Giving Justice Its Due

George Perkovich

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2005

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Summary:  President Bush is only half right to trumpet the spread of freedom as the main objective of U.S. foreign policy; the pursuit of justice is just as important. Broadening the focus would not only befit the United States' political tradition, but also help neutralize opposition from radical Islamists and critics of globalization.

George Perkovich is Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

THE MISSING PRINCIPLE

With its ringing invocation of "the force of freedom," President George W. Bush's second inaugural address exemplified and updated the long-standing American belief that liberty is an intrinsic human good and that its promotion will enhance the nation's security and prosperity. Critics who scoffed at Bush's attempt to put ethics at the heart of U.S. foreign policy were misguided, because such considerations have been a crucial part of policy debates since the country's founding. What they should have criticized instead was Bush's narrow focus on one particular principle, political freedom, in isolation from other components of the American creed. After all, the Pledge of Allegiance promises not only liberty, but justice as well. Unfortunately, the elision of the notion of justice from the president's speech matches its elision from his foreign policy, with the result that in recent years, U.S. diplomacy -- public and private -- has been limping along on one leg and stumbling.

Much of the opposition the United States faces in the world today comes from either radical Islamists or from those who blame Washington for the unequal and destabilizing consequences of globalization. In their own ways, both groups fear that the freedom so loudly championed by the United States translates in practice into a license for the rich and the powerful to take advantage of the poor and the weak. They wage their anti-American campaigns in the name of justice.

Both movements are following in the footsteps of the United States' previous global foes, the communists, who based their legitimacy on appeals to social justice -- the good of the many taking precedence over the interests of the few -- and promised a world without exploitation, in which no one would be a loser. Ironically, it was precisely because the democratic, capitalist West was better able than its rival to fulfill such promises and motivate the masses that it won the Cold War. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the victors have cast their achievement primarily as the triumph of freedom and taken to spreading free markets and free politics as the key to universal progress. They have forgotten that justice and equality were equally important concerns for many and that what was discredited was less communism's communitarian ideals than its ability to live up to them. The emergence of a world system dominated by the United States, meanwhile, has raised people's expectations that Washington could correct economic and political injustices if it really wanted to and has ensured that they are angry with it when problems persist, even if actual responsibility rests closer to home.

If the United States fails to train itself on alleviating injustice as much as on expanding freedom, the political-economic order of free-market individualism it promotes will be discredited and U.S. influence will wane. This will happen because it is not only the abject and the miserable who end up feeling alienated. In fact, the poorest and the most downtrodden are too powerless to fight. ...

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