National Honor Matters
By Jonah Goldberg
NationalReview.com
Rendering honors aboard
USS Pearl Harbor. (Mass Communication Specialist
Second Class Alan Gragg)
"I should have anticipated the
optics,” President Obama said by way of
acknowledging that golfing right after making a
statement about the beheading of James Foley looked
bad. “Part of this job is also the theater of it,”
he said. “It’s not something that always comes
naturally to me. But it matters.”
For those who remember that this is the same guy
with the Greek pillars, the campaign stop in Berlin,
the newly minted “seal” of the president-elect, it
was an odd confession. Obama likes theater just
fine; he just doesn’t like having to read from a
script not of his choosing.
Advertisement That is probably why it took him so
many tries to come up with the right words for what
we will do about the Islamic State. One wonders
whether he looked at the prepared remarks, turned to
Valerie Jarrett and asked, “What’s my motivation?”
Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) has a similar problem.
Much like Obama in 2007–08, he has been enjoying
swimming with the current on foreign policy.
War-weary, fed up with Arab countries hating us for
trying to help, and convinced that our priorities
are closer to home, Paul’s noninterventionism was
sounding just right to many Americans.
Then some jihadi punks beheaded two Americans and
taunted the U.S. in the process. The same jihadis
conquered and enslaved territories that Americans
fought, bled, and died to liberate. They boasted
that they beat us in a war and vowed — ridiculously
— that their flag would fly over our White House. Lo
and behold, it turns out that Americans don’t like
that sort of thing.
Attitudes, particularly among the very patriotic and
pro-military tea-party crowd, suddenly and
predictably shifted. This time last year only 18
percent of Republicans told pollsters for the Pew
Research Center that the U.S. does “too little”
abroad. That number had more than doubled according
to a similar poll last week. And a new Washington
Post/ABC News poll shows 71 percent of Americans
favor strikes in Iraq and 65 percent favor them in
Syria.
Suddenly, Paul, who just weeks ago was calling
Hillary Clinton a warmonger, is doing some mongering
himself.
As much as it shocks me to say it, the politician
whose instincts were best calibrated to the moment
was none other than Vice President Joe Biden, who
vowed that we would chase these barbarians to “the
gates of hell.”
Any analysis that fails to appreciate national honor
fails to take into account what actually motivates
nations. The Scots seem poised to secede from
Britain, and the foreign-policy establishment seems
baffled by the idea. Don’t the Scots understand that
such a move is not in their economic self-interest?
Lurking behind such questions is an assumption that
we are all Homo economicus, that we act only on a
narrow, largely financial definition of
self-interest. Maybe we should, but we don’t and
never will. If Palestinians acted solely on their
rational self-interest, their conflict with Israel
would have ended before it began. And there is a
very strong case to be made for Obama’s view that
Vladimir Putin’s empire-building will be bad for
Russia in the long run. The only problem: Putin and
a huge majority of Putin-worshipping Russians do not
care.
“The mistake of the ‘realists’ is not their interest
in the struggle for power but their deliberate
neglect of everything else, especially the
non-scientific, contingent, very human feelings and
beliefs that most powerfully move people,” Donald
Kagan writes in
Honor Among Nations: Intangible Interests and
Foreign Policy.
The neglect of such considerations can have enormous
costs (as can too much consideration; see World War,
First). The Ukrainians sent troops to fight with us
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, in their moment of
need, all they want from us are weapons to fend off
the Russians. Our refusal is not merely dishonorable
in some poetic sense; it is dangerous because it
sends the signal that we are not a reliable friend.
That is why Obama had to issue the mother of all red
lines in the Baltics last week, vowing unconditional
support for our allies.
He was right to do so. But at this point it is an
open question around the world whether America is
the sort of country that will deliver on such
commitments, given that the president has made it
clear he considers such things mere theatrics.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National
Review Online and a fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail
at
goldbergcolumn@gmail.com or via
Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2014 Tribune Content Agency,
LLC