RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nations operate in what they perceive to be their self-interest. It’s not always a good thing. When the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939, it was under the policy of Lebensraum, the claimed need for food that those fertile lands offered. The people of Poland and Czechoslovakia and the Allies disagreed. When nations’ interests clash, differences must be decided diplomatically or war ensues, as happened in Europe in 1939. It has always been that way and, likely, always will.

But sometimes a nation’s interest serves the world’s. In the wake of World War II, America’s self-interest – guided by our values – benefitted not only ourselves and the nations who had allied with us, but the people of those countries we helped defeat. In a recent history, Harry & Arthur, Lawrence Haas, a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, tells of the remarkable working relationship between newly sworn-in President Harry Truman and Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, then the leading Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. According to Mr. Haas, a former member of Al Gore’s staff, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, NATO and the U.N. Charter would have been impossible without the collaborative efforts of the two men. This was bi-partisanship at its best, relying on fundamental American values – to help those in distress, by serving our own interests. The consequence: the west saw seven decades of economic growth, Germany and Japan became economic powerhouses and the world saw the most rapid eradication of poverty it had ever known.

Things have changed. We have abandoned our magnanimous perch. Our values are on trial. A belief in moral relativism has replaced a sense of national self-confidence that had been driven by moral certitude. Political extremism has meant that our nation’s self-interest has been subsumed within the wants of party hacks; and immediate self-gratification has replaced the values needed for moral leadership. Republicans: consider the effects of the war in Iraq? Democrats: think of the consequences of the attack on Libya, and the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria? Keep in mind, 9/11was an attack on western civilization by Islamic jihadists – a fact that has all but disappeared from our collective memories. Non-threatening euphemisms used to describe those terrorists (and others since) have undermined a focus on the awfulness of what they did, and what they are still capable of doing.

In an April 10 Fox News interview, President Obama identified what he believes is the worst mistake of his presidency. He said, “Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya.”

It’s mighty tempting to deride that statement by going through the long litany of Mr. Obama’s mistakes in national security and foreign policy. But surrendering to that temptation would cause us to miss the important elements in what Mr. Obama said and why he said it. More difficult, and far more important, is an analysis to determine why Mr. Obama is incapable of learning from such mistakes.

Begin with the advice he received from his top defense advisers before going into Libya. According to “Duty,” the memoir of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Mr. Gates had determined that we had no vital national security interest in Libya and so advised the president. Again, according to Mr. Gates’ memoir, the final decision on intervention was made in a meeting between Mr. Gates and his team, including Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, and the State Department and White House teams led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and two of her staffers, Samantha Power (now U.N. ambassador) and Ben Rhodes.

Mr. Obama, saying it was a “close call,” came down on the side of intervention to prevent a humanitarian disaster.

Appearing with Mrs. Clinton on the Sunday talk shows to defend the intervention, Mr. Gates said repeatedly that we didn’t have a vital national interest in Libya, indicating that Mr. Obama’s action was unjustified.

Mr. Gates’ point is so fundamental to American defense and foreign policy that it beggars the imagination that we need to be reminded of it. Like several presidents before him Mr. Obama has misunderstood it, but the principle is precise and clear: the United States should never go to war unless a vital national security interest is at stake.

Arthur Vandenberg, the former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman who worked closely with President Truman to architect the free world in the late 1940s, died 65 years ago on Monday. His legacy offers two important lessons for us during our current time of turmoil at home and abroad.

First, we have benefited greatly from the global role that Truman and Vandenberg brought to fruition. We would be wise not to abandon it. Second, we can nourish more bipartisan support for a robust U.S. foreign policy, even when our two parties are fighting fiercely over domestic policy.

Vandenberg worked with Truman in strong bipartisan fashion at a bitterly partisan time, helping to craft a revolutionary new foreign policy through which the United States seized global leadership for the first time on a sustained basis to protect our friends, confront our enemies and promote freedom. Under their leadership from 1945 to 1949, the United States spearheaded the effort to create the United Nations; pledged through the Truman Doctrine to defend freedom, first in Greece and Turkey and then broadly; lifted an economically prostrate Western Europe to its feet through the Marshall Plan; and committed to defend Western Europe through the NATO alliance.

Seven decades later, however, Vandenberg’s legacies – U.S. leadership abroad and bipartisan cooperation at home – are falling victim to a collective crisis of confidence in America, about both what we should do around the world and what our leaders can accomplish in Washington.

On the global front, President Barack Obama has worked to reduce America’s footprint around the world, share burdens with allies and even adversaries and focus on “nation building here at home.” To reduce U.S. burdens in the Middle East, for instance, he welcomed the rise of a hostile Iran, invited Russia’s return to the region and largely let Syria descend into a humanitarian nightmare.

The approval of former MI6 agent John le Carré has not guaranteed the authenticity of the BBC’s dramatisation of The Night Manager. Those who know about the Middle East could barely make it through the first episode.

My colleague Peter Beaumont, the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent, was in Tahrir Square during the revolution. He turned off The Night Manager when a murderous member of the Mubarak oligarchy ordered an improbably large assortment of weapons from a villainous English arms dealer. Mubarak had no shortage of weapons in 2011; he just could not persuade his forces to use them. The notion that his cronies would be trying to buy more rather than trying to persuade the army to fight comes from a definition of “realism” so capacious it includes Eurofighters on sale on the black market, and governments so unconcerned by weapons proliferation that they keep their inspectorates in cold, understaffed offices.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Le Carré’s post-Cold-War politics are best described as more Pilgerish than Pilger. Connoisseurs of his public statements can tick every space on the bingo card. Le Carré believes that corporations brainwash the bovine masses (check) on behalf of the imperial American hegemon (check) which is itself controlled by a conspiracy of right-wingers (check) who are pulling our puppet strings at the behest of — guess who? — the Jews (full house!). Or as le Carré explained, the neoconservatives are “appointing the state of Israel as the purpose of all Middle Eastern and practically all global policy”.

Then there is the self-pity, that most deplorable affectation of Western intellectuals, who have never once faced the smallest threat of persecution or punishment for their writing. At one point during the last decade, le Carré compared himself to the German-Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer, who miraculously survived life under the Nazis. Liberals of a certain age remember that when the Ayatollah Khomeini’s assassins imitated the Nazis and threatened Salman Rushdie’s life the Klemperer de nos jours opined that Rushdie had brought death on himself by insulting the great religion of Islam.