Why we need a presumption against aggression

Al Queda seeks softer approach

Joe Nye's ideas around soft power are excellent. They are the basis for my own work. His insights into the need to look at the broader picture of values and culture to understand power are very important, I think, and unique enough to have his work stand out for me as some of the most important in international policy and security.

Having said that, there is something missing in Joe's analysis. And it is something that has consequence.

Soft power is a good idea. Except when it is used to rationalize manipulating others for ends that are not their own. Meaning, soft power is a good idea except when it is used to circumvent the very liberal democratic principles and liberal values - namely self-determination and self-governance - that are the basis for its strength.

As I argued for Joe on his blog, soft power, without a presumption against aggression, force, and the use of power, is illiberal in both theory and practice unless there is an understanding that aggression, force, and power are to be presumed against.

Gangsters, terrorists, and despots all use some combination of hard and soft power to seek their ends, as this article on the changing tactics of Al Queda demonstrates. Gangsters pay off allies as well as kill their enemies. Terrorists persuade their followers - and, most recently, terrorist groups like Hamas and Al Queda have been explicitly using manipulation around concepts of forgiveness, just as too many in the West have done the same in popular political arguments - as well and as a means of continuing their efforts to murder innocent civilians. Dictators like Saddam Hussein and terrorist groups like Hezbollah or violent groups like the Black Panthers provide social services as well as killing and intimidating.

Decent liberal democratic peoples need to create and carry a presumption in their thinking against such barbarism and rationalization if we are to honestly account for distinctions between the aims and values of liberal democracies and the aims and values of gangsters, terrorists, and despots. Otherwise such groups have a much easier time persuading civilian populations to join or support their ranks.

It is what made pursuing and prosecuting the ugly and power-hungry practices of the Mafia in the early 20th century so difficult, as prohibition against alcohol made heroes of murderers and thugs for citizens fed up with laws against a favorite pasttime. And it is what fuels the violence in both that trade and in the contemporary drug trade, where a favorite, if often foolish, recreation of so many citizens is made illegal and therefore underground and enforced by the arbitrary use of weapons and mayhem by gang leaders rather than openly consumed with an expectation of responsibility for its use and decency and rough law-abidance in the trade, a fact that is undermined by the laws against its use as much if not more than by those who use it and break the law doing so.

But much more important than the folly of the drug war, an absense of a presumption against aggression, force, and power as a means in a liberal democratic society for resolving problems, and a presumption for conscience, thought, engagement, debate, discussion, and committed efforts for doing the same, means that other actors who also carry no such presumption, like Hezbollah, Hamas, Chinese Communists and the Myanmar military junta, dictators like Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe, and groups like Al Queda, featured in this article, simply switch tactics, become softer in their approaches to win support, and never face the clear need to take liberal values and liberal democracy more seriously.

And neither do we.

The liberal democratic world, and Americans as members of that community, needs to presume against aggression, force, and power, as a general principle, if they are going to make the distinctions between liberal values and the tactics of gangsters, terrorists, and despots clear enough, and to make the choice more clear between liberal and illiberal values and instititutions.

Otherwise, people in liberal societies and institutions really do begin to look much more like their illiberal brethren. And the harder it is to make the distinction, the more support organized crime figures like the mafia and violent gangs leaders and members, terrorists like Hezbollah, Hamas, and Al Queda, and dictators and despots like Kim Jong Il, Fidel Castro, and Robert Mugabe and less despotic yet still illiberal leaders like Vladimir Putin and Wen Jiaboa, and all of the less liberal practices and their practicioners in liberal and illiberal corners of the world and those who take seriously, practice, and elaborate on more genuinely liberal values. And that does not even mention the poor governance practices in liberal governments that romanticize power and fail to account for its failure to address, and often exacerbate, serious problems in their societies.

I have a lot more to argue about this to make it clearer, I know.

But we need a presumption against aggression, force, and power in our dealings with one another if reason and conscience are to have any of the breathing space they need to do for us what it has clearly done for the length of liberal history - help us solve problems that aggression, force, and power cannot solve and which they often make worse because of their propensity to crowd out the very reason and discussion that is needed to solve them.

There is no way to force our way out of this one or to fake progress by force, aggression, or power. These just aren't more genuine means for progress. They are, at best, artificial compromises that have often created as much trouble as they have resolved our problems, and, at worst, rationalizations for the ugliest crimes against humanity that have ever been committed.

It is time we ended that rationalization. And understood, more humbly, liberty and the limits of power.