Hard Power

Three weeks ago, after six years of captivity in horrendous conditions at the hands of the FARC guerilla group, the French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt was finally freed along with fourteen fellow hostages as a result of a magnificently effective and successful operation by the Colombian military, security and intelligence services. Six years of European diplomatic and moral “pressure”, pointless parliamentary resolutions and “demands” for her release having failed, the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe settled the matter once and for all. Charles Krauthammer comments:

This in foreign policy establishment circles is called “hard power.” In the Bush years, hard power is terribly out of fashion, seen as a mere obsession of cowboys and neocons. Both in Europe and America, the sophisticates worship at the altar of “soft power” — the use of diplomatic and moral resources to achieve one’s ends.

Europe luxuriates in soft power, nowhere more than in l’affaire Betancourt in which Europe’s repeated gestures of solidarity hovered somewhere between the fatuous and the destructive. Europe had been pressing the Colombian government to negotiate for the hostages. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez offered to mediate.

Of course, we know from documents captured in a daring Colombian army raid into Ecuador in March — your standard hard-power operation duly denounced by that perfect repository of soft power, the Organization of American States — that Chavez had been secretly funding and pulling the strings of the FARC.

It’s a story we now know only too well, and yet the lesson is not learned. As Krauthammer points out, “hard power” is out of fashion these days on both sides of the Atlantic. Barack Obama was widely criticised for declaring his willingness to negotiate with the Iranian government (and in principle with anyone else) “without preconditions”. Yet the force of the criticism was rather dulled by the talks which the American government has itself recently held with Iran. The behaviour of Robert Mugabe and his gangster regime in Zimbabwe is roundly condemned far and wide - but to what effect? A letter to the Times from the Director of Amnesty International in the UK opines:

Military intervention is not the solution to the crisis unfolding in Zimbabwe.

Hundreds of thousands of people are suffering from intimidation, harassment and torture; millions have been deprived of food after the Government suspended NGO operations, and those who dare to speak out are arrested or arbitrarily detained.

Surely it is reckless to deploy an international military force into this already vulnerable state?

Rather, the regional powers in southern Africa should use their influence to pressure the Government of Zimbabwe to restore peace. An emergency summit should be convened by the South African Development Community at which it can set out concrete measures to stem the tide of abuse.

As if a man who will happily wreak terrible vengeance on his own people for their impertinence at failing to vote for him would be swayed by constructive criticism from his neighbours. And still the people of Darfur continue to suffer, no matter how many tears are shed, speeches made, conferences held. At last the President of Sudan is to be indicted on charges of crimes against humanity, but who is there to deliver him to the Hague for trial? Charles Krauthammer gets to the nub of the matter:

What is done to free these people? Nothing. Everyone knows it will take the hardest of hard power to remove the oppressors in Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan and other godforsaken places where the bad guys have the guns and use them. Indeed, as the Zimbabwean opposition leader suggested (before quickly retracting) from his hideout in the Dutch embassy — Europe specializes in providing haven for those fleeing the evil that Europe does nothing about — the only solution is foreign intervention.

And who’s going to intervene? The only country that could is the country that in the last two decades led coalitions that liberated Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Having sacrificed much blood and treasure in its latest endeavor — the liberation of 25 million Iraqis from the most barbarous tyranny of all, and its replacement with what is beginning to emerge as the Arab world’s first democracy — and having earned near-universal condemnation for its pains, America has absolutely no appetite for such missions.

Of course in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, the United States has not shouldered the burden alone. But both the U.K. and U.S. governments, and more generally, the political establishment in both countries, are showing signs of exhaustion. This is a dangerous and dispiriting state of affairs. The cause of freedom and democracy depends above all on those who will arise to defend them.