To the Editor:
In his brilliant article, “Best-Case Thinking” [May], Owen Harries traces the “deeper roots” of such thinking to the universalistic liberal tradition that denies “the reality of conflict in the name of a fundamental harmony of interest. . . .” Since “there are no real intractable conflicts of interest,” it follows that enmity among nations “is illusory and unnecessary.”
But explaining one set of ideas by another separates them from their social context, as if they existed apart from the people who believed them. By asking a different kind of question—what sort of people, sharing which values and justifying what kind of practices, would act on these beliefs in order to shore up their way of life and tear down their opponents?—the tenacity with which these ideas are held and the immense challenge they pose to foreign policy will become apparent.
Does anybody actually believe in the universal harmony of interests? I think not. The idea is recognizably stupid. In fact, the very people who argue the best-case thesis in foreign policy also argue the worst-case thesis in domestic policy. Harmony in domestic policy, they claim, is the ideology of the oppressor. There are irreconcilable conflicts between the haves and have-nots, conflicts which cannot be compromised but only overcome by struggle. Foreign policy, apparently, is different. Why?
Anyone who believes in a worst case or a best case all the time in regard to everything is probably insane. In fact, many of the people who hold a best-case belief about the Soviet Union hold a worst-case belief about capitalism. Now that Henry Jackson is gone, I cannot think of a single committed environmentalist who is also a proponent of a strong national defense. After all, if corporate capitalism causes cancer, who would want to defend a system that kills people for profit?
Now we have a more varied and more interesting question to ask: who sees harmony in international affairs and hostility in domestic politics? What else do the people believe who claim that the United States government vastly overstates the enmity of the Soviet Union? They believe in equality of condition. They are part and parcel of many other movements dedicated to the diminution of distinctions among people—the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, the movements for children’s rights, animal rights (placing animal pain on a plane with human pain), and the rights of the elderly, gay rights, and on and on. When I grew up, for instance, there were two standard themes in the Second Avenue Yiddish theater, the bad son and the good parents and the ungrateful daughter and the good parents. Now all we hear about is child abuse, state intervention obviously being required to prevent parents from doing terrible things to their young. Harmony of interests, indeed!
How can harmony abroad be reconciled with hatred at home? Take the critics at their word: intolerable, unconscionable, unbearable inequalities at home, they believe, are justified by paranoia abroad. It is not that they think the Soviet system is benevolent or that it provides a better way of life. They are not that dumb, or dumb at all. It is rather that they care about how people live with other people in the U.S., not in the USSR. It is their passion for equality of condition and their rage at inequality that leads them to a portrayal of an international heaven spoiled by people bent on maintaining a domestic hell. Acknowledging a Soviet threat would mean agreeing that: (a) the social system of the United States is worth defending; (b) other systems are worse; and (c) a morally legitimate government has the right to divert resources from domestic (i.e., egalitarian) to military (i.e., inegalitarian) purposes.
Foreign policy is fought at home. Precisely because those who adopt the best-case thesis abroad do so to support a vision of the worst-case at home, we should not be surprised at the tenacity with which they hold on to optimistic views of Soviet behavior. People who see themselves threatened by mobilization for war, under the aegis of military hierarchy and capitalist competition, are not likely to accept the hypothesis of threat while there is some other mode of explanation that will leave intact their dream of the good, i.e., egalitarian, life.
Aaron Wildavsky
University of California
Berkeley, California
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