There’s no such thing as an ethical foreign policy (1999)

From the November 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ethical foreign policy? What a joke! How, in a capitalist world where each state is competing against every other state for a share of profits, can a government base its foreign policy on anything except economic self-interest—the economic self-interest, that is, of its capitalists?

“Obtain profits or die”, that is the economic law governing the conduct of states under global capitalism. And it cannot be otherwise for as long as global capitalism lasts.

Everybody knows that the reason for the Gulf War nearly ten years ago can be summed up in three letters O-I-L. Iraq, a virtually land-locked country wanted secure access to the sea for its exports and imports, so it invaded Kuwait. This represented a threat to the oil supplies of the capitalist West, so they went to war—and are still bombing and killing and starving ordinary people in Iraq to remove this threat. This has nothing to do with the fact that Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator who couldn’t care a damn about human rights. There are plenty of other dictators in the area—beginning with the King of Saudi Arabia and the other hereditary Gulf despots—who are left alone because they are on the side of the capitalist West.

It was the same earlier this year in Kosovo. Serbia wasn’t attacked because it was a dictatorship under Slobodan Milosevic but because it was a state with a powerful army that had been causing problems for Western capitalist interests in the area and had overstepped the mark. Neighbouring dictator and fellow ethnic-cleanser, Tunjman of Croatia, was left alone because he was “our bastard”.

East Timor? Who had heard of East Timor before last month? When Indonesian troops marched into this former Portuguese colony in 1975 the UN passed a resolution saying Indonesia had broken international law and left it at that. In the following years the Western capitalist powers competed amongst themselves for lucrative contracts from the Indonesian military. The ruling generals were invited to arms shows to buy guns, tanks, warplanes, ships, any military hardware they needed to maintain their grip on the country they were exploiting for their own ends.

“Please don’t use these weapons against your own people,” requested an ethically-minded diplomat. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” replied the generals. “That’s all right then,” replied the diplomat. When confronted with evidence that the generals were using British weapons for internal repression, a British Minister replied, “if we didn’t sell them arms, then the French would.” Questioned in the Assemblée Nationale on the same point, a French Minister replied, “if we didn’t sell them arms then the British would.”

When oil was discovered in the sea between East Timor and Australia, the Australian government decided that the Indonesian invasion of East Timor was not so contrary to international law after all. In order to get a share of the oil they signed an agreement recognising East Timor as part of Indonesia. Now they are leading the forces sent in to take East Timor from Indonesia. No wonder their erstwhile friends, the Indonesian rulers, regard them as two-faced double-dealers.

And of course a place like East Timor can never survive on its own. It’s obviously going to end up as an Australian dependency, no doubt giving Australia an even better oil deal.

That’s the way of the world—the capitalist world. And it’s no good just protesting about this and appealing to governments to base their foreign policy on ethical considerations. They can’t (except in words) even if they wanted to, since this would hamper them in the struggle for profits—and the trade routes, and investment outlets, and raw material sources, and strategic areas, to secure them.

The only way out is to get rid of global capitalism and replace it by a world socialist system in which all that is in and on the Earth becomes the common heritage of all humanity so that it can be used for the benefit of every man, woman and child on the planet irrespective of where they live, a small island or the industrialised heartlands.

Adam Buick