January 30, 2007
William Pfaff and America’s Role in the World Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:50 PM EST William Pfaff has a piece in the current New York Review of Books, and if one knows Mr. Pfaff’s style, it is not uncharacteristic. If one enjoys the Pfaff style, the piece displays cool irony and magisterial calm in the face of the threat posed to the world by the cretins and villains who have been administering American foreign policy since 1945. If one does not enjoy the Pfaff style, the tone may seem marred by Olympian pronouncements, a fair amount of preening and sneering, and rather less knowledge of history than those Olympian tones seek to suggest. In this example, Mr. Pfaff observes that the Bush administration has been “making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities.” Mr. Pfaff is quick to reject the idea that the United States has any such status and thinks himself boldly heretical for doing so: “It is something like a national heresy to suggest that the United States does not have a unique moral status and role to play in the history of nations, and therefore in the affairs of the contemporary world. In fact it does not. This is a national conceit that is the comprehensible result of the religious beliefs of the early New England colonists (Calvinist religious dissenters, moved by millenarian expectations and theocratic ideas), which convinced them that their austere settlements in the wilderness represented a new start in humanity's story.” Freely conceding the religious origins of the sense of American exceptionalism, there were and are some remarkable things about America, and one of them, relevant today, is our unprecedented degree of relative military power. While Mr. Pfaff thinks that military power is fairly useless, this is rarely the view of people who do not possess it, when faced by people who do, on which more below. In this case, as in many others, Mr. Pfaff is urging a much less interventionist stance by the United States. What may undercut this advice is Mr. Pfaff’s peculiar misunderstanding of the older international order he apparently seeks to resuscitate. Attacking Condoleezza Rice, he observes that “she said that the time had come to discard the system of balance of power among sovereign states established by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The Westphalian settlement ended the wars of religion by establishing the principles of religious tolerance and absolute state sovereignty.” Actually, the Westphalian system did not establish the principles of religious tolerance as we now understand them: it did quite the reverse. It established the principle of cuius regio euis religio, which meant that the religion of a sovereign would henceforth be the religion of his or her subjects, if the sovereign so chose, and most did. A sovereign could enforce this preference by torture and mass murder, and often did. Under the Westphalian system, other sovereigns renounced the right to interfere whenever this occurred. Religious toleration, of course, is normally understood to be the opposite of this practice. Mr. Pfaff seems very sure that military power, American or other, has little or no role to play in checking the power of sovereigns against heretical or otherwise objectionable minorities. In the wake of Rwanda and Bosnia and in the midst of Darfur, he is very sure that U.S. military power deployed in what its defenders call humanitarian interventions only makes things worse. Of course, in the case of Rwanda, it is hard to say how it could have made things worse, and in the case of Bosnia, it seems, when belatedly applied, to have almost instantly made things better. In many ways, the Pfaff essay is enormously depressing, but I do find it heartening that within three days of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, someone at Arts and Letters Daily had the wit to post Mr. Pfaff’s essay on the Internet. Somebody over there seems to have a sense of humor, if a rather dark one.
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