Ellen Bork of the Foreign Policy Initiative has an essay over at The American Interest in which she rebukes the Obama administration’s lifting of the arms embargo on Vietnam, because there has been insufficient progress on human rights by the Communist government there.
She complains that human rights progress has been a requirement for lifting the arms embargo, citing testimony by the U.S. Ambassador to Congress during his confirmation hearing: “We can’t lift the ban absent significant progress on human rights.”
It is fitting that the essay appeared at The American Interest, since Walter Russell Mead, founding editor, had previously written extensively about the incompatibility between Continental European Realpolitik and American traditions of foreign policy:
The Nixon and Ford administrations represented the zenith of Continental realism’s influence in American foreign policy. International life was seen as a morals-free zone… The United States would support any distasteful regime, bar none, in the interests of strengthening our global posture against the Soviet Union…The Nixon-Kissinger approach also took the moral element out of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. It was as if the United States and the Soviet Union were two rival great powers like Prussia and Austria, and could rech a detente based on common interests while setting aside their philosophical differences, just as Catholic Austria and Protestant Prussia had done. (Mead 2001, 76)
But this was its zenith. The Carter administration was ideologically unable to continue the Nixon-Kissinger pivot and it settled back into a comfortable moralizing anticommunism centered around the Soviet Union’s “abysmal human rights record and principled opposition to what was interpreted as Soviet aggression in Afghanistan.” (Mead 2001, 76)
What Bork fails to realize and which I have explained in a previous post on Obama’s “realism” is that he is a neoliberal institutionalist (NLI). What distinguishes NLI from previous forms of liberalism, like commercial pacifism (Adam Smith, Kant and its apotheosis in Norman Angell), is that the fundamental principles of realism are accepted: in the absence of a Hobbesian Leviathan, the in international states system is anarchic and a self-help system. What distinguishes NLI from realism, is the role that international institutions can play in removing the issue hierarchy that places the state’s security above all other diplomatic initiatives. Remove existential threats and cooperation among states becomes possible.
Obama is following a policy viz. China’s rise that goes back to the Bush administration (Silove 2016). China’s rise to great power status is inevitable and the United States’ diplomatic task is to manage that rise peacefully and integrate China into the current post-Second World War set of international institutions and liberal order. This, by the way, is extremely ambitious, since historically no reordering of relative power of this magnitude has been without war.
Checking Chinese imperial ambitions and preserving United States maritime hegemony in the Pacific dictates that the United States strengthen the relative power of China’s neighbors in order to raise the cost of Chinese assertion of sovereignty over its neighbors. China must be channelled into acceptance of the status quo instead of behaving as a revisionist power. This is very different from a strategy of containment, it but may be interpreted as such by the Chinese and may provoke armed conflict. This is why the strategy is so risky.
Lifting the embargo makes it possible to do selective arms deals with Vietnam along with Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines to increase their defensive and maritime policing capabilities that raise the cost to China of a significant conflict.
Fighting the cause of human rights is noble, but deterring a major war is more noble.
References
Mead, W. R. (2001) Special Providence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Silove, N. (2016) The Pivot before the Pivot: U.S. Strategy to Preserve the Power Balance in Asia. International Security 40 (4): 45-88.