Moral Intervention?

War in a Time of Peace. By David Halberstam (Riverside, New Jersey: Scribner, 2001). 544 pp. $28.

Midway through historian and journalist David Halberstam's latest book, War in a Time of Peace, we find President Bill Clinton in the midst of a tirade. Frustrated over a floundering policy toward Haiti and humiliated in the wake of the withdrawal from Somalia, Clinton rips his National Security Council staff for incompetence. He compares them unfavorably to Reagan's staff, who responded to the death of 250 marines in Lebanon by "almost immediately [invading] Grenada. . . [to keep] their popularity up." We see Clinton advisers Anthony Lake, Sandy Berger, and George Stephanopoulos considering the implications of the president's outburst, with Stephanopoulos telling the others the president had merely been so angry he did not know what he was saying.

This exchange is emblematic of the book's contents: the confrontation between decision makers vacillating between self-serving interventionism and neglectful isolationism. While Halberstam tries to impress upon the reader the moral aspects of U.S. foreign policy, the evidence within the book makes a different case—that strategic concerns take precedence over ethical concerns.

Scrupulously researched, War in a Time of Peace offers a window into the sausage grinder of U.S. interventionism. The core of the book is a detailed treatment of the rivalries and alliances between the members of both the George H.W. Bush and the Clinton administrations and how those interpersonal dynamics shaped the interventions during the two presidencies. Throughout the book, Halberstam draws a distinction between the moderate, "realist" wing of the Republican Party (represented by the first Bush) and the more ideological Reagan wing, which "often seemed more concerned about the morality of foreign policy." But this "morality" rarely, if ever, came into play. When it did, it was not morality for its own sake—witness the lack of any cry for intervention in the Rwandan genocide that Halberstam grimly details—but for the sake of masking strategy in the transparent clothing of morality.

For the Democrats, Anthony Lake, Clinton's first National Security Advisor, plays the role of the brooding moralist. Lake's frustration over the administration's inaction in Bosnia nearly led him to resign. Yet Lake, a team player, pressed on, backing policies he appeared not to have agreed with personally.

This shows us two stark realities: first, there are the few so-called "doves" or "activists" in the halls of power; and second, there are extraordinary constraints placed upon those who would make morality a more central component of foreign policy.

Why is this? As Professor Stephen Shalom of William Patterson University has noted, there are structural dynamics at work:

It should not be very controversial to assert that a country's foreign policy reflects the interests of those who control the country's political system. In a country where wealth is distributed in a highly inequitable manner . . . the political system will be controlled by either those who own great wealth or those who serve their interests . . . Since the wealthy owe their fortunes to the workings of a capitalist economy at home and abroad, it stands to reason that the state will serve to try to preserve capitalism and expand it where possible. ¹

Thus, a major component of U.S. society will never be represented in the foreign policy establishment. The institution has its own goals and members of the institution will support those goals or face exclusion.

At times, Halberstam bolsters Shalom's argument. Colleagues of Lawrence Eagleburger, he reports, considered Serbian butcher Slobodan Milosevic to be "one of [Eagleburger's] favorites" because the then-ambassador from the United States believed Milosevic was "a new breed of Yugoslav leader" who could "navigate his country toward the more blessed shores of capitalism." Aside from that, Eagleburger found Milosevic quite free from ideological constraints and thus, the ideal future leader.

War in a Time of Peace addresses the issue of class in U.S. politics. George H.W. Bush, for example, "represented the politics of...