Take Our Power — Please!

posted at 5:22 pm on June 3, 2010 by J.E. Dyer
[ National Defense ]   

Juxtaposed with the West’s feckless reaction to the flotilla incident off Israel, two foreign political resignations this week seem emblematic of the developed industrial world’s profound ambivalence about having state power and using it.

The 31 May resignation of Germany’s president, Horst Koehler, was the less remarked of the two. Koehler announced his departure from the largely ceremonial post following a public backlash over statements he made about the use of the German military overseas. As Spiegel Online delicately puts it, Koehler, in an interview with a radio reporter, “seemed to justify his country’s military missions abroad with the need to protect economic interests.” Spiegel quotes him as follows:

A country of our size, with its focus on exports and thus reliance on foreign trade, must be aware that … military deployments are necessary in an emergency to protect our interests – for example when it comes to trade routes, for example when it comes to preventing regional instabilities that could negatively influence our trade, jobs and incomes…

Media accusations ensued, suggesting that Koehler spoke from an effectively unconstitutional perspective, given the forms of military action the German constitution forswears. Yet Koehler’s remarks were hardly bellicose or in any way outside the canon of traditional, post-1945 understandings about a nation’s interests and prerogatives.

The other resignation this week is that of Japan’s prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama. Hatoyama, hailed after his election in 2009 as the “Japanese Barack Obama,” stepped down on 2 June after breaking his campaign promise to reject the previous agreement on relocating a U.S. Marine Corps base in Okinawa. The impetus for his change of heart was the Korean ship sinking incident of 26 March. That event’s impact on the region has been amplified by China’s refusal to rebuke Pyongyang over it or recognize it as an act of war. Alignments are hardening in East Asia – ominously, if incrementally – and it is not encouraging that the political outcome for our most important ally in the region is a prime minister’s downfall.

When the leaders of great and stable nations can’t manage to remain in office through the inevitable vicissitudes of geopolitics, it seems to indicate a far-reaching philosophical disorganization in the people, their expectations, and the leaders they produce. I’ve been critical of the Obama administration for its handling of the Marine basing issue in Okinawa, but although I remain so, I also observe that a Japanese government ought to survive making difficult security decisions. If Yukio Hatoyama is not the right man for the job, can Japan pick the man who is?

The pattern of incoherent political thinking is not, by any means, restricted to these two former Axis powers. Obama’s America is afflicted with it to a disturbing degree. Britain’s inconclusive election this spring amounts to an almost humorous example of it. Sarkozy of France and Harper of Canada look like laser-focused elder statesmen in comparison with some of their G-8 peers. Certainly the political comportment of Bibi Netanyahu stands in startling contrast to the dithering, triangulating, and posturing of other Western, industrial-world leaders.

Too many in what we once called the “First World” have no living memory of reckoning responsibly with the security purposes of the nation-state. But as recently as the 1980s, it was normal for all our leaders, including Germany’s, to speak in the traditional terms of geopolitics for which Horst Koehler was decried last month. Similarly, this 2010 interview with Japan’s long-serving 1980s prime minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, provides a reminder that he governed effectively in spite of strains in the alliance with the U.S. and more immediate security threats than those facing Mr. Hatoyama. These dynamics are common in alliances; they are not epic crises.

It was not the consensual customs or the normal conditions of state-based relations that plunged the world into global wars in the last century; it was breaches of them that produced crisis. We seem to have raised more than one generation of citizens now who think there is something immoral or unethical – certainly distasteful – about the most historically traditional purposes of national power. Germany protecting her trading interests comes nowhere near equating to Germany being a half-breath away from Anschlussing Europe again; yet her president can’t even speak publicly in such terms.

And when Japan is confronted with a real, no-kidding security situation, it has to be a political crisis for the prime minister to make the sensible decision – as if all conditions should line up to avert painful security decisions, and if they don’t, someone has to pay.  Both of these developments indicate major populations out of touch with enduring human reality, as well as the relinquishment over time of the understanding and practice of actual statecraft. And again, they are not unique or special to Germany and Japan: they are emblematic of a philosophical malaise throughout the industrial, democratic “First World” we share.

Perhaps the most disturbing element of this pattern is not that it’s a security weakness vis-à-vis nations like Russia, China, and Iran – although it is – but that it is a void that at some point is going to be filled with something.  Without a positive, constructive, organizing view of national-security statecraft, nations are left to flail and overreact when the need for it arises. Such unpreparedness only promotes instability – and makes antidemocratic choices more likely down the road.

The situation in which Israel is excoriated for performing the most basic duties of national defense, while for many of the world’s leading powers national security is an embarrassment that hardly dares speak its name, is toweringly unsustainable.  It’s a situation in which threats find a reason to coalesce and emerge.  The only real question today is which region will see the first watershed event – the one that wakes up the complacent populations of the wealthy, consensual-democratic nations and hits us over the head with the 2×4.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

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