Ends and Means

Jonah Goldberg takes a look at the Democrats' incessant calls for the necessity of "alliances". In this they, and Kerry, seem to confuse ends and means. Alliances are undoubtedly important in pursuing foreign policy in an increasingly interconnected world. But at the same time alliances are not, and should not, be ends in themselves. Yet, Kerry's worldview has been and continues to be about subordinating the ends of the War on Terror, to the desire to be liked by "Old Europe".

This is all consistent with liberal rhetoric for the last three years. How many times have we been told that George W. Bush "squandered" the good will of the world "community" after 9/11? The assumption behind all of this seemed to be that anything which cost America the support of allies like France or Germany was, in effect, too costly. In other words, the means-"strong alliances"-are more important than the ends-winning the war on terror, toppling Saddam, and so forth. Listening to these folks, one gets the sense that America's greatest foreign policy triumph was to get sucker-punched on 9/11 because it resulted in sympathetic newspaper headlines in Paris and Berlin.

Consider Kerry's seemingly final explanation for why he voted for a war he now condemns Bush for waging. He says he wanted Bush to have the authority to go to war in order to build up a mighty coalition to oust Saddam. But he says he didn't think Bush should actually go to war without such a coalition.

The great post-WWII alliance, NATO, was necessary to counter the Soviet threat in Europe. And in that, it had a purpose, an end - even if this alliance was made up primarily of the US itself. Today, in part because of Europe's inability to field armies that it can project, this alliance is useless. In fact, militarily, the only European country that can actually help is the one that is helping - Britain. All the others simply do not add anything, and oftentimes become hindrances. During the first Gulf War, French forces were put as west as possible in the desert and the French fighter planes were placed in the very south of Saudi Arabia for fear that they would be mistaken for Iraqi planes - the French had sold Iraq the same Mirages that the French employed themselves - and be shot down by US fighters.

Alliances as an institution have shown themselves to be occasionally problematic. In large part, because of the grand alliance that George H.W. Bush had assembled to liberate Kuwait we were unable to finish the job of destroying Saddam. One can also argue that the complex system of alliances that were put in place in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century were a cause of World War I. In the final analysis, alliances are needed for a purpose - to accomplish an end. Creating alliances for the sake of alliances is rarely useful and often damaging to the realization of given ends.