Faking It - NATO's strike against Yugoslavia

Mr. Harries is editor of The National Interest.

As many readers will know, Rudyard Kipling once wrote a poem called "The Gods of the Copybook Headings." It is about how, through the ages, mankind has sought to evade and deny the hard, simple truths that have always defined human existence-those precepts and maxims that children learn at school and then forget-in favor of easier and softer options.

But, maintains Kipling, inexorably those elementary-and elemental- truths insist on reasserting themselves:

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

One way of looking at the predicament we are now in concerning Kosovo is that, after a decade of posturing and prevarication, of inflated rhetoric and easy options, of inflicting pinpricks and pretending they were hammerblows, the Gods of the Copybook Headings have caught up with us and applied the reality principle to our foreign policy. The result is not pretty.

A tenet of foreign policy (and, indeed, of most human endeavor) is that if you will the end you must also will the means. It has a corollary: If you are not prepared to will the means, you should forget about the end. In the last decade-the decade of the cheap hawk-this tenet has been systematically violated, not primarily in the allocation of dollars but in the combination of large ambition ("the indispensable nation") and extreme parsimony regarding the taking of casualties and the shedding of blood. A strong case can be made for a bold, assertive foreign policy by the United States. A case of a different kind can also be made for giving very high priority to protecting American lives-including even the lives of professional, volunteer soldiers. But no case at all can be made for combining the two.

Yet this is what the United States has been trying to do for the better part of a decade. To the extent that it has got away with it until now, it has done so by faking both ends and means. The former have usually been described in grandiose terms in the preamble, but in much more timid and flexible terms in the small print (flexibility being a specialty of the forty-second president); the latter have involved substituting flashy but fairly innocuous displays of military technology for the more effective but politically costly use of human resources.

But all this can only work for a time. Sooner rather than later, attitudes toward ends and means have to be brought into balance, either by becoming more modest about the first or more ruthless about the second. Yet any advocacy of such a commonsensical adjustment has been fiercely denounced. Anyone advocating the scaling down of ends has been routinely accused of being "neo-isolationist"; anyone advocating a greater willingness to bear costs, especially human costs, is open to the charge of being callous, politically insensitive, and premodern.

Part of the problem-an important part-arises from the nature of the ends in question. I would offer as a basic truth, a Copybook Heading, that a people, any people, will be prepared to bear heavy, sustained cost in blood (treasure is another matter) only when it believes that its interests are directly and seriously at risk. It may quite sincerely believe in other, wider, larger, more idealistic ends, but not, in the absence of supporting national interests, to the point of suffering large-scale casualties in their pursuit. Though we may regret it, no substantial war involving serious carnage has ever been fought for the sake of human rights or the spread of democracy. Political leaders, unless they are determined to make their mark as major innovators, would do well to factor that into their formulation of foreign policy.

To be fair, it should be acknowledged that this is usually at least half recognized when a crucial step is about to be taken. However much national interests may normally be disparaged as parochial in an age of globalization, or selfish in an age of humanitarianism, when a difficult policy has to be sold there is invariably some effort to justify it in terms of those interests. The trouble is that people who don't normally think in terms of such interests are not much good at it in times of crisis, so what we tend to get is more fakery.

Sometimes this takes the form of extravagant claims concerning interdependence, proving that as ultimately everything is related to everything else, our vital interests must somehow be involved. Sometimes, as with President Clinton's attempts to relate America's commitment to Kosovo to the outbreak of two world wars in the Balkans, it takes the form of bad history. Apart from the fact that the beginning of World War II had nothing to do with the Balkans, World War I began at a time when the interests of three vast empires collided in the region, making it one of extraordinary geopolitical sensitivity. That is no longer the case. Now, properly considered, it should be an insignificant backwater, and it has taken a good deal of determined, sustained political stupidity to make it otherwise.