Friday, May 22, 1998

Sanctions weak against India's honor

By George Will

WASHINGTON - This ninth year of the century's 10th decade is taking a toll on one of the century's characteristic chimeras. Liberalism and (which is much the same thing) wishful thinking favor arms control as a means of taming the unruly world with pieces of paper. However, two attempts at arms control are collapsing simultaneously, with reverberations in a third conflict that has an arms control dimension.

President Clinton says he is "encouraged" by Iraq's cooperation with U.N. inspectors attempting to eliminate Iraq's chemical and biological weapons. The head of those inspectors, Richard Butler, says there has been "virtually no progress" in six months. The president's U.N. ambassador, Bill Richardson, says "there's been zero progress."

So Israel knows the president makes foreign policy pronouncements that are disconnected from reality. Israel is in a "peace process" with an entity, the Palestine Authority, which, in violation of the Oslo accords, remains committed, in its unamended charter, to Israel's destruction. The accords contain arms control: The PA is limited to a police force of 24,000. Instead, the PA has an army twice that size.

The president, who is "encouraged" by Iraq's behavior, wants Israel to accept his estimate of Israel's security needs. He has helped China, by technology transfers, develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems. He has been relaxed about China helping Pakistan toward nuclear capability. He is startled that India wants nuclear weapons.

India, although provoked by recent U.S. policy, would have acquired nuclear weapons anyway. With a population 45 percent larger than the combined populations of four of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia), India is not impressed by "international norms" defined by others to ratify their advantages.

Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to presidents Ford and Bush, and his colleague in a Washington consulting firm, David Sloan, express the foreign policy elite's dreamy disappointment that India has affronted "international norms." India, they say, must decide whether to "rejoin the global community." But it is peculiar to speak of a "global community" with India's one-fifth of the world's population exiled (by whom?) therefrom.

And what is the pertinent "norm"? That there shall be no nuclear proliferation? Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, notes that U.S. policy "all along has been one of selective and preferential proliferation." U.S. policy openly helped Britain to become a nuclear power, less openly assisted France and did not become exercised about Israel developing such weapons.

For 50 years U.S. policy was that nuclear deterrence can be conducive to stability. Now U.S. policy is to tell Pakistan a nuclear imbalance is crucial to stability in South Asia. Perhaps it is.

However, arms control is usually impossible until it is unimportant. Arms control agreements usually renounce superfluous weapons or accept limits higher than anticipated procurements. Nations will abide by only those arms limitation agreements that do not seriously inconvenience their pursuit of security and other national interests. As India's euphoria about the nuclear tests demonstrates, those interests can have a huge psychological component.

In On the Origins of War, Donald Kagan, the Yale historian and classicist, notes one current theory of war's obsolescence holds that free markets and the communications revolution have sublimated aggressive energies in commercial relations that are too valuable to disrupt by violence. But, Kagan notes, "over the past two centuries the only thing more common than predictions about the end of war has been war itself."

Remember, Kagan says, what Thucydides listed first among the three things that cause people to go to war: "honor, fear and interest." Liberal optimism about taming the world rests on the hope that fear can be assuaged and interests accommodated. But honor is a more volatile variable. Kagan says if we understand the significance of honor to include deference, esteem, respect and prestige, it is an important motive of modern nations.

Honor, says Kagan, is desirable in itself and has practical importance in the competition for power because a nation's honor and fame are apt to wax and wane reciprocally. Kagan believes considerations of material gain or even ambition for power itself frequently play a small role in bringing on war, and that "often some aspect of honor is decisive." Which is one reason why threats of material losses from economic sanctions are weak enforcements of arms controls and will be utterly futile against an India feeling its oats.

Washington Post Writers Group