Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published at Steve Hayward’s Substack here. Anchoring Truths has been given permission by Hayward to reprint Arkes’s guest post.
Whoa! After reading John’s tirade, I’d suspect that something had gotten into the air conditioning at Berkeley—except that Berkeley probably doesn’t have air conditioning. But something evidently detached him from that sobriety that I take to be one of his defining and golden features. The most apt response that springs to mind comes from Mencken about those people who curiously translate our words into something else: When we tell them that we are reserved about demagoguery, they say that we’re against democracy, and when we tell them that we’re reluctant to buy the cancer salve, “it must mean that we want Uncle Julius to die.”
Well, we tell John that we take seriously the moral terms of our lives together, the principles that define this American regime—that we are committed to a government by “the consent of the governed.” Or as the old understanding went, no man is by nature the ruler of other men in the way that God is by nature the ruler of men and men are by nature the ruler of horses and dogs. Anyone who rejected that, said Jefferson, had to assume that the mass of mankind were born with saddles on their backs and that a privileged few were born with spurs out ready to ride them. But now we learned from John Yoo that, if we are committed to these moral premises of the American regime, we must be in favor of reckless interventions abroad. Or that we must favor the most cribbed isolationism, detaching ourselves from the serious dangers from abroad, whether from Europe or the Caribbean. We learn also that we must be at odds with the arrangements that gave us NATO in 1949 and two generations of peace in Europe. Or that we are opposed to the system of free trade that came in with the Bretton Woods agreement and lifted the standard of living of Europe. Since my first book was on the Marshall Plan, I should affirm the statecraft that came along with the rebuilding of Europe and the first steps to a European trading bloc.
But why should we fly to the assumption that American statesmen, understanding the moral premises of their own regime, would not have a prudent sense of the risks they should forbear from taking. Lincoln preserved decorous relations with the Tsar of Russia, though he was no friend of despotism. He understood, as I said in my piece, that he didn’t have the means to vindicate freedom in other countries without exposing the experiment in democracy in the United States to serious dangers. Right now we see a regime becoming ever more cruel and racist in South Africa, but we realize that we don’t have the means of redeeming that country by putting American troops on the ground. Apart from economic sanctions, the most we can do is offer asylum to refugees who are fleeing from a democracy turning itself into a racist regime. And it is no simple solution always to favor democracies in other countries, for in the early 1970s we saw an elected government under Allende, in Chile, turning itself into a socialist totalitarian regime.
And yet as I pointed out, the means available to an American president are vastly larger than the means that were available to Lincoln. It took little strain for President George H.W. Bush to prevent the overthrow of an elected government in the Philippines by warning against any plane that took off at the time in that country as part of a coup. I’ve been told by one of my former students, who rose to a high position in the CIA, that it took but a case of good scotch to deliver the minutes from the leadership of the Communist Party in one African country in the 1970’s. But American statesmen are rightly constrained by a sense of what is practicable. There has been no doubt about the wrongness of the genocide unfolding in Darfur, and yet there’s been a recognition that there was very little that Americans can do to undo those wrongs through military intervention. And yet it is not always been the case. We still find serious agonizing even in our own day as to whether we might have done more to destroy the rail lines leading to the killing centers in Auschwitz during the Second World War, or whether we might have destroyed the death camps themselves. We had the means, but serious people still argue about the reasons for holding back.
And yet why are we holding back now about Cuba? The planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion had been initiated under the administration of Dwight Eisenhower. His administration had already brought down Mosaddegh in Iran to preserve the Shah, and avert a leftist regime there. The Eisenhower administration suffered no want of confidence about the rightness of resisting pro- communist regimes especially in our own hemisphere. The Bay of Pigs invasion didn’t work, and that failure brought on the Cuban missile crisis. But why should we be obliged to live with a Cuba that offers a naval base for Russia and China; a vicious regime in Havana that has oppressed its own people and supplied the skills of a police state to reinforce a despotic regime in Venezuela? Why is it not time, if not for another Bay of Pigs, than for a serious overt threat to liberate the Cuban people, if the regime will not hold genuinely free elections, and remove a critical military base for our adversaries close to our own land? If Mr. Trump is threatening to send in troops to the Panama Canal Zone, then why not Havana? Yes, whatever did happen to the Monroe Doctrine? It apparently ended with the Cuban missile crisis and the new sanctuary given to the Castro regime.
But it is surely one of the strangest things for an American conservative, or an American citizen to ask, as John did, “why a nation’s regime type dictates its foreign policy.” It’s “regime type”? Is that all it is? I need to ask: Is John not clear that we’re talking about the moral grounds of his citizenship and ours—if he sees himself, that is, as a committed American citizen. The late Father Richard Neuhaus once raised the question of whether an “atheist” could be a good citizen. And by an atheist he meant someone who, in rejecting the presence of God outright, rejected also any claim to moral truths that may be associated with that God. Yes, he conceded that an atheist can be a good citizen in the sense merely of respecting the laws, whether in traffic or the paying of taxes. But the real test of citizenship is whether one could give a moral defense of that regime that commands his loyalty as a citizen. Lincoln caught the matter so beautifully in that speech he gave just after the 4th of July in 1858. He spoke about those people who were newcomers from other lands; they were not related by blood to the generation that had fought the fight and made the Revolution:
But when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have the right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.
Americans did not look like one another in the way that Frenchmen or Germans looked like one another. But they claimed the ground of an equal citizenship as they grasped those moral premises that defined the nature of this regime, the claim of human beings to their equal rights to be governed by their own consent. And when they grasped that, as Lincoln said, they became flesh of the flesh, “blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh” of the people who formed this regime. As Harry Jaffa said it was a kind of “democratic transubstantiation.”
Lincoln caught it in another way in his Cooper Union speech, when he recalled those black slaves who did not throw in with John Brown. As ignorant as they were, he said, and unschooled with books, they could see that the schemes of this crazy white man were not going to conduce to their well-being. They might not have been learned in school, but they were moral agents, beings who could reckon about their own well being and the well-being of others, And they did not deserve to be annexed to the interests of other men without their consent. It was as simple as that. And yet that is the question before John Yoo. Does he understand that we are dealing with the moral grounds of his own citizenship if he professes to be an American citizen, on the same plane as those people Lincoln described who had been drawn to this country? A political regime has a moral definition; it is not a hotel where people check in and out as it suits their convenience. Does John live here merely as a resident, who may as readily move elsewhere? Or does he recognize that the American regime has a sharp moral character; and with that sense of its character men and women have risked—and given—their lives in defense of this way of living together as a people.
I must admit that, when it looked as though Barack Obama was going to be elected to a second term, I began jokingly looking at real estate by the water in Malta. But of course, there is no way I could do that. No matter how grim things look in this country, I can’t put it out of mind that people have died so that I can be there. If not for those men who fought and died at Normandy and in Patton’s army, there might be no one in my Jewish family who would be alive today. I just can’t treat those sacrifices as trivial and walk away from the regime they preserved for me and the rest of us.
In the years I taught Political Science at Amherst I held to the line that the most consequential data in political life are the data that we associated with changes in regime—from the Cuba of Battista to the Cuba of Castro; from the Germany of Weimar, to the Germany of Hitler. (One student expressed how struck he was by the point but then asked, “Who was this guy Weimar?”) As Aristotle said, it may be like the shift in a Greek play between a comic chorus and a tragic chorus: we have the same people, but a shift in tone and character. Just as we had the native stock in Germany but noticed the different kinds of lives and persons who being shaped in those rival regimes of West and East Germany. Or we might say now, closer to home for John Yoo, the difference between North and South Korea.
Well, if one understood the world in that way, why should one doubt that George H.W. Bush, given a choice, would not use the powers available to him, with virtually no danger to the American people, to preserve an elected government for the people of the Philippines?
Under NATO we had preserved an alliance with the Portugal of Salazar. It was a conservative authoritarian regime. It sought to reduce the temper of politics, and balance the budget, but it was also, in many telling respects, a repressive regime. Still, Salazar had brought Portugal into NATO and into the institutions trying to produce a freer trade in Europe. When that regime came to an end in Portugal in 1974 it made a profound difference that Portugal found its place in an alliance of parliamentary democracies in NATO. And so all of the pressures emanating from that alliance was to return Portugal to a constitutional order and a parliamentary democracy with free elections. Was that not something to be appreciated and savored? Only if we genuinely thought, with the American Founders, that there was a serious human good to be had by establishing and preserving a “government by the consent of the governed.”
To say that the securing of that regime forms the ground of foreign policy is simply to get clear, in the first place, on the very thung that it is object of our national security to secure. And if we think that there is something good about a government that seeks to protect the rights that flow to all human beings by nature, we would probably feel obliged to do what we prudently can to that make good available to other human beings where we find them. And now closer to home, we remind ourselves that we have the blessings of our own, brilliant and lovable John Yoo because Harry Truman was willing to take the political heat–while the country paid the price in blood–for securing a non-totalitarian regime for the southern part of Korea. Over time that regime became a more robust democracy with a vibrant, free economy. Among its citizens, with the freedom to move, was an accomplished professional couple who would migrate to America, make their way in time to the tonier suburbs of Philadelphia. They would and send on to Yale a handsome son, who would go on to write books, become a star on for Fox news, and light up the world for his friends. And his enduring gratitude is that none of this would have happened if fate had delivered his parents to the prison we call the regime in North Korea.
Yes, as Mr Strauss and the classics – and Angelo Codevilla had it—the regime is the center of it all.
