We can assume nothing where the Communist leaders are concerned. We can trust nothing that the Communist leaders say. We can accept nothing that the Communist leaders sign as a conclusive guarantee.
  --  BARRY GOLDWATER, Why Not Victory?

      Granted, a strategist of the old school may argue: some of our international practices are unsavory and go against our fundamental values. Granted, too, these practices often injure us as much as others and reduce the chances for collective action to overcome the threat of nuclear annihilation. But let's be realistic. Barry Goldwater is right: trust is a luxury we cannot afford.

      Besides, what alternatives do we possess, this strategist might continue, to the policies we now reluctantly endorse? Kant uttered his strictures in a less desperate period; now we are dealing with adversaries who can wipe us out at a moment's notice. Because they threaten our survival, we have to be able to disregard even fundamental rules in sheer self-defense. We would be only too glad to play by those rules if we could trust others to do the same. But the world has become too dangerous for us to abide by principles that our adversaries violate at will. We cannot disarm unilaterally when it comes to bribery, disinformation, or violent destabilization of third-world nations, any more than with respect to military defense.

      In many nations at war or threatened by war, strategists of this persuasion can be heard making the same argument: "Dishonorable stratagems," to use Kant's phrase, may indeed erode trust, undermine negotiations, and thus increase the risk to national as well as joint survival in the long run. But a nation will put its values and its safety even more directly at risk if it lowers its guard out of misguided concern with moral niceties.

      Few would quarrel with the need to be on guard in a world as dangerous as ours. Nations need to exercise every ounce of distrust that promotes their freedom and survival. It is certainly important, moreover, for a government not to let the attacks or dirty tricks of adversaries go unanswered, nor to be victimized by passively accepting such policies.

      Yet the need for extreme caution and for responding to an adversary's unacceptable conduct does not by itself justify repaying injuries in the same coin. Two wrongs do not make a right in foreign policy any more than elsewhere. Forceful responses can take many lawful forms, such as the use of sanctions, diplomatic protests, and multilateral action. And though retaliation in kind against treachery and violence may have its emotional appeal--the more so since those who violate the rights of others invite disrespect for their own rights--it tends to corrupt participants, heighten mutual partisanship, hurt innocent bystanders, and impel those at the receiving end to strike back still more vengefully. The predicament of Lebanon shows how such mutual retaliation in kind can escalate. As one observer wrote of the unrestrained factional conflicts there since 1975, "Beirut became synonymous with a new barbarity, its very name becoming shorthand in the world's headlines for chaos, as the Congo had two decades earlier."

      Old-school strategists might well agree that governments should not indulge in retaliation in kind so long as lawful alternatives will check aggression on the part of an adversary.* It is only when the liberty or the survival of a nation is at stake that they take all means to be fair. Thus Machiavelli holds, in the Discourses, that there should be no talk of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, honor or dishonor, where "the safety of one's country" is at stake. And in 1954, a commission chaired by former President Herbert Hoover restated such a view in cold war terms:

      It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the U.S. is to survive, long-standing American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered .... We must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us...

      The view that there are no rules for what a nation can do when thus threatened represents an unwarranted stretching of a claim that most people would accept: that ordinary moral constraints should allow for limited exceptions as a last resort when self-defense is at issue. Such a claim is based on a nearly universal view that staying alive is the most basic human imperative, shared with all living beings. But strategists who want their governments to be free to violate moral constraints at will in foreign affairs stretch this claim in two ways. They extend the reach both of what counts as self-defense and of the exceptions it allows. It is worth considering each of these two extensions, since they provide the basis for rejecting moral concerns about foreign policy in times of prolonged national emergency.

      The force of self-defense as a justification for going to war rests on a long-standing analogy between nations defending themselves and individuals doing so--by means of violence as a last resort, if need be. Such a response to aggression has seemed self-evidently right to all but those pacifists who accept no grounds for resorting to violence. Erasmus, Kant, and other advocates of projects for a lasting peace were once among the few who held self-defense to be the only legitimate reason for a nation's engaging in war. Others saw as justified, in addition, certain wars of punishment, retaliation, or religious or political conquest. But even they took for granted that self-defense offered the strongest grounds for resorting to violence. By now, the levels of suffering and injustice inflicted by wars of conquest have given pause to those who hold expansive views of what makes for a righteous war. As a result, there is now greater agreement in law, theology, and philosophy alike, that only self-defense (including aiding in the defense of allies and victimized peoples) can offer sufficient justification for war.

      For an example of a conflict in which such a reason was clearly present on one side and absent on the other, consider the Nazi attack on the Spanish town of Guernica on April 26, 1937. Hitler had sent the Luftwaffe to bomb the town as a gesture of support for General Franco's Fascist forces. When the planes arrived, the town market was thronging with villagers who had come to sell their produce. Incendiary bombs exploded everywhere, destroying the town and killing over fifteen hundred men, women, and children. In such an emergency, most would agree that the citizens of Guernica would have had every right to defend themselves against the Nazi assault, had they had the means to do so. The Germans, on the other hand, could hardly claim self-defense in justification of their action. Hitler and Franco chose, instead, to have their supporters spread the propaganda message that "Red hordes" had carried out the massacre.

      Half a century after the Nazi assault on Guernica, death brought suddenly to civilians from the air is no longer unusual. Even after the Second World War, with its millions of civilian casualties, napalm and firebombs have rained on villagers in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. But by now, those who order or carry out such assaults rarely hesitate to claim that their actions are justified by the imperative of self-defense--of their nation, their allies, their way of life, their religious or political convictions. Just as rulers on opposite sides of past wars once took for granted that God was on their side, so opponents now invoke self-defense and national security even for aggressive ventures far beyond their borders.

      Such actions are far from analogous to what an individual might rightfully do as a last resort when faced with direct assault. But because of the ferocity of today's weapons and the genuine threat to national survival, the great powers as well as adversaries in regional conflicts can now argue, as they never could before, that everything they do to reinforce their own power and that of their allies, or to diminish that of their enemies, actually does contribute to self-defense. Thus some U.S. policymakers argue that they must respond in kind to the disinformation, bribery, violent destabilization of foreign governments, and other tactics employed by the Soviet Union across the world or risk losing influence in one region after another. Others likewise invoke the legitimacy of such self-protection not only for what they do in wartime, or only for their military preparations in peacetime, but for all economic, political, and other policies that affect their nation's international standing. Self-defense, when seen in such a light, becomes coextensive with all of strategy.

      Up to a point, it is reasonable and indeed indispensable for present-day governments to go beyond the individual analogy in deciding what their nation's security requires. Given the nature of contemporary weapons systems, it would be absurd to prepare defenses merely against direct attacks; for by the time such attacks occur, it is often too late for genuine self-protection. And yet it is clearly excessive to move to the other extreme of justifying all questionable activities that have an effect, however tenuous or remote, on national defense. It remains necessary to draw a line as close as possible to the analogy with what individuals might do to defend themselves--a line that distinguishes between legitimate self-defense and all that a nation might do to expand its territory and further its ideological aims.

      It is useful, for the purpose of drawing such a line, to consider the distinction often made between the narrower concept of self-defense and the larger one of self-preservation. Acts of self-defense presuppose a specific threat of serious injury from particular agents; self-preservation include such acts along with all that makes for greater safety and well-being. Preventive health care, for instance, can add to longevity and well-being and, in that sense, to self-preservation, without counting as self-defense in the same way as shielding oneself against blows. It is especially with respect to self-defense properly speaking that one may ask about limited exceptions to fundamental moral constraints such as that on violence. When it comes to the larger aims of self-preservation, the analogy between individual and state action holds: it is no more legitimate for a landowner to bribe, cheat, or terrorize unscrupulous neighbors than for a state to do so, no matter how much those responsible might claim to be better off and safer as a result.

      The distinction between the narrower concept of self-defense and the larger one of self-preservation is clear in the case of policies of terrorism and disinformation. Terrorism cannot be defended on grounds of direct self-defense, because its random assaults on noncombatants hardly disarm assailants. Disinformation programs, because they are so diffuse and so likely to boomerang, are equally worthless from the point of view of direct self-defense. Nor can advocates of these two practices claim to be engaging in them for the purpose of giving humanitarian aid to beleaguered peoples--least of all terrorists, whose actions represent a denial of the most fundamental human rights.

      The confusion that results from ignoring the distinction between the narrower and larger concepts is increased by a second way of stretching the claim regarding self-defense. When government officials state, as in the Hoover commission report mentioned above, that "there are no rules" where national security is at issue, they may not intend to be taken literally. But such statements open the door to every form of abuse; for they can be used to nullify the efforts over many centuries to draw distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate means of warfare. International law, just war theory, and military education all specify certain rules--against killing noncombatants, say, or torturing prisoners or using poison gas. True, the rules are often overridden in practice; but those who become convinced that no rules apply to what they do risk losing all moral inhibitions in this respect.

      Together, the two efforts to stretch the justification for what can be done in self-defense undermine constraints with respect to foreign policy in times of peace as of war. They then introduce yet another way to reject moral concerns in foreign affairs. The claim is no longer that of realists in earlier decades, that international relations are somehow inherently outside the bounds of morality. It is, rather, that the appeal to self-defense legitimates all actions pertaining to foreign policy, once they are understood to be inseparable from a nation's or a community's survival, and that they are therefore governed by no rules.

      The risk of nuclear war doubtless helps make this claim more acceptable to policymakers; for such a war would obliterate the line between defense and aggression as well as the distinction between combatants and non-combatants and between more or less inhuman weapons. Even if such a total war never comes about, its shadow has blurred the lines still further for what is acceptable in "conventional" warfare and for what adversaries can do to one another and to innocent bystanders in times of peace.

      In recent years, the blurring of lines between offense and defense has encountered increasing challenge from advocates of so-called nonoffensive or nonprovocative defense. If nations could arrive at balanced and strictly defensive protection against assault, their citizens would no longer have to cope with the economic and psychological burdens of maintaining and being in turn targeted by vast arsenals of offensive weapons; nor would they have to live with the fear that these engender. So far, the movement for nonoffensive defense has focused primarily on measures affecting military preparedness. But the concept of such a form of defense deserves attention in foreign policy more generally -- in diplomacy, for instance, as in trade policy and intelligence work. Offensive or provocative policies are precisely those which inspire distrust between adversaries; to the extent that they can be discarded without added danger to national security, everyone stands to gain. There is no necessary link between exercising cautious distrust and acting so as to inspire more distrust among others. On the contrary: adding to the amount of needless distrust makes it harder for all involved to know what dangers genuinely require special attention and impairs the climate needed for resolving conflicts without going to war.

      Genuine concern for national security calls, therefore, for extreme caution against giving too free a hand to those who invoke self-defense to legitimate all questionable undertakings. Officials may otherwise assume, without stopping to reflect, that they have no alternative course of action and that the nation's interest calls on them to go against their principles, by planning a disinformation scheme, say, or violating laws they have sworn to uphold.

      The Reagan administration's decision in 1985 to send arms to Iran in hopes of assuring the release of U.S. hostages may have begun as just such a well-intentioned effort, however unrealistic, to cut back on the terrorism and violence in the Middle East and to end the suffering for the hostages and their families. But without principled administrative oversight and legislative controls, the doors were opened to practices of bribery, money-laundering, falsification of official documents, and arms-smuggling. As the scandal unfolded, the weakness of the excuses invoking the nation's best interest and the lack of alternatives became apparent; and the role of official secrecy in allowing such excuses to go untested until too late was highlighted once again.

      Public officials who are asked for the first time to take part in problematic activities often fall back on yet another standard excuse: that it is not up to them to try to reexamine long-standing national policy. But it is up to them, and up to us as well, to take a very close look at all the morally questionable policies that have somehow gained the status of permanence. While some of them may once have been needed as a response to an acute crisis, no one can claim that they are all needed now. Some respond needlessly to ineffective and self-damaging actions by an adversary or are ineffective and thus uncalled for in their own right; others are excessive considering the provocation and thus are especially likely to escalate hostilities; still others are unnecessary because alternative actions will promote national security without hurting innocent bystanders or eroding trust. Together, all such unnecessary tactics damage national security, delay the settlement of regional conflicts, and hinder collective efforts toward security. They end by forcing government leaders into blatant and embarrassing hypocrisy whenever they claim self-defense for every form of aggression or deny in public those acts which they know they sponsor in secret.

      Since democracies are expressly committed to justice and the respect for human rights, they have every reason to question practices that go against these norms for the sake of national defense. But whatever their political system, large powers have a special responsibility to avoid violations that set precedents for others to emulate. A number of countries have long sought to eschew all such practices; they, too, have a special function in showing how to hold the line against them. And all nations, as suggested in Chapter IV, have a stake in efforts to counteract practices that erode rather than build the confidence needed for negotiations to further common security. To the extent that governments fail to do so, concerned organizations and individuals have a critical role to play in bringing pressure to bear.

      As soon as those advancing the strategic argument for dismissing moral concerns acknowledge that not all shady practices are necessary for self-defense, and that some may even damage it, there is already an opening for change. Strategists have reason, then, to join in reevaluating all practices linked to defense, if only for the sake of their own nation's security. In such a process of reevaluation, more is needed than the customary judgments having to do with short-range financial and political costs or with the obstacles to be expected in trying to implement a policy.

      Even before undertaking such judgments, it will be helpful to begin the process of reevaluation by dividing all relevant policies into two categories: one containing the many practices, including those which are purely defensive and confidence-building in nature, that violate no fundamental moral constraints; and a second category singling out policies that do violate such constraints. About each policy in the second category, one can then ask the three questions set forth in Chapter IV to assist in weighing actions or practices fraught with moral conflict:

1. Is there an alternative policy that might serve the purpose one takes to be justified--in this instance lasting national security--without breaching moral constraints? One, that is, which falls in the first category? Asking this question calls for all involved to look for such alternatives as creatively and imaginatively as possible and to consider what kind of leadership it takes to implement them most effectively.

2. If no alternative policy of nonproblematic nature can be found, what are the arguments by which proponents justify the violations made necessary by the policy under consideration? And what are the counterarguments advanced against it? Where national security is concerned, three subsidiary sets of questions must then be asked:

a. Is the policy one that genuinely serves self-defense? Or is it so ineffective or so likely to backfire as to damage, rather than serve, national security?

b. Is the policy appropriate in light of the provocative policy or action to which it responds? Does it overreact? Does it risk needless escalation? Or is the provocation itself so ineffective or so likely to backfire as to call for a different response or none at all?

c. A consideration of the above questions will eliminate a number of policies as unnecessary or inappropriate. With respect to those remaining ones which still seem necessary in the eyes of proponents, they must be asked to explain on what view of self-defense or national security they base their judgment. And what lines, if any, do they draw with respect to violating fundamental moral constraints on, say, killing noncombatants or cheating on international treaties?

3. As a test of the preceding questions, how would the arguments for and against the answers to each fare if defended in front of an assembly of reasonable critics? Such an assembly would have to be representative of those who bear the costs of the policies at issue--of taxpayers in the nations responsible, for instance, just as much as of potential victims abroad or at home.

      Such a process of rethinking and reevaluating existing policies is indispensable to a strategy for peace. It will take time and require the efforts of citizen groups, scholars, and many others in addition to public officials--the more so as line-drawing often calls for considerable fact-finding, analysis, and debate. These efforts of reevaluation, of which mine can be but a small part, offer an alternative path to those who insist either that nothing meaningful can be done, given the genuine threats to survival that so many nations face, or, on the contrary, that nothing need be done, since all is well as it is.

      There is a better way to reconcile genuine self-defense with the public desire for a principled foreign policy. It is in the power of each nation--and, most urgently, also in the interest of each--to seek ways to reduce excessive, debilitating distrust. And just as many different practices contribute to that distrust, so the collaboration of a great many groups and individuals can bring about a change.


* Around 1750 B.C., when the Code of Hammurabi first spoke of exacting an eye from a noble who had put out the eye of another noble, and the teeth from one who had knocked out another's teeth, retaliation in kind represented an advance over blood feuds, and massive retaliation. Justice called for equivalence of retribution, not excess, and was to be carried out according to the code by lawful authorities, not by an aggrieved party with a mind to revenge. The same was true when "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot" was prescribed for the Jews in the Book of Exodus.