Say that Aznar’s party lost in the Spanish election partly because some Spanish voters (it need not have been a majority, or even close to it) thought the Madrid bombings were al Qaeda’s retaliation for the Spanish involvement in Iraq, and wanted to punish Aznar for it. Of course, this might not be the correct interpretation of the election results, in which case the rest of this post is beside the point; but at least right now it seems to be a popular interpretation, and a plausible one.
Those voters’ position would be understandable — perhaps not terribly sound in the long term, but understandable: The deaths were caused by Aznar’s policies, since if he had not supported the Americans (over the opposition of most Spaniards, as I understand), the bombings probably wouldn’t have happened; therefore, let’s punish Aznar, and send politicians a message to prevent this from happening again.
But if that’s so, then doesn’t it show that we can’t allow our foreign policy to be vetoed by other nations? After all, if we agree that we may not do what we think is right and necessary for our national security if any one of England, France, Russia, or China says “veto,” then our enemies can paralyze us simply by influencing one foreign country. The influence might be exerted by bribes (more here), or by threat of terrorist violence. But one way or another, an enemy that couldn’t break down our resolve could still stop us from doing what needs to be done by breaking down the resolve of one of the veto-owning countries. (The same applies if we just generally agree not to go ahead without the agreement of “our European allies” generally — if the threat of terrorist retaliation cows several of those allies, that could be enough to stymie our plans.)
As I mentioned before, there are three possible reasons for a position that we shouldn’t do certain things without multilateral support. One is purely pragmatic: if we don’t have much foreign support, the theory goes, our task will be too hard, either because we won’t have enough material help, or because the lack of foreign support will undermine our credibility with (say) the Iraqis. A second relates to legitimacy: certain kinds of actions, the theory goes, are only morally or legally legitimate if we have support from certain foreign bodies, or perhaps from a certain range of foreign countries. A third relates to foreign support being probative of the need for action: if we don’t fully trust our government’s judgment, then we might consider other countries’ judgment as evidence of whether the action is practically and morally justified.
But the second and third reasons, it seems to me, are pretty weak if we think foreign countries are likely to be influenced by the risk of terrorist retaliation. The foreign countries’ decisions may simply be probative of their own desire not to be attacked, not of what’s the morally right thing to do in the abstract, or what’s the practically right thing to do for us (or even what’s in the aggregate interests of humanity generally). And I don’t see why we should ascribe to a view of legitimacy that makes our actions illegitimate whenever the terrorists are able to force other countries to oppose us.
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