December 13, 2006

Jeane Kirkpatrick: Did Clear Thinking Die With Her?

It was a bad week for clear-headed foreign policy thinking. In at least one respect, a fatal week.

Just as the naïve, self-congratulatory “experts” of the Iraq Study Group were outlining their high-minded strategy for surrender in Iraq, a true expert – one whose insight was predictably ignored by the ISG – left us. We can only hope that any last vestige of sensibility didn’t also disappear when Jeane Kirkpatrick passed away in her sleep at the age of 80.

The first column of this writer’s career was a tribute to Kirkpatrick, published on Dec. 7, 1984 – exactly 22 years preceding her death. Ronald Reagan’s first ambassador to the United Nations did not grow up as a doctrinaire conservative. In her college days, she joined up with the campus socialists, believing this to be the best and fairest path to social justice. But Kirkpatrick was too astute and intellectually honest to overlook the obvious as she moved along this path. As she grew in her appreciation of democracy and liberty, she could not pretend that socialism led to anything but corruption, repression and economic deprivation.

Once the Reagan team had won the Cold War – adhering to the principles Kirkpatrick espoused – she began applying the same clear thinking to the threats posed by tyrannical Islamist regimes. It was the same thinking she brought to Turtle Bay when Reagan tapped her to go to the UN – a sober skepticism of multilateralism as a solution to just about anything. Kirkpatrick wrote in 2002:

In effect, multilateral decision making increases the cultural, political, and geographical distance between those who choose decision makers, those who make decisions, and those affected by these decisions. Abstract relations cannot produce the same solidarity among people as common identifications, education, and experience. The democratic institutions that make and keep decision makers representative and accountable are national, as are the cultures on which they rest.

The officials of multilateral organizations are not elected by a popular vote. Often they are not even chosen by elected officials. Multilateral institutions do not merely add another layer of bureaucracy between rule makers and those who live under their rules; these institutions create wholly new jurisdictions that do not coincide with existing institutions -based on nation-states - that provide democratic accountability. Voters can rarely "throw the rascals out" when the rascals hail from 200 countries scattered around the globe.

When President Bush tapped John Bolton to serve as UN ambassador in 2005, some noted that Bolton didn’t think too highly of the UN, and wondered how he could possibly “serve” an institution he despised. Bolton’s critics were merely a 25-years-later recycling of Kirkpatrick’s critics, who had lost all understanding of the fact that America’s ambassador to the UN serves America, not the UN.

What’s more, as Kirkpatrick understood, the UN serves no one, except itself and the tin pot regimes that would and should be completely marginalized without the UN providing them with a forum to feign legitimacy alongside democratically elected governments.

Had it consulted with Kirkpatrick, the Iraq Study Group might have disabused itself of two important and dangerous fantasies contained in its report. First, she would have informed them that referring Iran to the UN Security Council for action on its nuclear ambitions would be worse than a waste of time. It would feed the illusion that something was being done, when the world would be better off at least recognizing that the world’s powers are twiddling their thumbs while the mad mullahs are buildings themselves a nuclear arsenal. Second, she would have explained the folly of attempting to “engage” Syria and Iran in the hope that they will somehow be conscripted to act “constructively” with regard to Iraq.

Because Kirkpatrick was neither naïve nor interested in meaningless “agreements,” the traditionalist foreign policy camp had little use for her. A diplomat whose only objective is to “keep the process moving,” even if the so-called process leads nowhere, never appreciates a hard-headed clear thinker who points out the foolishness of the process.

Sadly, we will hear Kirkpatrick’s thinking no more, although it is readily available in her writings. One does not sense that they have caught the attention of most Democrats, many Republicans, the mainstream media or Old Europe, who have hailed the ISG report as the opportunity to bring back meaningless “engagement” in lieu of victory.

When knees start to buckle and courage wanes, voices like Jeane Kirkpatrick’s are usually among the first to be tuned out. But her thinking stays with us, and policymakers cannot ignore it forever. Because you cannot forever ignore the truth.