There is hope yet
Remember Jeane Kirkpatrick?
IT WAS said of Sir Christopher Wren, the great English architect who designed and built London’s magnificent Saint Paul’s Cathedral: If you seek his monument, just look around.
If you seek Barack Obama’s monument, just look around at the magnificent ruin that was once American foreign policy. America seems in retreat around the world; the devastating attacks in Paris were only the latest siren wailing in the night. The flood tide of refugees out of Syria and environs, largely the product of this administration’s years-long neglect of the unending crisis there, continues to mount, now with the active collaboration of American and Russian diplomacy. (How’s that reset of American policy toward the Kremlin goin’ for ya, Mr. President?) The Russian Bear is on the prowl again throughout eastern Europe, swallowing up one small country after another without any effective resistance from this country.
Before despair completely displaces hope, let us recall another dark time, when a new American president appeared out of seemingly nowhere and brought with him an expert voice in foreign policy who completely reformed and restored it in her simple, unpretentious, almost homey way: Jeane Kirkpatrick.
It was at the end of the disastrous Carter Years, and this is what Ambassador Kirkpatrick found waiting for her as she became our new representative to the United Nations, where our enemies were declaring victory and our friends were dispirited.
Taking her cue from George Kennan’s famous secret communique in 1954, this is what she said, among other acute observations about the conduct and misconduct of foreign policy:
“International relations depend, above all, on the values and relative power of nations;
“The power in international affairs is cumulative; the more you have, the more you get and vice versa . . . .
“Our influence with other nations depends in very important measure on their hopes and fears—hopes of gains; fears of losses;
“And, finally, our effectiveness, our power, in places like the United Nations requires absolutely that we have confidence in our values, our experience, our country.”
There is no Obama-like eloquence here, no Kissingeresque clevernesses, just plain, dull common sense, but no less true for being self-evident. Or as Jeane Kirkpatrick noted, “the United States acted as if everything mattered to us, but nothing mattered much. There were neither rewards for helping the United States nor a price for opposing us even on issues of concern to us. George Kennan’s famous 1954 warning was clearly relevant to our predicament, but nobody had heeded it.”
In 1954, Kennan had written: “I view with skepticism our chances for exerting any useful influence unless we learn how to create respect for our possible disfavor, at least as great as the respect for our possible favor.” Kennan knew, as Jeane Kirkpatrick observed, “that the behavior of nations is not normally motivated or controlled by disinterested gratitude or friendship, but rather by the hope of gain and the fear of loss. Kennan knew that it was important for a nation seeking influence to remember what Thomas Jefferson had called ‘the peaceable coercions of international politics.’ ” For nations have no enduring national friendships but only enduring national interests. If that sounds hard-hearted, it is also hard-headed. Instead we have a president who has seemed to believe his own profusions of eternal friendship on those meaningless apology tours of his.
OR AS a wise woman—Jeane Kirkpatrick—observed in her time, “U.S. effectiveness in the United Nations does not always require that we always prevail all times. It does require that we secure a decent respect for our values and our important principles. That can be as often achieved as when others take a leadership role than when we seek to dominate. George Kennan understood that, too . . . . [But sometimes] America’s representatives have behaved as though they secretly agreed with our adversaries. Sometimes they’ve behaved as if they didn’t believe that we had advice and experience as well as money to share with other countries.” That was a mistake in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s time; it still is in ours. Weak, the United States cannot even protect itself much less its principles or the independence of other nations.
Peace through strength, it used to be called. There’s another belief that needs to be remembered and revived. Like the memory of Jeane Kirkpatrick.