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Comment by saiya-jin | Hacker News Reader

the fact that US for decades openly and covertly supported such an plain evil regime as Pakistani one (on top of other similar all over the world) tells me all I need to know about lack of any morality of US foreign efforts.

I'm not buying some fairy tale of lesser of two evils while supporting the bigger one. they could do better if they wanted, which would incredibly affect millions and millions of human beings, but they've chosen not to.

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There is no morality in international relations. The international stage is ultimately an anarchy, and it's a dog-eat-dog world. Countries which make decisions based on morality rather than self-interest lose out to countries that focus on results.

So why don't people call it as it? Anything that has to do with foreign politics always sounds like propaganda to me or some weird sense of moral superiority.

Because it works to sway the masses. If you think you should take some action, telling your people that it's moral will help get support for it. If you think some other country shouldn't take some action, telling their people it's immoral will hurt support.

Sounds like there'd be a fair amount of morality in international politics, if democracy were given a chance instead of unilateral action by shady oligarchs with psychopathic ideas about how "it's a dog-eat-dog world".

I object to calling that psychopathic. Acknowledging the nature of reality is never wrong. It would only be psychopathic if you not only acknowledged it, but celebrated it.

"The nature of reality" is that one must act in a certian way? You're confusing the normative with the descriptive.

I'm saying that countries do act this way. I'm also saying that countries which don't tend to lose out to those that do. That's not the same as saying that countries must act this way, it merely explains why they all do.

You're saying that they do act that way but you're also objecting to calling leaders who act that way psychopathic. Choosing to do what is necessary for the continued victory of one's country even to the extent of assisting genocide is psychopathic. Good people, even if they "recognize the nature of reality" should allow themselves to be defeated rather than assist in genocide.

No, I object to calling the idea that countries act this way psychopathic.

Call the leaders whatever names you want, I'm not fond of any of them. But I saw that "psychopathic ideas" business as being aimed straight at me, not merely the people involved in international relations.

Ok. I interpreted the remark differently but I think both interpretations are credible.

I'm sorry, I did not intend a personal slight. I understand that world leaders really do think like this, and I even think I somewhat understand why; I just think it's not an acceptable state of affairs because it's a horrible way to relate to the rest of the world, and what's worse it doesn't even match up to how the actual citizens of those countries feel. I would love to think that if we asked regular people their opinion more instead of isolating our leaders in ivory towers away from normal daily life and feeding them scary realpolitik stories, we'd have a higher-trust global society, but (as you say) possibly this only works if everyone does it...

I feel like that might not be true. Morality is relative and by extension the democracy it embodies.

This view seems utterly at odds with what I've read of history. The individuals making the decisions about the actions of states take action for moral reasons all the time. Look at, I don't know, all the wars the UK got into in the 19th century through trying to stop the slave trade, half the decision making of the powers getting into World War I, the US's conspicuous failure to annex the territory it captured in WWII or countless other things. I certainly wouldn't say that any country is entirely selfless, that doesn't happen either. And there's a wide range of how different factors affect a country's balance between the two. But even Nazi Germany and Japan did things for racist, anti-communist, and (in Japan's case) anti-colonialist things at times that weren't in the interest of furthering the power of their states.

The US's good treatment of conquered territories following WWII set it up for the global hegemony it enjoys to this day. The Nazis and Japanese lost the war in a devastating fashion in part because they behaved so stupidly due to their ideology. I'm not too familiar with the UK's fight against slavery, but I'd wager that their enemies were the ones who suffered the most from shutting down the slave trade.

> I'd wager that their enemies were the ones who suffered the most from shutting down the slave trade.

This is .. not a position supported by historical evidence, and in fact it was the UK which suffered (stopped benefiting from) the slave trade.

Thats how I would expect it to happen to, but then I live in a tiny country in Scandinavia which would have no chance at all of defending itself if didn't have an alliance with the US. An alliance the US gets almost nothing out of.

The US is committed to defending Taiwan as if it was its native soil, despite it being basically on the other side of the planet and posing no significant strategic benefit. The US has such treaties with a ton of countries (http://www.state.gov/s/l/treaty/collectivedefense/).

Despite this the US "wins" the international relations game completely (if we go with the KvK definition that war is politics by other means and its aim is to enforce its will on somebody else).

What would happen if the US didn't support an evil regime?

It could collapse and be replaced by something better, or something worse. Or it could just be supported by another super power.

But you're right, fairy tales sound nice but aren't true.

If the US had dropped Pakistan in 1971 and teamed up with the USSR to support India and Bangladesh, who would prop up Pakistan?

Saudi Arabia? They have money to offer and no much else.

China? It's 1971. China is in no shape to get into foreign adventures whatsoever. Even if they tried, the Soviets could always rattle some sabers in the Far East and scare them off.

If the US had completely abandoned Pakistan, it would not be able to use it as a proxy base for war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It would not be able to, in Zbigniew Brzezinski's words, be able to "give the Soviet Union its Vietnam."

You should not be moralistic in thinking about international relations, because that is not foreign policy makers think.

You should not use time travel when thinking about international relations, either. The question is about what the US chose in 1971. The Soviets weren't in Afghanistan until 1979.

That doesn't change the fact that exactly the reason that the US backed Pakistan was as a foothold near Central Asia to counter Soviet regional influence. The particular time and place at which that later became useful, obviously, was not predicted in detail at the time, but the concept of the need was.

Now, whether the cost of supporting that regime is justified by either its actual utility or the reasonably anticipated utility at the time the decision was made are different questions, but you can't really fully discuss the decision without considering its actual rationale.

True.

But at that time, the US had both India and Iran as friends. Having Pakistan as a friend to plug the gap between them seems like a less important goal, especially if it comes at the price of alienating India.

The thinking may have been something like: India isn't going to go into the Communist orbit even if we offend it, because of their border trouble with China. But Pakistan might. So it's more important that we keep Pakistan as a friend than to keep China.

Na, US didn't have India as friends. Specially because India started the Non Aligned Movement (basically we aren't choosing sides, we'll have relations with both US and Soviet)

Americans had the attitude that if you aren't with us, then you are against us. Plus India had a socialist economy

> If the US had completely abandoned Pakistan, it would not be able to use it as a proxy base for war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

You mean, we wouldn't be able to fund the radical Islamists that went on to found al-Qaeda and the Taliban, contributed to inspiring (and later more directly assisting) fellow Islamists elsewhere, including those who later became al-Qaeda in Iraq before becoming the Islamic State in Iraq (then the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, then simply the Islamic State.)

> You should not be moralistic in thinking about international relations, because that is not foreign policy makers think.

All decisions about priorities boil down, at their root, to moral preferences.

If the US had completely abandoned Pakistan, it would not be able to use it as a proxy base for war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Right, to use Pakistan as a tool in the Cold War, which was also a stupid and self-serving enterprise.

"If there's change, it could be worse." That is a terrible reason to support evil. And we actually did worse. We overthrew democratically elected governments to install police states because it was too "lefty" for our tastes. Iran, for example.

Agreed but the best route isn't a matter of choosing the right leader in other countries but staying out of other countries elective processes IMO. You can have voluntary diplomatic relationships of varying degrees, but this idea of influencing foriegn power players doesn't sit well with me. I'd rather their power came from local sources and therefore is incentivized to benefit the local population and local economic interests.

It's not just the US either, so much of the middle easts problems is the willingness for half or more of the countries to be proxies for the bigger states wishing for hegemony. Both sides end up losing more often then not. Just like Yemen and Syria.

A bit off topic but I often wonder what Iran or Iraq would be like today if they didn't engage in their awful war in the 1980s. They'd be much nicer places to live and most likely in far better economic shape and without the baggage of war (growing up with dead relatives/fathers and stories of violence as examples of greatness). But they would also have much larger militaries and I'm curious if their proxy wars would have just been even more prevelent then it is now.

> You can have voluntary diplomatic relationships of varying degrees, but this idea of influencing foriegn power players doesn't sit well with me. I'd rather their power came from local sources and therefore is incentivized to benefit the local population and local economic interests.

Think it through from the other side. You're in a small, relatively minor country without the ability to sway the whole world. Your economic interests depend heavily on a handful of more powerful neighbors. Are you going to sit on your hands as the local power coming from local sources trying to look after the local economic interests of your neighbors' local populations makes decisions that will impoverish your local populations through their local economic interests?

You might say "Yes! Yes I would, because to do otherwise is unethical!". However, I'd lay good odds that your local populations and local economic interests would prefer leadership interested in actively defending those local economic interests, even through foreign power players. I'd further hazard a guess that these preferences might find expressed in electoral processes.

There might be benefits and protection from some neighbours but the small countries are rarely left with much sway in the conversation. There will always be a compromise and I get the impression the vast majority of countries are too quick to take that compromise under the oversold promises of globalism.

I hope the pendulum swings back and countries still engage in global trade but put their own priorities first instead of making themselves vulnerable to the real power players.

We're speaking abstractly but I think this is the gist of recent developments in globalism, what people are starting to grasp after the full destruction of mercantilism in the last half century.

Having little influence and choosing not to use it is not generally preferable to using whatever little influence you have to most local populations acting as local sources of power in pursuit of their own local economic interests.

Concretely, I think you're advocating for a series of deeply sub-optimal locally protectionist local regimes. I'm having a hard time grasping how this is supposed to be better for everyone.

It's naive to suggest that "US Foreign Policy" is somehow specific to the US. Most, if not all, of the major European Nations actively support these same policies and have a much longer history in many of the conflict zones around the world. This case is particularly illustrative given the long history that the UK had in the region and role in the partition of India.

> Most, if not all, of the major European Nations actively support these same policies

That's because they're vassal states. Our foreign policy is their foreign policy. Their leaders don't have much of a choice in the matter. Either they play along or we find a way to get rid of them.

France sure acted like a vassal state during the Second Gulf War. I remember their vociferous support of US policy, especially one Dominique de Villepin. Same with Turkey; they opened up access for the 4th ID to attack through Northern Iraq. Let's see who else was a vassal; Germany?

This supposition of yours is silly. Europe isn't a vassal of the US. Each country follows its own goals and priorities.

> This supposition of yours is silly. Europe isn't a vassal of the US. Each country follows its own goals and priorities.

Then you don't know what's happening in Europe, or the relationship between it's various states and the US.

Just an example: Even when European states are taking economic hits from the economic sanctions against Russia, then're still going along with it. How many times have you read in the Western press that Polish or French farmers are protesting against the sanctions?

While American influence may be unpopular, Russian influence would be even less popular. I think after the shooting down of the civilian airliner by Russian-affiliated forces in Ukraine the sanctions were very popular.

At this point we do need to remember that, while it's convenient to regard a country as having a single point of view and foreign policy, in a democracy there can be significant dissent and disagreement.

(After Brexit I'm not sure what our foreign policy is any more...)

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