Annihilation Is Not a Foreign Policy

At the United Nations, I am told, a president announced that he faced a stark decision respecting Iran: either a deal that might allow that country to rebuild into “one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world,” or the annihilation of its regime over the pursuit of nuclear weapons. The language is that of a merchant laying out alternatives to a customer, except that the wares are peace and destruction, and the shop is the world. Such dramatic oppositions charm the imagination of the speaker and the crowd; they spare everyone the trouble of calculation. Yet in public affairs, what most flatters the imagination most often ruins the accounts.

In my inquiry into the wealth of nations, I argued that the division of labour, by which one man’s narrow dexterity multiplies tenfold the product of another, is everywhere limited by the extent of the market. A bargain that opens trade, quiets fears, and admits a once-suspected country more fully into the commerce of mankind enlarges that market; cannon and embargo narrow it. To “annihilate” a regime is not merely to change ministers; it is to tear up contracts, to scatter merchants, to interrupt the long chain which conducts the cloth of one people to the back of another and the grain of another to the table of a third. The poorest at home, who live by cheap bread and steady employment, feel these broken links as famine long before statesmen feel them as failure.

Nor is the cost of such heroics confined to traffic and prices. In war, the state’s first acknowledged duty, the defence of society, is discharged; but it is discharged in the most expensive manner known to mankind. The wages of soldiers, the profits of contractors, the rents of those who supply the army are all paid, in the end, from the general stock which might have maintained peaceful industry. The labouring poor contribute twice: once in taxes and dearer necessities, again in the hazard that their own sons will be sent to enforce abroad what was resolved upon in comfort at home. When a leader speaks of “severe consequences” for another nation, he speaks, though more softly, of severe sacrifices for his own.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I proposed that we judge our conduct as if under the eye of an impartial spectator: a well-informed, disinterested observer who sympathises with the happiness of all, without being dazzled by the grandeur of any. Placed in that spectator’s seat, the alternative between a fair, verifiable agreement and the “driving into hell” of an entire political order admits, I think, of little doubt. To destroy quickly, “with no hope of future greatness or generations,” is to inflict upon multitudes the very hopelessness which is said to justify the act. No wise man entrusts the safety of his own people to a policy which the impartial spectator can regard only with horror.

I do not deny that there are regimes so aggressive that other nations must sometimes resist them by force; nor that nuclear arms, which can destroy at a distance what formerly required an army to besiege, present new terrors. Yet even here, prudence must guide resentment. The mediators who speak of a “deep deficit of trust” between parties, and who labour to turn a choice between a deal now or a deal in ten months into mere difference of timing rather than of corpses, understand better than the man of system that, on the great chess-board of human society, every piece moves by its own principle. To imagine that one can, by a single decisive blow, extirpate not only weapons but motives, not only rulers but resentments, is to ascribe to power what experience attributes only to time and patient arrangement.

There is, besides, another party in all such dramas, who seldom appears upon the stage. Wherever foreign interventions are “defended” as settling unfinished business, there are merchants and ministers who expect to settle their own accounts handsomely. People of the same trade, whether of arms, of oil, or of influence, seldom meet without discovering that their several interests coincide in urging action upon the public. Their ardour for principle should, therefore, be heard with the most suspicious attention. They risk, for the most part, other people’s money and other people’s blood, and are thus more easily reconciled than they ought to be to splendid projects whose costs are widely diffused and silently borne.

When I wrote of an invisible hand leading men who prefer domestic industry to promote the general interest, I had in view the peaceful higgling of markets, not the terrifying calculus of annihilation. Self-interest, under equal laws and the security of justice, is a powerful engine of improvement; the same passion, inflamed by the deception that power and glory will bestow a happiness they rarely give, becomes the “poor man’s son” on the scale of empires, toiling through campaigns for a splendour that ends in sleeplessness. A ruler who would be praise-worthy, and not merely praised, will choose the course that enlarges the market, lightens the load of the labouring poor, and can be borne with composure by the impartial spectator. He will find, if he looks steadily, that annihilation never meets that test.