OLD THOUGHTS FROM AN OLD MAN

Thank you all for your birthday wishes. They warmed my heart.

As I look back over my long life, I find that I have spent most of my time thinking about eight or ten big questions, to which I return again and again. The first big question I tackled was my attempt to find a straightforward, coherent argument in the Critique of Pure Reason that began with a premise that David Hume could not consistently deny and led by simple logical steps to a proof of the causal maxim. I found that argument, at least in a form that satisfied me, a little less than sixty-three years ago and set it forth three years later in my first book, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity.

 

One of the earliest questions to which I have not found a satisfactory answer to this day can be stated simply in this fashion: Given the world as it is, not as we wish it would be, what ought the foreign policy of the United States to be? It is easy enough to criticize what the United States does and to call out the hypocrisy of its public pronouncements. I did that publicly for the first time almost 62 years ago when I chaired a Cuba Protest Rally at Harvard (an event that got somewhat less local attention than I had hoped because it coincided with a student protest of Harvard’s decision to print its diplomas in English rather than in Latin,) and I have been doing it ever since. That takes very little knowledge or courage or thought. But then when I ask myself, What ought the foreign policy of the United States to be? I find myself torn and uncertain.

 

I am not asking what minor tweaks or adjustments in America’s foreign policy I would like to see a Democratic administration make. Nor am I interested once more in assigning blame – Lord knows there is plenty to go around. No, I am asking a deeper and more difficult question: given all the facts on the ground as they are, and leaving entirely to one side the possibility of actually putting such a policy into effect, what ideally should the foreign policy of the United States be right now?

 

Speaking broadly, I can see three possibilities. The first is what I think of as the Luxembourg or Swiss policy: the United States could withdraw all its troops back within its borders, dramatically reduce the size of its military budget, withdraw from all “entangling alliances,” and as it were mind its own business. If countries want to invade one another, engage in extensive slaughter, deny the rights of women or gays, or Christians, or Jews, or Muslims, or Hindus, overthrow democratic regimes and replace them with autocratic regimes and do all manner of other evil things, that is their own business so long as they do not threaten the territory of the United States and its citizens.

 

The second possibility is what I think of as the modern Monroe doctrine: United States carves out a portion of the world – let us say, North, Central, and South America, and declares that so long as the rest of the world keeps its hands of this territory, it can do as it wishes.

 

The third possibility would be some form of progressive militaristic interventionism: using the enormous military power of the United States for what I think of as good rather than what I think of as evil.

 

As I say, it is easy to expose the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the US government in all of its Democratic and Republican iterations. But doing that does not answer the question, What ought our foreign policy and military policy to be?

 

I simply do not know what I think.