The National Interest

I was recently discussing Iraq with a friend of mine. He was angry because he felt the Bush Administration had lied to the public about the reasons for the war, and had planned poorly for its aftermath. Nevertheless, he said, "I would argue in the short-run, our national interest was best served by removing the Saddam regime, given that we were prepared to dedicate the time and resources to post-war Iraq…"

As I see it, there are two problems with his take here. The first is that the idea of "national interest" is incoherent. Now, it's not entirely his fault that he's bought into such an idea: much of his education (in foreign policy and so forth) probably consisted in attempts to convince him that "the national interest" was a coherent concept, and, furthermore, something that could be clearly seen by certain far-sighted leaders.

But nations are not the sorts of entities that have interests, just like they don't have crushes or daydreams or urges to go out for a beer. It is individuals who have those things. All thoughts, of which interests are a sub species, occur in the minds of particular people, and do not float around in some sort of "national consciousness."

Many groups are formed based on a specific interest, so that we generally may assume that members of the group share that interest. When we say, "The New York Yankees are interested in winning the World Series" our statement is unproblematic, because the purpose of the team is to win ballgames and championships, and we don't suspect any team members of being a double agent for the Red Sox or something of the sort. Nevertheless, "The Yankees are interested in winning the World Series" is still just shorthand for, "Each member of the Yankees organization is interested in winning the World Series."

Things are different with a civil government. A civil government does not exist to achieve some substantive purpose; it exists in order to establish the framework of rules in which different people go about attempting to achieve their own purposes. Of course, the US state functions less and less as a civil government everyday, and more and more as a struggle among warring interest groups, each trying to grab the reins of power in order to carry out its plans for society. But, as someone who is basically a classical liberal, my friend should recognize that this represents a corruption of the American government, and is a trend to be resisted if we care for liberty.

As an informal way of talking, there is nothing wrong with saying that "America is interested in baseball," when what we more precisely mean is: "Many Americans are interested in baseball." But to move from that to the proposition, "It is in America's national interest to promote the sport of baseball," is fallacious. It is in the interest of the Americans who like baseball to promote baseball. What someone forwarding this proposal really means is that he would like to be able to force Americans not interested in baseball to pony up some dough for the sake of those who are.

There is no sort of calculus by which one could tally up the "net interest" of all the people in a nation and arrive at some coherent meaning for "the national interest" conceived of as a device to be employed by utilitarian judgments. "Being interested" is not available for quantitative measure. There is no means but the arbitrary judgment of the person doing the tallying to decide how one person's interests should stack up against those of another.

When would-be planners promote the idea that some scheme is in the "national interest," what they mean is that it is in their interest. That doesn't imply that they simply are trying to line their own pockets – although, of course, sometimes they are. Their interest need not mean only their own career advancement or their personal material gain: it could be their interest in what the future of America should be, or their interest in playing a giant game of Risk with the world as their board.

But whatever the character of his interest, every social planner would like to replace other people's interests and other people's plans with his own interests and plans. Of course, he can't put it like that, as it would be a bit of a hard sell to those whose plans were being cancelled. It is better for him to claim to have a pipeline to some higher voice, for which he is the prophet: the forces of material production, geist, the Second Coming, the "end of history," or the spirit of the Aryan people. Only through the planner can ordinary people hear this higher voice.

Except in the remarkable case that the interest in question is shared, and shared to the same extent, by every person in a nation, the national interest does not exist. However, even in the highly improbable event that the interest of every person in America did coincide with the fixation of Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, Ledeen, and others on generating "creative destruction" in the Middle East, the "national interest" argument for war still falls short. All that has been determined at that point is that it's not unjust to Americans for the US to go to war with Iraq, since none of them are being coerced into supporting it. Now, the issue becomes: Is it unjust to Iraqis?

Let's say I have some neighbors who are a real nuisance. They have screaming matches all the time, leave unsightly garbage around in their yard, and, what's more, their house blocks my view! I decide it's in my "family interest" to get them out of there. (And my family is bigger than theirs, so we've got a majority on our side. Furthermore, since we generally behave better than they do, we can claim to be "a force for good" in the neighborhood.)

One night when they are out of town, I creep over to their house, pour gasoline around it, and light it on fire. Sound criminal to you? But look, by waiting until they were gone, I was minimizing casualties, wasn't I? Later, I discover that their cat had been home and was barbecued as a result of my efforts. Well, that's just collateral damage, isn't it? After all, I wasn't deliberately targeting the cat. I even help them find an apartment and a new cat: we could call it family building!

Would you excuse my actions based on these justifications? I doubt it. But when ordinary men and women, inherently no more virtuous or infallible than you or I, take on the mantle of state power, they are excused on such bases again and again. This is the great illusion of our age, the idea that a certain class of people is exempt from the moral judgments that apply to the rest of us.