The Toxic 'Ethos' of Great Power Rivalry

Brands says that “there is always a point at which foul means corrupt fair ends,” but his “principles” seem designed to permit an awful lot of foulness.

Hal Brands comes to the wrong conclusion as usual:

Reagan supported awful dictators, murderous militaries, and thuggish “freedom fighters” in the Third World, sometimes through ploys—such as the Iran-contra scandal—that were dodgy or simply illegal. Yet he also backed democratic movements from Chile to South Korea; he paired rhetorical condemnations of the Kremlin with ringing affirmations of Western ideals. The takeaway is that rough measures may be more tolerable if they are part of a larger package [bold mine-DL] that emphasizes, in word and deed, the values that must anchor the United States’ approach to the world. Some will see this as heightening the hypocrisy. In reality, it is the best way to preserve the balance [bold mine-DL]—political, moral, and strategic—that a democratic superpower requires.

Brands never makes the case that these “rough measures” are truly necessary, so there is no good reason why we should want them to be “tolerable.” Consider the Reagan-era examples he mentions. Did any of the policies from the first list make the United States and its treaty allies more secure? Which ones? Were any of them worth the horrific price that the people in the affected countries paid? What good is the “larger package” if the package contains massacres and war crimes?

One of the most obvious lessons of the Cold War is that launching covert regime changes, supporting abusive dictators, fueling civil wars, and abetting genocides were ugly sideshows that had little or nothing to do with containing the threat from the USSR. Had the U.S. done none of those things, the final outcome likely would have been much the same. The USSR collapsed on account of the failings of its own system and not because the U.S. armed dictators and funded insurgents in the developing world. Global containment became a catch-all justification for all sorts of outrages and crimes that couldn’t be defended otherwise. China rivalry, opposing Russia, and “countering Iran” are now used in the same way today to excuse just about anything.