Letters to the Editor

As American soldiers excavated Haitians from their own ruins, I was reminded of the last time the United States violated Haitian sovereignty. It was 1994, and civil rights activist Randall Robinson, along with a who’s who of the day’s celebrities, had gone on hunger strike. The United States, these onetime reflexive opponents of U.S. military action demanded, had to invade Haiti—the point being to exchange one suspect ruler for another. Which we then did.

But those were different times, as Mark Mazower recounts in his fine contribution to this issue. Or were they? A few issues back, Robert Kagan wrote that it was not as if the successes of U.S. foreign policy have been “the product of a good America and the failures the product of a bad America.” They have all been the product of the same America. And, yet, even now, around the margins of the debate over the U.S. role in Haiti—as well as on the New York Times Op-Ed page—one hears echoes of “the utopian nihilism of a left that would prefer to see genocide in Bosnia and the mass deportation of Kosovars rather than strengthen, however marginally, the hegemony of the United States,” as David Rieff summarized the mindset many years ago.

The conviction that American power is tainted, marred by involvement in too many suspect conflicts, really got its jump start in Vietnam. Iraq has revived the old suspicions. Haiti ought to dispel them. Purely in terms of power projection, who else is there when catastrophe comes? Europe? Ask the Bosnians. The United Nations? Ask anyone. China? It inspires fear and loathing among its neighbors. So, even as Mazower’s liberal hawks cast about for alternatives to American power, they may as well call off the search. Whether provoked by state-sanctioned depredations, or genocide, or massive natural disaster, the decisive intervention will come from the United States, or it probably won’t come at all.

—Lawrence F. Kaplan   

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