Soccer Dad

Easy to be soft

Reacting to a news story "Betancourt Vows Not to Cut Hair Until FARC Frees All Hostages", James Taranto yesterday noted sardonically, "That'll Show 'Em."

Such a move would no doubt be an expression of solidarity with the captives who were not rescued, but it will likely have no effect on speeding up their return.

In fact the show of solidarity is an example of what Charles Krauthammer calls soft power. He argues in How Hostages, And Nations, Get Liberated (or here) that soft power sounds great in theory, but it's hard power that actually gets the job done.

Unfortunately, karma does not easily cross the Atlantic. Betancourt languished for six years in cruel captivity until freed in a brilliant operation conducted by the Colombian military, intelligence agencies and special forces -- an operation so well executed that the captors were overpowered without a shot being fired.

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 Chávez offered to mediate.

Of course negotiating with, what one of Betancourt's fellow captives accurately called, "terrorists" is of limited utility. Ask Israel when Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev are coming home. (A few weeks ago Moshe Arens reminded us that in 2002, Israel did successfully defeat terrorists:

But once the Israel Defense Forces and the security services began to seriously tackle Palestinian terror, following the massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya in the spring of 2002, it quickly became clear that terror could be defeated by force. As a matter of fact, it could be defeated only by the use of force. The terrorists view any hints of Israeli willingness to give in to a portion of their essentially limitless demands as a sign of weakness, which only serves to encourage further acts of terror.

Arens observes, however, that Israel's leadership has forgotten the lesson learned.)

But exercising hard power has its costs.

And who's going to intervene? The only country that could is the country that in the past 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.

And even Betancourt, Krauthammer observes, didn't thank America for its help in gaining her freedom.

It may require hard power to get a job done, but for all the costs hard power incurs, it is, perhaps, easier to be soft.

Posted by SoccerDad at July 11, 2008 1:24 AM