreign intervention follows from a proper view of government and from a proper view of foreign policy: from the idea that government exists to protect the rights of its citizens, and from the corollary need to combat objective foreign threats to a free nation’s citizens, threats to their life and rights. A proper government is justified not only in opposing foreign governments which pose such a threat, but also in opposing any foreign situation that poses such a threat. Supporting insurgents against threatening governments can work to advance the first goal, for example; supporting besieged governments against rebels who would erect a threatening government is an example of attempting to accomplish the second.
A foreign government may be ideologically opposed to a country like the United States, and may also possess the military means to back up that opposition with force. Such a government poses an objective threat to the security of the U.S., and to the extent that ideologically more innocuous rebel groups exist in such a country, supporting them materially or tactically is necessary and proper. On this view, one might have justified U.S. support for the contra rebels against the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
A band of communist rebels, however, has announced its intention to violate the rights of its fellow citizens, and by extension its willingness to violate those of foreign citizens. Because it adheres to a collectivist ideology destructive of individual rights, and because it has used force to implement that ideology, it poses a threat to free nations abroad. One might argue that U.S. intervention against communist rebels in El Salvador was justifiable in this respect.
Although the examples of foreign intervention listed so far are the ones most likely to be justifiable, the list is not exhaustive. One can also imagine justifiable cases of intervention in which no government-rebel conflict is present, because no single party can be accurately described as “government” or “insurgent” — and even if neither party is demonstrably more of a threat to the intervening government than the other. The very conflict may be a threat. Were Canada to descend into anarchic struggle between French and English speakers, for example, the very presence of this conflict so close to American borders might easily threaten Americans near the border, and be detrimental to U.S. economic interests. In such a case, U.S. intervention to establish a stable and friendly government would be eminently justifiable.
IV. Polemics
A. “National sovereignty”
The leading critics of foreign military intervention argue that no nation is justified in meddling in the domestic affairs of another, for whatever reason. This is true, they argue, because each nation has a “right to self-determination” or “sovereignty” which ought not to be infringed — even if the nation in question is a brutal dictatorship.
What such critics have never provided is an explanation for the source of this right. In fact, there is none. Nations as such — like any other collectives — have no rights. In her essay “Collectivized Rights,” Ayn Rand notes:
In a free society, the ‘rights’ of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary, individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights in a specific undertaking. Every legitimate group undertaking is based on the participants’ right of free association and free trade. (By ‘legitimate,’ I mean: noncriminal and freely formed, that is, a group which no one was forced to join) (The Virtue of Selfishness, pg. 119).Applying this view in the context of nations, Miss Rand observes:
A nation, like any other group, is only a number of individuals and can have no rights other than the rights of its individual citizens. A free nation — a nation that recognizes, respects and protects the individual rights of its citizens — has a right to its territorial integrity, its social system and its form of government. The government of such a nation is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of its citizens and has no rights other than the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific, delimited task (the task of protecting them from physical force, derived from their right of self-defense) (pg. 120).But this right, she maintains,
. . . cannot be claimed by dictatorships, by savage tribes or by any form of absolutist tyranny. A nation that violates the rights of its own citizens cannot claim any rights whatsoever. The right of the ‘self-determination of nations’ applies only to free societies or to societies seeking to establish freedom; it does not apply to dictatorships. Just as an individual’s right of free action does not include the ‘right’ to commit crimes, so the right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society. There is no such thing as ‘the right to enslave’ (pg. 121)Ayn Rand goes on to identify the implications of this view for the rights of free nations to deal with dictatorships:
Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba, or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the nonexistent ‘rights’ of gang rulers. It is not a free nation’s duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses (pg. 122).Ayn Rand’s answer to this objection is clear, and needs no further elaboration, except to say that the same principle that justifies invading another nation similarly justifies intervening in it, if limited intervention is all that a free nation’s security requires. If it is acceptable to invade a statist nation like Iraq (as the U.S. did during the Persian Gulf War), then it would certainly be justifiable to intervene in on a limited scale (as Israel did in the early ’80s when it bombed Iraqi nuclear facilities).
B. Sanctioning foreign dictators
One objection to intervention on behalf of foreign governments against insurgents is particular popular. This is the idea that in doing so, the U.S. “props up dictators” who are responsible for serious violations of individual rights. This, critics say, stains American hands with foreign blood. Though it may threaten American security to do so, the U.S. must refrain from such alliances of “convenience” to keep itself morally innocent.
As Peter Schwartz observes in his essay “Foreign Policy and the Morality of Self-Interest,” (The Intellectual Activist, 1986; available from Second Renaissance Books) the underlying premise behind this argument is a faulty view in morality:
[T]his accusation against self-interest as the standard for foreign policy is simply a restatement of one of the false premises underlying the doctrine of altruism. It is altruism which holds that men’s interests are inherently in conflict and that the individual’s only choice, therefore, is to be ‘moral’ by sacrificing himself for the sake of others, or to be ‘practical’ by sacrificing others to himself. In foreign policy, the altruist believes that the alternative America faces is either to pursue its interests by quashing others’ freedom or to give up some of its security in order to help advance liberty elsewhere (19).But this is a false set of alternatives.
It is wrong to assume, to begin with, that foreign autocracies are more conducive than free nations to the security of a free nation like America. Free nations pose no threat to other free nations, as they do not loot the resources of their own citizens, and turn on their neighbors when those resources are gone (See “The Roots of War,” Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal). Free nations also make better allies. As Schwartz points out, free nations are not only more trustworthy as allies, but also more capable of mustering a more productive defense. Notice, for example, that Britain was a much safer ally in World War II than was the U.S.S.R.: Britain did not claim half of Europe as her own when the war was over. It is, therefore, unmistakably in American interests to spread freedom around the globe. A proper American foreign policy would morally condemn any and every statist foreign regime.
The issue of supporting foreign autocracies arises, however, in a world where many foreign nations are statist — but some are more statist than others are. The worst are those driven by totalitarian ideologies, like communism, Nazism, or Islamic Fundamentalism, which are by their nature bent on world domination, and the destruction of freedom. Others, however, are “petty dictatorships,” whose leaders have no ideology, and are content merely to loot their own people to a limited extent. Many such petty autocrats pose little or no direct threat to American security, but may be in a position to aid in the defense against totalitarians. Petty dictators like Pinochet or Duarte were of little significance when compared to the opposition they faced: ideologically-driven communists who were bent on joining forces with a global network of Soviet pawns. When the ideologists were allowed to topple their autocratic opponents, the results were invariably worse: the Ayatollahs were much worse then the Shah; Mao was much worse than Chiang Kai-Shek. In such cases, it may be necessary and proper to make temporary alliances with these regimes, provided that it is done so with the proper qualifications. (It is, incidentally, precisely because ideologically-driven dictatorships are the most dangerous that an alliance with one is to be ruled out, even if it is an alliance against another [e.g., the U.S. alliance with the Soviets against the Nazis].)
Here are the qualifications: A proper policy of intervention would assist a foreign dictator to the extent, and only to the extent that is necessary and sufficient to repel or suppress the dangerous, common threat. It would, at the same time, include an open declaration of the moral inferiority of the dictatorial regime. A proper policy of foreign intervention would even offer support to those citizens who would overthrow the dictatorial regime, and replace it with one devoted to protecting individual rights. Such a regime would, after all, provide a better buffer to whichever ideological insurgency made intervention necessary to begin with.
It is worth noting, in addition, that joining with these dictators does not thereby violate the rights of their subjects. On the contrary, foreign intervention against ideologically dangerous insurgents protects those citizens against the crimes of the insurgents. U.S. intervention in El Salvador, for example, effectively forestalled the greater crimes a communist regime would have perpetrated. Supporting a dictator to defeat a greater threat is analogous to the police tactic of paying criminal informants for information that leads to the arrest of more dangerous criminals — which is fully justifiable. (In the end, of course, police would prefer there to be no criminals, just as a proper foreign policy would prefer there to be no dictators.)
The moral and the practical are one. As Schwartz summarizes:
What America’s military structure is designed to secure, after all, is the right of its citizens to be free. And there is no conflict between the rights of Americans and of other nationals, any more than there is a conflict among the rights of people in the same country. One man’s liberty cannot be attained at the cost of another’s subjugation, and the same is true for the liberty of entire nations (19).C. Unjustified foreign intervention
The final objection is likely to be particularly relevant in a debate context. There may be cases of moral foreign intervention — the negatives may point out — but what about the numerous ways in which intervention can be undertaken unscrupulously? What if the intervention is for the purpose of eventual foreign aggression (e.g., Soviet intervention in African civil wars) or for strictly altruistic reasons (e.g., American intervention in Haiti)? The resolution is an unqualified statement that does not limit itself to moral intervention: it must also refer to immoral intervention. So the resolution cannot be true: it is impossible to justify the morally unjustifiable.
The problem with the resolution as worded is that its present wording does not allow it to be evaluated as true or false. An action like intervention cannot be evaluated as intrinsically good or bad without a specified context. This point can be illustrated if we were to consider an analogous resolution: “Resolved: killing is immoral.” There would be no way to evaluate such a resolution. Which instances of killing? When? Is this resolution referring to killing unthreatening innocents? Or killing vicious killers in self-defense? The first could not be justified; the second could. “Killing is immoral” cannot be identified as true or false without reference to a specific context. Killing is not inherently good or inherently bad. Its moral worth depends on its context. The same goes for the resolution about foreign intervention.
We should assume, properly, the actual context that has given rise to debate about the morality of foreign intervention. The resolution is not a disembodied proposition handed down from heaven (even if from the NFL), but an issue that has arisen in the context of decades of debate about American foreign policy. A person holding that foreign intervention is morally unjustified is likely to hold this view because they believe intervention necessarily represents an unjust incursion into foreign sovereignty, or an improper sanction of foreign oppressors, etc. To promote authentic clash in debate — and more importantly, to be able to evaluate the resolution at all — it is necessary that the affirmative side represent the genuine alternative in the contemporary context to the idea that all foreign intervention is wrong. Just as the ordinary proponent of the right to suicide does not maintain that everyone should commit suicide, the ordinary proponent of foreign intervention does not maintain that every foreign nation should be subject to intervention. We may just as well read the resolution as “foreign intervention is justifiable,” rather than “foreign intervention is justified.”
(The author acknowledges the kind assistance of Dr. Onkar Ghate.)