EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series No.37
 

Author

Peter Van Ness is a visiting fellow at the School of International, Political & Strategic Studies, in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the ANU. For many years a member of the faculty at the Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver in the US, Van Ness is a specialist on Chinese foreign policy and the international relations of the Asia-Pacific region. He first went to the PRC in 1972, and he has served as a member of the board of directors of both the National Committee on US-China Relations and the Human Rights in China organization. Awarded grants from SSRC and ACLS and two Fulbright fellowships to Japan, he has taught at four Japanese universities, including Keio University and the University of Tokyo. He has been a research fellow at the ANU, the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, and the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies in Taipei. He is Coordinator of the project on Peace Building, Linking Historical Reconciliation and Security Cooperation in Northeast Asia, which has convened five international workshops to date, the most recent at the University of Hawaii in March 2011 on “Avoiding an Arms Race in Space.” Papers from that workshop are available in a special issue of Asian Perspective, Vol. 35, No. 4, 2011.

Introduction

This paper investigates how the moral authority of national leaders in two very different countries in different historical periods collapsed when those leaders, the most prominent in each country, conspicuously linked their foreign policies to a set of fundamental principles which they then violated in practice. I analyse this phenomenon from the perspective of a concept of Civilizer State: a state that claims a civilizing mission in its international relations (Van Ness, 1985).

The first case is Mao Zedong’s successful program of global opposition to US imperialism during the Vietnam War, which involved support for third world revolutions, black radicalism in the US, and student-led rebellions throughout the world, including the one in Paris in May 1968 that almost brought down the French government. The collapse came when Mao met with Nixon in 1972. Maoist radicals around the world simply could not understand how the Chairman would make peace with American “devil.” In the US case, after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, in September 11, 2001, there was a spontaneous outburst of international public sympathy for the United States and support for President Bush, who had proclaimed a mission to bring democracy and human rights to the world. But a combination of the US invasion of Iraq and, especially, the systematic torture of prisoners taken in the President’s “war on terror,” began to deflate and finally collapsed that international support for George W. Bush and the United States.

I have spent my professional life as an academic trying to understand the politics of the People’s Republic of China and its relationship with the United States. After completing a PhD at Berkeley, where I studied with Chalmers Johnson and Joseph Levenson, both of whom had a major influence on my thinking, I published my first book, Revolution and Chinese Foreign Policy, on Beijing’s support for wars of national liberation in the third world. The book came out in 1970, right in the middle of China’s cultural revolution and America’s domestic convulsions over the Vietnam War. Much of my research centered on trying to understand the impact of Maoist ideas, not just in the third world, but also on the student movement in the United States and Europe. Official Washington at the time was deeply worried about China. For example, during the 1960s, US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara appeared to calculate that the ideological influence of the Chinese revolution and Maoist ideas constituted a greater threat to American national security than the Soviet Union — at a time when the PRC did not even have the material capacity to cross the Taiwan Strait. However, within days after Mao’s meeting with Nixon in February 1972, that influence collapsed. Maoist radicals around the world were astounded that their revolutionary hero, Mao Zedong, would make peace with the super imperialist Richard Nixon.

My most recent book is Confronting the Bush Doctrine (edited with Mel Gurtov). When Mel and I were working on the book, we mainly wanted to critique the strategic design and the implementation of Bush’s “war on terror.” Evidence of the systematic torture of prisoners by the US had only just begun to surface, and President Bush was still enjoying much of the spontaneous world support prompted by the 9.11 attack on the US. But later as it became clear that none of the purported justifications for the US invasion of Iraq were true, and the Red Cross and other independent authorities began to document in detail the systematic abuse by the US of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram air base in Afghanistan, moral support for Bush and his campaign against terrorism began to sink. By the time he left office in 2009, the collapse was so extensive that some members of Congress were calling for his impeachment together with Vice President Cheney; and other opponents wanted to convene a war crimes commission.

In these two books, just by chance, I had the opportunity to observe and to write about the peak of the moral influence of Mao and Bush, and then to examine how China and the United States have dealt with each other in the period that followed.

Understanding a Collapse of Moral Authority

My task in this paper is to explain a phenomenon that occurred in two separate historical periods to two very different governments and leaders, but which surprisingly appeared to have very similar effects. How should we try to understand this phenomenon?

First, we are talking about foreign policy, not domestic politics. The role of moral authority is universally recognized as important for successful governance in domestic politics, but it is more contested with respect to its influence on foreign policy. Second, we note how the same message from a head-of-state or foreign minister is likely to be understood differently by a domestic audience as opposed to a foreign audience, and how the foreign policy of any country, especially a major power, has many international audiences, some intended and others not, each receiving a particular message in its own way. For example, among Americans, Mao Zedong’s call for world revolution in the 1960s was perceived by many activists in the anti-Vietnam War movement as a message of support, while for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, it was seen as a threat to US national security.

Foreign-policy analysts often distinguish between so-called “declaratory policy” and “operational policy,” roughly meaning what governments say, compared with what they actually do. What they say is often dismissed as not very important, but in fact declaratory policy often includes important statements of principle, ideological positions, and ethical rationales for operational policy. Mao Zedong during the 1960s and George W. Bush after the 9.11 attack on the US in 2001 repeatedly articulated declaratory foreign policies that had clear operational implications.

Is this just “ideology”? It is indeed ideology, but in addition, Mao and Bush described their countries and their foreign policies as exemplars or ideal models of the ideological position they articulated. Their message was especially powerful for prospective true-believers, those for whom the ideas appeared to provide an answer to their most serious life problems: for Mao, revolutionaries in the third world working to liberate their countries from Western imperialism; for Bush, people hoping for foreign intervention to overthrow tyrants, and activists trying to build democratic societies.

For some, this was almost a religious experience. An example of this kind of commitment, again from a different historical era, is the collection of essays written by prominent Western writers in the famous book The God that Failed (Gide et al. 1950). These writers, all inspired by the 1917 revolution in Russia, had become Communists in the 1930s, but later rejected Communism after Stalin made peace with Hitler and signed the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in August 1939. Their commitment reshaped their lives. Arthur Koestler, for one, was prepared to give up his job as a successful newspaper editor to spend his life in service to the Soviet Union, but then felt betrayed when Stalin made peace with Hitler’s Fascism. Statements of principle or declaratory policies, repeatedly proclaimed by Mao and Bush as the moral foundation of their foreign policies, had this kind of impact for many foreign listeners...(Continued)