Americans, as ever, fancy ourselves as big thinkers. We have interminable “how does this end” debates, navel-gazing exercises in which we obsess over hypotheticals so that we don’t actually have to do anything. We argue over who cares more about the troops, the children, world peace, international law, and all kinds of high-minded flummery, while the leaders of Russia, Iran, Syria, China, and other U.S. opponents make decisive moves. Our insular arm wrestling has made us helpless bystanders, watching a string of foreign-policy defeats, the likes of which we have not experienced since the 1970s.

Where do we go from here? I propose the following—more out of optimism than realism—as a kind of pact among Americans of all political persuasions to follow as guidelines for a more honest and less angry debate about foreign policy and the use of force. All of them amount to a plea for consistency over partisanship, but there are some specific areas to consider.

First, stop abusing the words “national interest.”

Those words do not have scientific meaning. They are terms of art, political expressions of a coherent view of what is best for our country. They are not words that have a meaning independent of the person using them. If you truly believe that the national interest only extends as far as America’s shores (or to the boundaries of our close allies), then be willing to think through—and to live with—the implications of your view. If you have a more expansive conception of interest that includes our values as something worth fighting for, then be willing to acknowledge the costs you’re proposing. In any case, the term “national interest” should be the start of a conversation, not the end of one.

Second, detach your emotions from the president.

By this I don’t mean President Obama or President Bush...or Presidents Harding, Pierce, or Madison, for that matter. I mean any president. We have developed a partisan cult of personality around our presidents—something for which we chide Russia’s Putinists but of which many of us are equally guilty—and it short-circuits our ability to be consistent in our views. That’s relatively harmless if we’re arguing over tax rates or water standards, but if we’re talking about war and peace, we have to be willing to put aside our personalized loyalties and to force ourselves, as uncomfortable as it is, to be more consistent.

If, for example, you were against violating the sovereignty of other nations to kill terrorists when George Bush did it, then you should be no less against it when Barack Obama does it. If Obama’s “kill list” offends you, but George Bush’s did not, then you’re a hypocrite. We shouldn’t be using popularity and personal emotion to choose where to use military force; that’s making decisions about life and death the same way high school kids pick their prom queens.

Next, we must stop pretending that any one ideology or party has cornered the market on virtue.

One of the least attractive human emotions is sanctimony, and lately we’re covered in it like bad cologne on a hot day. On one side, liberal interventionists—the tribe to which I am a late-career convert—posture about “our girls,” make blatant appeals to emotion and imply that anyone who disagrees with them is a monster. Anti-interventionists, by contrast, try to seize the high ground of disinterested realism: they claim to be defenders of American constitutional purity, vigilant guardians preventing us from sullying ourselves on wars among excitable peoples whom we do not understand. (Usually, this means they don’t understand them, and thus they assume no one else does either.)

Instead, we should start from a different presumption: that we all care about innocent human life, about peace, and about the spread, where possible, of at least some basic human values. Let us agree that none of us wants to tolerate lawless dictators and regimes who seek weapons of mass death. We can disagree about what to do about those priorities; sometimes, the painful answer might well be to do nothing. But we must leave aside both the screechy invective that demands moral perfection on one side, and the pretentious (and often feigned) lack of interest in anyone who isn’t one of us on the other.

Intervention is a complicated business. We must stop polluting our debates with false binaries of always-or-never, invasion-or-nothing. We must also stop the Bonfires of the Straw Men: writing in Wednesday’s New York Times, Obama supporter Michael Cohen wrote: “our foreign policy debates are defined by simplistic ideas: that force is a problem-solver, that America can go its own way and that mere application of American leadership brings positive results.” This is just a restatement of some of the least adept points in President Obama’s pancake-flat West Point speech last May, and all of them are caricatures. They are phony choices meant to produce nothing but partisan advantage. Every problem in the world doesn’t have a solution, but many of them do. Refusing to recognize either or both of those realities is how disasters germinate and spread.

Finally, leave bogus military arguments out of it. In fact, leave the military out of it, period.

The military should be a voice, not a veto. Unfortunately, as the number of people in public life with military experience continues to decline to tiny levels, the urge to defer to the uniformed military is overwhelming. The military cannot say that something is “too hard,” because that is not their decision to make. Rather, military leaders can only lay out the costs and risks of a potential action, and then leave it to the civilian decision makers to determine if those costs and risks mean the goal is “too hard.” The political authorities are the ones who must answer to the people, and thus they are the ones who must decide when the expenditure of blood and treasure is warranted.

I doubt, as elections approach, that right or left will find much common ground here. The president, in denial about his administration’s many failures, has retreated into churlish defensiveness. His opponents, emboldened by the impending collapse of a presidency, have advanced with relentless criticisms, many of them unrealistic and some of them downright disrespectful and un-American. But we, as citizens, can do better. We can start by remembering that foreign policy is not a game. Billions of lives are at stake, every day, including our own. We should debate and act with that in mind. It is a responsibility that rests heavily on our shoulders and is a greater burden than we have lately been willing to accept.

 

Tom Nichols is Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College and an adjunct at the Harvard Extension School. His most recent book is No Use: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security (University of Pennsylvania, 2014) The views expressed are his own. You can follow him on Twitter:@TheWarRoom_Tom.

Image: Flickr/U.S. Army/CC by 2.0