The means betrayed the ends
Unprincipled methods undermine principled goals - over and over again.
I’ve been meaning to write this article - a whole series of related articles, in fact - for some time. The death of Henry Kissinger reminded me about this issue, because Kissinger was a major proponent of what was often termed realpolitik: America should advance its own national interests … by whatever means necessary.
Over his extraordinarily lengthy career as a foreign policy advisor, Kissinger became the most visible symbol of the American version of realpolitik throughout the Cold War. In honor of Kissinger’s death, this particular article will focus on American foreign policy examples.
Down with democracy!
In 1953, the CIA helped depose the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran, eliminating a fledging democracy in favor of autocratic rule by a monarch. The end was advancing American interests and preventing the Soviet Union from making inroads into the Middle East. The means were a betrayal of American principles.
In order to undermine a secular democratic government, the CIA engaged in large-scale bribery of religious leaders to denounce the secular and non-Islamic nature of Iran’s pre-1953 government. The Shah of Iran proved to be a close ally for the next sixteen years. Following assurances by Kissinger in 1972 that there would be “no second-guessing” of the Shah’s requests for US arms, the Shah requested (and received) what was then the most advanced fighter in the arsenal of the United States, the F-14 Tomcat.
In 1979, sixteen years after the peak of a CIA-funded surge in rhetoric against a secular democratic government in favor of explicitly Islamic governance, the United States lost Iran as an ally when the movement to install a religious Islamic government gained enough momentum to overthrow the Shah. Some of the most advanced US military hardware in the world was now in the hands of an adversary nation.
Also in 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The US promptly lent its support to Islamist rebel leaders, who were not the least bit interested in liberal democratic principles.
In 1980, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein launched an invasion of Iran. While Kissinger quipped that it was “a pity both can’t lose,” the Reagan administration pragmatically supported the Iraqi dictator’s military venture against Iran. Eleven years later, in 1991, Saddam Hussein switched from being a US ally to a US enemy. Ten years after that, in 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan to depose the Taliban, whose leaders had been mujahideen allies in the 1980s.
Looking to the future
Today, America’s chief rival on the world stage is the People’s Republic of China. In 1971, China was arguably poorer than India and Africa and far less developed than Latin America.1 However, Nixon and Kissinger saw the communist dictatorship in China as a potential counterweight to the communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union. Rapid growth of China’s economy followed from dramatic increases in trade and investment with the United States.
Also in 1971, Kissinger and Nixon snubbed India, the world’s second-most populous nation and the world’s largest democracy, because India’s relations with the Soviet Union were too friendly. Instead, they preferred to side with the communist dictatorship in China and the military dictatorship in Pakistan.
Sometime around 1998, Kissinger realized that US and Indian interests were, in the long term, aligned. By that time, India’s economic development had fallen behind that of China’s, largely because the United States had chosen to help China become stronger instead. Today, it is clear that India’s interests are - in the long term - more closely aligned with the United States than are the interests of China or Pakistan.
Democracies hang together or hang separately
Modern democracies spent the 20th century failing to go to war with one another. In spite of occasional friction over trade and other non-aligned interests, the secular liberal democratic model of governance that aligns with fundamentally American principles has never been an enemy of America.
Military dictators, theocratic radicals, and other illiberal or autocratic governments are at best allies of convenience. When the United States acted to undermine the progress of democracy in order to prevent the rise of parties that might be too friendly to the Soviet Union, the United States acted in many ways against its own long-term interests.
Purchasing power parity adjusted GDP per capita in 1973 per Angus Maddison’s estimates: $853 for India, $838 for China, and $1,410 for Africa. The 1980 IMF estimates show a larger difference for the total GDP (PPP) for China is $302 billion with India at $372 billion (not the same dollar as reference benchmark).