Moral Clarity on Foreign Policy

Objectivity matters

Council on Foreign Relations website

Theodore Yohalem Shouse 🔸

wrote a critical essay about Israel. He is correct about the specific facts. There really are high-ranking members of the Israeli government who refer to themselves as fascists and call for all Palestinians to be killed. But Shouse’s essay - like most other criticism of Israel - misses the bigger picture. Where is his outrage about the the ethnic cleansing of 100,000 Armenians by the Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh? Or the Tigray war in Ethiopia which has killed 600,000 people?

It seems that critics of Israel have a double standard. They apply a harsh standard to any white and/or developed country, and an extremely lax standard to any non-white and/or undeveloped country. I have a suspicion about why critics of Israel (and many other critics of American foreign policy) act this way. I think it’s oikophobia.

I think that liberal critics condemn Western foreign policy misdeeds more than they condemn the objectively worse misdeeds of non-Western countries because the liberal critics are bigoted against Westerners and white people in general. I think the liberal critics have convinced themselves that it is somehow high-minded to indulge in the myth of the noble savage: to treat the barbarism of third-worlders as an inevitable and almost quaint force of nature, while simultaneously condemning vigorously the minor¹ sins of the civilized world. They think it is somehow high-minded to condemn the sins of people like themselves or to whom they have some connection, rather than those greater sins and greater catastrophes objectively more in need of condemnation.

In the comments, Shouse confirmed my suspicion:

There are plenty of issues in the world I choose not to write about. Whether or not I write about an issue shouldn’t be assumed to correlate with the amount of moral outrage I associate it with.

For example, I feel particularly compelled to write about Israel because, A, my tax dollars are being sent to the IDF and America gives Israel immense diplomatic protection and, B, because I’m kinda Jewish and feel personally connected to and interested in the conflict.

I appreciate Shouse’s candor, but that attitude is morally deranged and it has been the cause of an enormous amount of human suffering.

Whether you speak out about an issue actually should correlate with the degree to which you think the issue is objectively morally important.

Suppose you’re in high school and there’s a guy named Bob who goes around beating people up and breaking their legs. There’s also a guy named Chester who sometimes steals people’s pencils. Now suppose that Alvin loudly condemns Chester and writes essays denouncing his pencil thievery, while Alvin ignores Bob’s violent crimes, claims not to know much about them, and doesn’t care to learn. Alvin’s behavior is at best morally deranged, and at worst is a kind of complicity in Bob’s crimes.

Azerbaijan’s expulsion of 100,000 Armenians from the homes in which they had lived for thousands of years is objectively less justified than the Israeli government’s “apartheid” treatment of Palestinians. The current Israel-Palestine hostilities are Israel’s reaction to the attack by Hamas in October 2023. Maybe you think Israel is over-reacting, but Israel’s military actions are still being carried out with greater care for civilian life than the Tigray war and other third-world conflicts.

Directly committing a moral wrong is worse than merely allowing it to occur. It’s true that American tax dollars are sent to Israel, but American tax dollars are also sent to Azerbaijan. Furthermore, neither I nor Shouse made the decision that Israel and Azerbaijan ought to receive funding out of America’s government coffers. Many morally dubious actors take money out of America’s government coffers; there’s no reason to single out Israel.

Whether you speak out about an issue should also correlate with your ability to do something about the issue. The average American citizen actually has more power to put pressure on Azerbaijan than on Israel. Israel is a powerful country (diplomatically and because of its influence in the US, if not militarily). Azerbaijan is not a very powerful country. If you call your member of Congress and ask them to take an anti-Azerbaijan stance, you’re much more likely to change their mind on the issue than you are to change their mind on the Israel/Palestine issue. It would be easy for the US to sell weapons to Armenia and put severe sanctions on Azerbaijan.

When deciding which side to support in a conflict, it is morally deranged to look at the misdeeds of only one side. We must examine the misdeeds of both sides, as well as the likely results which each side’s victory would bring about. Israel is an advanced, technologically innovative country with a decent amount of personal freedom and at least some concern for human rights. Gaza is not. Yes, Israel has committed wartime abuses, but so have the Gazans. I’m a Whataboutist because Whataboutism is just a synonym for rational thinking. Whenever you make a choice, you should ask "what about the alternatives"? As I wrote in February:

And this brings us to the biggest reason that I don’t believe Israel should disband itself and give the land back to the Palestinian Arabs: They would not do so if the roles were reversed. We hear the language of human rights and moral obligation applied to Israel, yet we almost never hear Jews demand that Arab countries return the property which they stole from Jews in 1948. The reason that we hear demands for accountability from Israel and not from the Arabs is because Israel is the side which will even consider fulfilling its moral obligations. The Arabs would laugh at the suggestion that they should make amends to the Jews they wronged in ‘48. They only use moral language as a weapon against the gullible West.

There is absolutely nothing moral about criticizing the objectively better side merely because you are ethnically connected to that side.

Huge swathes of Africa lie in ruins because liberal intellectuals in the West persuaded the elite to abandon their civilizing mission in Africa in the 20th century. Those intellectuals howled about every misdeed of every colonial official², while ignoring the fact that the native rulers - both the ones who had ruled prior to European colonization and after European colonization - were almost always more brutal and oppressive than the Europeans were. Israel’s actions are more morally dubious than the actions of the European imperialists were, but they’re still clearly better than the Muslim totalitarians they’re fighting.

The hundreds of thousands dead during the wars of decolonization, the subsequent takeover by communists, and the resulting famine and destitution, can all be laid at the foot of the Western leftists who argued against civilization, and the cowards who followed them. They have blood on their hands.

Again, I appreciate Shouse’s frank admission of his motivations, but those motivations are very bad. People who act on those oikophobic motivations should reconsider.

1. From a global perspective

2. Western leftist intellectuals also applied their selective outrage to Westernized Africans as well, such as the Americo-Liberians. Leftists are anti-civilization in addition to being anti-white.