States Have No Motive but Survival : It’s Hypocritical for Us to Demand Purity of Purpose

Why are our political leaders so preoccupied with our adversaries’ motives? Motive implies morality, as if states operate on the basis of good and evil, right and wrong. While states freely invoke ideology to gain popular support, their decisions are based on pragmatic concerns. Their actions do have moral consequences, but morals do not determine their actions. At best, they incidentally coincide.

There is a certain predictability and, hence, stability that derives from this kind of disinterested, analytical approach. Take the Iran-Contra affair, for example. Analyzed from the amoral perspective of self-interest, it is logical that once the United States perceived a Soviet-supported Nicaragua to be inimical to its interests, its actions would be designed to quash the proxy state. In a democratic country and a world influenced by telecommunications, the choice of means can get a bit touchy, but the end is never in doubt.

Tread into the murky waters of morality, on the other hand, and the end as well as the means is in doubt. Is it “moral” to defy the democratic will of the people as expressed by their elected representatives? Is it “moral” to sell arms to a terrorist state like Iran? Is it “moral” to look the other way while Iraq balances Iran’s manpower with chemical weapons? Oliver North, we have been told, is a national hero because he put the state’s interest above the bidding of the people. But, oh . . . if we plunge into the abyss of good and evil, the facility with which the government claims conterminous interests between God and Country may not survive close scrutiny, certainly not beyond the values of exhortation and tradition.

Thus, when impugning motives, the United States must tread lightly where sleeping dogs lie. What was the U.S. motive in trading hostages for arms? Was it pure? Did it warrant the betrayal of principle and friends? Was it worth the prospective lives of U.S. military personnel serving in the Persian Gulf? Would it have happened at all had it not been for the need to create a source of funds for the languishing Contras? President Bush wants President Gorbachev to reveal his motives, but he refuses to answer questions from We, the People, about his own. It appears, then, if we are to have an understanding of state actions, we must return to an analysis based on state interests.

In broad strokes, Soviet interests seem relatively clear. During the Industrial Age, policies forged around a closed, centralized government operating under party dictate served state interests well. Though morally reprehensible, those policies did succeed in catapulting the Soviet Union from an agrarian to an industrial military superstate in a very short span of time. These same policies, however, are impotent in a world based on the flow of information and the ability to translate that information into wealth. Threatened with being left behind, the Soviet Union has little choice. It can either change or be reduced to a second-class state.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev may be shrewd enough for the task at hand. And he is adroit enough to make a virtue out of necessity. But the difference between him and his arch-rival Yegor K. Ligachev, is not “whether,” but “how” and “when”.

The Bush Administration has declared that our national interests lie in continuity and maintenance of the status quo in Soviet policy. U.S. action will be a reactive, measured response to Soviet rhetoric as it is translated into deed. But how, we say, can this be? Has the United States forsaken the ideals of its own revolution? Has it forgotten the power of an idea and the impact of the spoken word?

The Soviet people now find themselves part of a world that is writhing in democratic revolution. We are seeing what may well be the singularly most important political happening since the Bolshevik Revolution. And yet the United States, the legitimate philosophical and moral leader of the democratic movement, stands on the sidelines. Why? It is because the United States sees its geopolitical interests in terms of stability and continuity, not in the volatility of revolution, with all the attendant precariousness that that can bestow.

The idealistic and isolationist United States born of the American Revolution is a millennium away from the United States of today. This is not the result of any evil conspiracy. Rather, more insidiously, it is the product of circumstance and time.

As the dominant Western power in a hostile, bipolar world, the United States emerged from World War II as the only country capable of assuming the role of global protector. Today, the dynamics are changing, but for the world’s policeman, the path is no more easily traversed. Military confrontation appears to be on the wane. But the complexities that accompany emerging economic dynamos, shifting world paradigms and destabilizing revolutionary fervor are even more clearly on the rise. Thus, we will have to content ourselves with Washington’s sniping at Gorbachev’s actions and whining about his motives. That is, unless we happen upon a bit of that fine, old Jeffersonian spirit to help us reinvigorate the American Revolutionary soul.