Between the Alps and a Hard Place (27 page)

Ultimately, in supporting the WJC's campaign to collect money from European government and businesses in the name of Holocaust victims, President Clinton helped yield billions of francs and marks to constituents of and contributors to his own party. But the campaign yielded only negative returns for the United States as a whole. It escaped no European that the U.S. government was acting as collector for a private group. Europeans understand, better than do most Americans, the extortion of the weak by the strong and the use of foreign policy to line the pockets of domestic constituents, but they resented such things from an America that touted its morality. The anti-Swiss campaign helped convert the vast majority of Swiss and a growing number of Germans and other Europeans to the French view that America had become unbearably imperious and needed to be cut down to size. The rest of Europe asked itself when American interest groups backed by the U.S. government might come calling on them. This embittered the usual disputes over trade and foreign policy. The result was rancor mixed with disrespect.

In sum, whatever may be said of the Clinton administration's interest in supporting its constituents' claims based on the Holocaust, there is no doubt that this support abused the U.S. legal system and was a foreign policy fiasco. Worse, it taught those Americans who followed it uncritically some unrealistic notions about international affairs.

T
HE U.S. GOVERNMENT'S USE OF POWER vis-à-vis Switzerland in the 1990s betrays a misconception of the role of power in international affairs; it also shows a kind of corruption of the U.S. body politic. Let us sum up the lessons of the Swiss experience in World War II and in the 1990s, first with regard to Switzerland and then to U.S. foreign policy.

The Swiss case recalls the timeless truth that all international requests and demands, demurrers and denials are valid only to the extent they are backed by the capacity and willingness to fight, regardless of the prospects for victory. While technical military factors such as numbers, quality of equipment, and appropriate strategy are important, the nation's bloody-minded willingness to kill and be killed is the most fundamental of factors. During World War II the several factions in Switzerland's armed forces disagreed bitterly on much. But all agreed that the
sine qua non
of their country's capacity to bargain with Nazi Germany was their willingness to wage a war that Switzerland was sure to lose. This tipped the fine balance of power and interest and made possible independence.

Switzerland's General Henri Guisan spent more time and energy on building his army's and civil society's will to sacrifice than on any other task. His orders to the army were variations on one theme: fighting to the death. His constant message to the civilian population was that the Swiss would fight for the country's honor and independence regardless of cost. He stressed that point to counter the altogether understandable sentiment in public opinion that standing up to Germany was futile. Building this foundation of military power is not necessarily the job of a military man. In Britain, Churchill did it. Guisan did it in his country because no one else was trying to do it. Creating or preserving an army's willingness to kill and be killed is the most important—and the most difficult—of military tasks. Without this willingness even the best military preparations, never mind mere military potential, are useless. Without this, the foreign policy even of large countries becomes a bluff begging to be called. Americans should have learned this lesson in Vietnam. This lesson is especially relevant at a time when many Americans who should know better tout the notion that modern technology has done away with the need for physical courage in the armed forces.

The greatest threat to a nation's military power comes from the tendency of domestic groups to identify their interest with the success of foreign powers. This leads citizens to feel greater affection for foreign causes and less enthusiasm for risking their lives for their own country. General George Washington was able to shape the whole of early America's foreign policy to smother the habit, typical of small countries, to place their hopes and fears abroad. Creating such a “national outlook” was the most militarily significant of his achievements. Keep in
mind that foreign policy breeds domestic factionalism in powerful countries as well. Machiavelli reminds us that arguments about Pisa helped tear apart Renaissance Florence. Americans must not forget that the most dangerous aspect of the Cold War was that Americans' sympathy and antipathy for Communism heightened existing domestic divisions. General Guisan was not able to affect his country's foreign policy directly, but by stressing the unconditional necessity to fight for independence he succeeded substantially in creating a political atmosphere in which factionalism was hard to sustain.

This atmosphere proved to be the most effective weapon against the most dangerous kind of subversion—not the sort performed by petty agents of foreign powers, but rather the accommodationist feelings of insufficiently ardent, excessively prudent elites. Creating such an atmosphere is certainly more of a political task than a military one. And yet every military leader, as a duty to those he must order into harm's way, must somehow make sure that if there is no Churchill around, there will at least be a Guisan or a de Gaulle if not a Washington.

The indispensable element for a call to bloody duty is calling the enemy—in this case Nazi Germany—by its right name. During the battle of France there could be no dispute about who the enemy was, and thus little quarrel about the troops' duty. But between the summer of 1940 and the winter of 1943 Germany forbade Switzerland from saying out loud that the Reich was its enemy. So subversion spread beyond the “usual suspects” and became internal political decay.

The Vietnam War should have taught Americans the connection between a government's failure to identify the enemy and the enemy's capacity to broaden its appeal far beyond the
“usual suspects.” Presidents Kennedy and Johnson did not point to the governments of North Vietnam and the Soviet Union as evil enemies for fear of alienating the left wing of their own party. The results were predictable: The nonprofessional elements of the armed forces became less willing to expose themselves to danger. Drug use and insubordination in the services became widespread, and almost impossible to punish severely. It became illegitimate for any American to stigmatize as traitors those who were literally giving aid and comfort to the enemy that was killing fellow citizens. Most important, since the U.S. government did not forcefully counter the Soviet Union's and its allies' indictment of America and its cause in Vietnam, some mainstream Americans came to tolerate the proposition that American anti-Communists posed the greatest danger to world peace.
¹
In sum, a substantial number of Americans sought their country's defeat by turning it around from within—the literal meaning of subversion. This was easier to do because the U.S. government did not publicly identify the enemy and acknowledge that America was indeed at war.

This almost happened in Switzerland in the Second World War—but did not because the army led public opinion despite all sorts of strictures.

Not least of the lessons of the Swiss experience is that, because allies are available in inverse proportion to the need for them and alliances are creatures of circumstances, military forces must not be spread out in positions where their safety depends on allies. Allies may be defeated, as France was in 1940, or fail to see their own interest, as Italy failed. Or they may be too far away to help, as America was. So Switzerland was obliged to fall back on its own resources as the storm was at its worst, and to redeploy its forces as they should have been deployed in the
first place. Had the Swiss examined their military predicament and established their mountain redoubt in the sunshine of peace, the military significance of their forces would have been as sound as possible. From this firm foundation, they could have opted for the assistance of whatever allies the circumstances might have produced. But making the survival of one's military forces dependent on allies whose disposition one cannot control leads to rude awakenings.

As for neutrality, history teaches that it is the fragile creature of the balance of power, and that belligerents violate or respect neutrals' claims to the extent that either course appears to pay. Neutrality is possible only to the extent that it can be defended, and the behavior that can be expected of neutrals is proportionate to the capacity to hurt them or protect them. Both the Axis and the Allies asserted their interests vis-à-vis Switzerland proportionately to the balance of power. For either side to have pressed harder than its capacity to hurt or protect Switzerland warranted would have invited hatred as well as contempt for impotence. Had the Swiss given in to a greater extent than they had to, they would have been the contemptible ones.

Governments are always under pressure from domestic groups to pay in some way for the foreign exports of domestic businesses. But when goods are sold with subsidies of any kind, the home government—that is to say the taxpayers—becomes the real payer. And the government acts as collector for its favorite interest groups. Any sort of subsidy effectively lets one group live off the resources of others and thus tends to set one domestic group against another. In World War II the Swiss government felt compelled to subsidize sales to both sides on
behalf of different domestic interest groups. The balancing act was successful, but the country paid a heavy price in political disaffection.

Money, or rather the prospect of getting hold of it easily at others' expense, is the driving force of interest-group politics as well as of rapacious war. Montesquieu reminds us that the Roman Republic died when its citizens began to exploit one another as they had despoiled foreigners. This happens all too easily without pressure from foreign powers. But when a country is confronted by a foreign power that can cause rewards to flow to its favorite domestic interest groups, maintaining cohesion becomes even more difficult.

The grand question in Switzerland during World War II was whether and to what extent to resist Nazi Germany. No dispassionate person argued that this was primarily, let alone exclusively, an economic question. And yet much of the interplay among Swiss elites went on as if this grand, long-term question were about which interest group would get what in the short term. Do not confuse this effect of interest-group politics with democracy. Typically, interest groups exercise influence behind closed doors, while the public nature of democratic competition pushes political competitors to frame their claims at least in the language of common interest, if not the common good. Rather, Americans should be mindful that questions of material advantage are inherently divisive and distract from the proper concerns of foreign policy. Americans should be especially wary of such divisions and distractions because in the 1990s the United States adopted the long-standing European and Japanese theory that the purpose of foreign policy is to secure advantages for domestic businesses. Thus an official of the Clinton administration was quoted lumping all that does not
concern commercial advantage into the category “Stratocrap and Globaloney.”
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No. The hunt for material advantage on the part of interest groups can corrupt foreign policy no less disastrously than domestic policy. The anti-Swiss campaign of the 1990s is yet one more example that domestic and international corruption are made of the same stuff.

Democracy is just because those who bear the consequences of policy also choose it. But democracy is good also because it tends to produce policies more thoroughly thought out than those merely chosen by officials. The Swiss experience in World War II teaches that people at large often have a better sense of events than do their officials. This is not to say that rank-and-file citizens are intellectually brighter than elites; intelligence is not the point. Nor is
vox populi
to be confused with
vox Dei
because greater numbers lead to better decisions. History is full of instances in which whole peoples made disastrous decisions after full deliberation. None is more poignant than the ancient Athenian assembly's self-destructive decision to invade Sicily after rejecting the better arguments. Rather, popular government, or the responsibility of officials to voters, only raises the chances that the better arguments will be considered along with the worse.

Indeed, quite apart from democracy, merely adhering to formal procedures in decision-making forces officials to explain what they are doing to one another and
a fortiori
to themselves. Officials must then formulate their proposals in full sentences, knowing that they will be held responsible. As we have seen, the Swiss government likely would not have made the errors it did with regard to refugee policy and freedom of the press had the
decisions been made through the normal political process, never mind by referendum. The political will to resist Nazi Germany and assert the old Swiss decencies resided far more in ordinary people than in sophisticates.

This is a valuable lesson. Americans at the turn of the century as during the Cold War have been seduced by the argument that their historically unsubtle approach to international affairs—especially revulsion at Communist regimes and preference for using military power decisively or not at all—is dangerously unsophisticated. These matters, so goes the new wisdom, are best left to the pros. One of the clearest articulations of this point comes in the 1995 memoirs of General Colin Powell (U.S. Army, retired), former national security adviser and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Powell, proud of his status as a Washington insider, argues not only that the people's elected representatives are a bother to serious policy-makers because they play to the public, but also that seriousness in policy-making consists of privately brokering the interests of various bureaucracies and interest groups. Powell has contempt for those officials who try to make policy by presenting full-dress arguments in “big meetings with the boss.” Competent men like himself instead arrange small meetings where different interests are arbitraged without the participants having to fear being held responsible. Alas, officials who make decisions
en canaille
tend to lose the intellectual discipline and the very language of national interest that are the currency of “big meetings with the boss.”