Hippocratic Precept for Foreign Policy Establishment: First, do no harm
Medical doctors subscribe to an extrapolation from the Hippocratic Corpus: "First, do no harm."
Jan 15, 2016
Medical doctors subscribe to an extrapolation from the Hippocratic Corpus: "First, do no harm." Among other things, the precept seeks to avoid iatrogenic treatments in which the cure is worse than the disease.
Medical doctors subscribe to an extrapolation from the Hippocratic Corpus: "First, do no harm." Among other things, the precept seeks to avoid iatrogenic treatments in which the cure is worse than the disease.
Our foreign policy establishment needs a corresponding professional creed to avoid chronic adventurist follies that harm more than benefit our national security. Included in the oath of every the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Director of the Office of National Intelligence, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Director of the National Security Agency should be a promise to do no harm to the United States in fashioning and executing actions bearing on foreign policy.
In honoring their "First, do no harm" oaths, they should be informed by St. Francis of Assisi to distinguish between the plausible and the fanciful. He pleaded,
"Lord, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
The starting point is a theory of man that recognizes the DNA of the species craves power, riches, sex, beauty, fame and creature comforts over the higher principle of justice--the end of civil society. At any given point in history, the number of earthly inhabitants who are actively pursuing justice and mastering their sordid passions can be counted on one hand with fingers left over. The exclusive method of diminishing the misery index of the world is to splinter power--to pit ambition against ambition--to prevent any political faction (including a majority) from oppressing another. Limitless power irrespective of the form of government--monarchical, oligarchical, or popular--will beget tyranny.
That understanding was the genius of James Madison. He featured a separation of powers, checks and balances, and individual rights in our Constitution and Bill of Rights: a bicameral legislature with different terms, rules, and constituencies, limited and enumerated powers, and authority to remove the president through impeachment and conviction for crimes against the Constitution; a president elected indirectly by an electoral college favoring small over large states; an independent judiciary with life tenure; transparency; and, robust protection of private property, freedom of speech, press, and religion, due process, and privacy.
But Madison, like Albert Einstein, was a prodigy probably not to be seen again for a thousand years or more. Thus, the birth of our Constitution was styled "Miracle At Philadelphia" by Catherine Drinker Bowen, and Lord Gladstone effused, "the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off by the brain and purpose of man."
The United States Constitution, however, also required a political culture that celebrated liberty and the rule of law. That culture had evolved over more than five centuries from Magna Charta to the Mayflower Compact to the Virginia House of Burgesses to the Connecticut Charter Oak. It did not spring forth from James Madison's head like Athena from Zeus. As Thomas Jefferson admonished, "If a nation hopes to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it hopes what never was and never can be."
Our foreign policy fools untutored in Madison's theory of man routinely embrace the delusion that the United States can give birth to western-style democracy in foreign lands barren of any supporting political culture or Madisonian genius. Accordingly, we chronically go abroad in search of monsters to destroy; and, with fantasies of plucking democracies from Neanderthal cultures dancing in our head. Think of our recent foreign policy "Hail Mary" passes in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, South Sudan, Nicaragua, Ukraine, Yemen, Kuwait, and Syria. The arguable and rare exceptions of Taiwan and South Korea prove the rule.
The road to an enlightened foreign policy is a "First, do no harm" mandate for the foreign policy establishment.