For the Love of Veneer

Charles Krauthammer dissects (registration required) the "Realist" foreign policy camp, in the person of Brent Snowcroft:

This coldbloodedness is a trademark of this nation's most doctrinaire foreign policy "realist." Realism is the billiard ball theory of foreign policy: The only thing that counts is how countries interact, not what's happening inside. You care not a whit about who is running a country. Whether it is Mother Teresa or the Assad family gangsters in Syria, you care only about their external actions, not how they treat their own people.

Realists prize stability above all, and there is nothing more stable than a ruthlessly efficient dictatorship. Which is why Scowcroft is the man who six months after Tiananmen Square toasted those who ordered the massacre; who, as the world celebrates the Beirut Spring that evicted the Syrian occupation from Lebanon, sees not liberation but possible instability; who can barely conceal a preference for Syria's stabilizing iron rule.

The UN subscribes to the veneered approach. Why bother looking beneath the facade when you really don't have to? As long as there is the absence of international conflict, it becomes easier for a transnational organization to ignore intranational ones. A strongly-worded resolution here or there will suffice as an Action Taken in the global To Do list. Afterwards everyone again sits down at the table.

Why bother with Iran, North Korea, Sudan, pre-liberation Iraq, or pre-liberation Afghanistan? The peace was kept, and kept at a low price. The best guests are the ones like Qaddafi, who, by submitting himself to international arms inspections, learned the lessons of Stalin - diffuse any international worries of violence - and you can run your toxic backyard any way you want. It's only when one of the unheeding, discourteous gangsters slips his border and violates the gentlemans' ageement against international conflict does any awkwardness enter in, as it did on September 11. What ensued was a hasty rearrangement of the broken plates on the dinner table, a facile attempt at putting Humpty back together again, another polishing of the superficial veneer. America didn't take its seat.

Which explains why it is so easy for the increasingly agressive pacifists to decry America's invasions of two of the above dinner guests. Saddam Hussein even breached the agreement multiple times and was allowed leeway, as his actions seemed regional at worst and internecine at best. America does not get such a pass because it's easier to chide and moralize someone who listens than someone who's too busy gassing villages to pay much heed. What America is most resented for was that it upended the table; it created an environment where it was impossible for everyone to sit down again when the dust settled, when the awkwardness was sufficiently dispersed for everyone to re-subscribe to the old polite fictions.