[Movie Clip, Hotel Rwanda, 2004, United Artists]
[Women screaming, men chanting]
JACK DAGLISH (JOAQUIN PHOENIX) [offscreen]: I point at you, you do a shot.
PAUL RUSESABAGINA (DON CHEADLE): Excuse me, Mr. Daglish.
DAGLISH: Hey, whoa.
Listen.
Sorry about earlier.
If I'd known you were in there, I wouldn't have -
RUSESABAGINA: I am glad that you have shot this footage.
And that the world will see it.
It is the only way we have a chance that people might intervene.
DAGLISH: Yeah, and if no one intervenes, it's still a good thing to show.
RUSESABAGINA: How can they not intervene, when they witness such atrocities?
DAGLISH: Well, I think if people see this footage, they'll say, "Oh my God, that's horrible,"
and then go on eating their dinners.
[End clip] JAN TING: Well I think Bryan has the easier
side of the argument here, given our history, our recent history, that American intervention
has not proven successful.
And indeed, one could argue has been disastrous, and time after time.
Many young people here are too young to remember the war in Vietnam, and I am not, unfortunately,
too young to remember it.
And so that was a big disaster.
And in your young lives you've seen the disastrous war in Iraq, and some would argue the war
in Afghanistan has been equally disastrous.
So how do you make the case for military intervention?
I think I would just say this: that there are times when military intervention on the
part of the United States is appropriate.
And I think those times include when you're up against an ideology or a religion that
justifies the killing of people in the name of that ideology or that religion.
And the examples that I would offer were Franklin D. Roosevelt, who recognized that there was
great evil in the world in Nazism, national socialism, in Germany and in Japanese imperialism.
Both enamored with the idea of a master race and human superiority of their race and ethnicity.
And I think Roosevelt understood that, and he positioned the United States to stand up
against it militarily even before the declaration of war.
Even before Pearl Harbor.
The United States was intervening militarily to support England in their fight against
Germany and to support China in their resistance against Japan.
Was that wrong?
I don' t think so.
And it did lead the United States into war, but that was a war where we belonged.
I think in the current environment, we are confronted with a religious movement where
people feel it is justified by God to kill young women who are seeking higher education.
To kill health care providers who are trying to bring the benefits of science to poor people
throughout the world.
And I think that is a great evil.
And I think the United States is right to lend its resources whenever free people anywhere
in the world are standing up to that kind of, I think what can only be called fascism.
And when is the right time?
I don't think any ideology can give us the answer all the time as to what the answer
is.
Should we intervene?
Should we not intervene?
We've had arguments over Syria and Libya.
Those are real arguments.
I think the best we can do is reject ideology as a solution to these problems and try and
elect people whose judgment we trust.
Ultimately it comes down to a judgment question.
There are times when it's appropriate to intervene militarily; there are lot of times when we're
better off not intervening militarily.
And it's our business as free citizens to elect leaders whose judgment we trust on those
questions.
BRANDON TURNER: Great.
BRYAN CAPLAN: I'm going to make the argument hard for myself by defending an extreme position.
This is my four-step case for pacifism.
First, in modern wars, there are no wars of self defense.
War today inevitably means deliberately or at least recklessly killing innocent civilians.
This creates a strong moral presumption against war.
Two, to overcome this presumption you'd have to show the long-run benefits of war are so
wonderful that they clearly overshadow this grisly short-run cost, and you have to show
that there isn't any cheaper, more humane way to obtain these benefits.
Three, in practice, predicting the consequences of war is extremely difficult.
Extremely difficult.
Expert predictions are hardly better than chance.
The political scientist Philip Tetlock did a 25-years study where he asked people to
predict events very early on and then went to see if they were right.
They did barely better than chance, even though they were the experts in the areas they were
talking about in foreign policy.
Saying it's complicated or there are no easy answers is not a good enough reason to deliberately
or recklessly kill lots of innocent people.
Fourth, there are much cheaper and more humane ways to attain the alleged humanitarian benefits
of war.
First and foremost, free immigration.
Do you think that the women who are worried for their lives as they are going to college
would even be there anymore if they can get a green card and come here?
I don't think so.
Do you think the people in Hotel Rwanda would have been there if they could have just gotten
out of the country when they saw the writing on the wall?
They would be gone.
These are cheaper, much more humane ways of solving these problems than going and attacking
other countries, crossing our fingers, and hoping for the best.
TURNER: Okay, so I'll start the questions.
I'll start with Professor Caplan.
And this kind of actually gets at something you were saying before, right?
I mean, there isn't a clear moral principle by which we distinguish between those located
within the United States and those outside.
So if there were, for example, ethnic cleansing happening in San Diego, we would probably
feel obligated to step in.
Why would we feel less obligated to step in if it's happening in Montreal?
CAPLAN: It is a great question.
I would apply exactly the same test I just did inside or outside the country.
Do we have a clear reason to think that the long-run benefits are so wonderful that they
are going to outweigh the short run costs?
It may be, within the country, that is actually likely, but, see for example, I am not a fan
of guerrilla warfare.
What does actual guerrilla warfare in the real word mean?
It means you are going to wind up killing recklessly or - either deliberately or recklessly
killing a whole lot of innocent people.
That's the real world.
Guerrilla warfare is not someone going to a village and saying, "Hello.
Would you like to join my crusade to free the world?"
It is showing up there with some guns and saying, "You better volunteer to join our
guerrilla army now, or else."
And so I would say the principle inside or outside the country is the same.
In both cases, if you actually can have legitimately high confidence that the benefits of what
you're doing are so great they are going to outweigh the short run horrors, then I think
it's okay.
It's just very hard to obtain that in the real world.
TING: I feel a lot of sympathy for Bryan's four points, and I think they argue strongly
in favor of not going to war as your first, second, or third choice.
And I'm just leaving open the possibility that there are times when it might be justified
because you're up against a moral evil that you can't reason with, that is, in the name
of ideology or religion is going to kill.
And I certainly do not think that open borders and open immigration is a solution to that
problem throughout the world, because it not only brings the victims to the United States,
but it brings the perpetrators to the United States as well.
And we've seen that in the United States with the spread of foreign practices like honor
killings that are taking place in the United States now in immigrant communities.
So I think we need to recognize the reality that if you throw the borders open, you admit
everyone into the United States, and you bring all of those problems in with it.
I didn't want to mix the two topics together, but there we are.
TURNER: There's a clear border between them and I do not want to cross that.
Do you want to?
CAPLAN: So Jan, let's go back to your World War II example.
All right, so the United States went and stood up for China against Japan.
Now what actually happened?
As you know, we were talking about it before, the result was that the communists seized
control of China and murdered far more people than the Japanese did during the entire reign
of terror of the Japanese Empire.
That's what I'm talking about.
You may say there's a clear gain here.
It's not clear.
If you think it's clear, it's because you don't actually understand what's going on.
TING: It would have been worse for the world if Japan had won.
It would have been worse for the world if Nazi Germany had won.
Yes, there were terrible consequences as a result of American intervention, but it would
have been worse.
And I think the United States did the right thing.
I think the judgment of history is clear on this point.
The United States did the right thing to lend its military might to the struggle for human
freedom against forces of ideological and religious tyranny.
And I think there may be times in the future - maybe this is one of the times, I don't
know, I hope not - when we're called upon to do it again.
CAPLAN: The judgment of history is clear when you don't have to predict the future.
That is the problem.
It's easy to look back and say that we did the right thing; however the counterfactual
which you would have actually had to face at the time is, it possible that the Empire
of Japan would have calmed down the same way that Mao's China calmed down?
Totally possible.
We don't know.
So to say that we look back and it turned out to be better - it is far from clear that
it actually was better.
Mao killed way more people than the Japanese did in the midst of decades of war.
TURNER: But isn't there a problem with your, so you have a limiting principle of pacifism,
which is, namely, you do a kind of cost-benefit analysis?
CAPLAN: I mean it's not just cost-benefit analysis.
I say you need to have a clear evidence of much larger benefits.
TURNER: But you seem to be denying at the same time the very possibility of that clear
evidence.
CAPLAN: I don't deny the possibility, just the empirical likelihood.
If someone says, I know the future for certain, here's how it's going to be: This is going
to cost five lives and save a million lives.
My answer to that person is, how could you possibly know that?
Are you willing to bet?
Let's put some money on it.
Let's go and check out your betting record on things like this.
Let's do ten bets, see how many you get right.
You're going to be wrong a lot.
TURNER: But what about in the incident in San Diego?
Again, we've got ethnic cleansing going on in San Diego.
I mean, like, do we tell the police chief, listen, you've got five minutes to do this.
Very sophisticated.
I want you to place nine bets and et cetera, et cetera, right?
I mean, I think it's pretty much, it's clear what our principle is in this case.
We assume it will be worth it to prevent ethnic cleansing in San Diego.
CAPLAN: Assuming isn't good enough.
If you actually know, great.
If your example is constructed so that it's a no-brainer, fine.
But in the real world, it's not a no-brainer.
And even cases you think are easy.
Let's think about the U.S. defense of Kuwait against Iraq.
Seemed like a no-brainer.
What came of that?
Everything else that followed.
TURNER: Let me put up a question to Professor Ting: So you mentioned we have kind of a justification
of the principle of intervention, the principles behind intervention, based on the experience
in World War II.
But again World War II was like 10 wars ago.
TING: Right.
TURNER: So in other words, isn't so -
TING: Ancient history.
Peloponnesian Wars.
TURNER: Right.
So have we reached a point where the logic of intervention is sort of a perpetual motion
machine?
We have intervened here and now we must intervene here and now we must intervene here?
TING: Well, I think there is a problem.
We have a World War II mentality.
We got surprised in Pearl Harbor, and we've been reacting to that ever since.
And I think it's a problem.
And, again, I'm very sympathetic to Bryan's arguing, that there are a lot of arguments
why war should be your last, absolutely your last resort.
But should it be taken off the table?
Should we unilaterally disarm?
If we're never going to, isn't the logic of peace at any price saying we're going to unilaterally
disarm?
It would save us a lot of money, I concede you that, but I don't think we're ready to
do that.
I think we understand that there are bad forces at work in the world, and we need to defend
ourselves against them, otherwise why do we have a country?
Right?
Unless you're an anarchist, and maybe some of you may be, but why do we have a country?
We have a country to defend ourselves against evil elsewhere in the world.
And I think we need military forces to do it.
And why should you have military forces if there are no conceivable circumstances in
which you'd ever use them?
TURNER: Okay I want to go to the last segment which is the inter-questioning.
So who went first last time?
I think Bryan you went first last time.
Do you have a question to Bryan?
TING: Are you in favor of abolishing the U.S. military given the fact that you're so committed
to never using it?
Isn't that the logical outcome of what you're saying?
CAPLAN: The answer is a definite maybe.
Here's what I would say.
It is often the case that countries have military problems because they have a military.
The Soviet Union was at risk because the Red Army was powerful.
When the Red Army collapsed, the Soviet Union became safer, because they were no longer
terrifying and frightening and terrifying other countries.
Other countries were no longer scared for their lives.
It is easy - it is often possible for unilateral disarmament even to reduce the risk that a
country faces.
And note that it doesn't specifically require that you have democracies on the other side.
Communist China was still on the Soviet border.
They disarmed.
They did not get a sneak attack from communist China.
As a general rule, being better armed does not always make you safer.
It often makes you less safe, because it provokes other countries, angers them.
So I would say it is a very good idea for the U.S. to greatly reduce its military spending
and at least see what happens.
I think that it's quite likely that we could get an outcome as good as what the Swiss have:
namely, since no one is scared of them, nobody bothers them.
TURNER: You want to respond?
TING: No one can accurately predict the future.
I mean I agree with Bryan on that.
But I think your example of China kind of disproves your fundamental point about how
bad the consequences were of World War II.
Yeah, communism triumphed in China.
But look where they are now.
They're a communist state that's studying free-market principles and trying to absorb
them as quickly as they can.
So the future is not foreseeable, at least very far into the future, and I think that
calls on us to use our judgment and not ideology in going forward.
They are complicated.
factual -
We can't simplify the world as much as we would like to and reduce it to a handful of
principles.
It's a complicated world, and the difficult path forward for us is to study the world,
learn as much as we can about it, appreciate the complexity and the detail in the world,
and argue about the best way forward for us.
And I think the best way forward for us is to maintain some level of military strength
and be prepared to stand up for American principles and values when they are under attack by evil
forces elsewhere in the world.
TURNER: Professor Caplan, do you have a question?
CAPLAN: It seems like there's a long list of evils that you're unlikely to want to do
anything about.
Do you want to invade Saudi Arabia so they stop oppressing their women?
Do you want to threaten war against China unless they switch to democracy?
There are many U.S. allies that commit the very crimes that you're talking about, but
as long as they're our buddies we do very little about it.
And it seems like most people have no problem with that.
What do you think?
TING: I don't think you can say just because there's a lot of problems in the world that
we're going to intervene everywhere.
In fact, I'm very sympathetic to the notion that we ought to have an aversion to intervention,
absolutely.
And I'm saying that there are a small number of situations, like when you're battling an
unthinking ideology of racial superiority as prevailed in Nazi Germany and in Japan,
or maybe now, when you're battling a religious intolerance that calls for the murder in the
name of God, as though God is ordering these murders and issuing fatwas on people.
Maybe that's a situation where people are willing to stand up and defend themselves
for the United States to lend some support to free people elsewhere in the world willing
to stand up and fight.
And I think we need to have armed forces standing in reserve to lend that support where it's
in our interest and in the interest of humankind to do so.
TURNER: Professor Caplan, do you want a last word?
CAPLAN: It seems like really all that you're saying is even though we have a lot of evidence
that our best thinking isn't very good, let's do it anyway and rely on it.
I think we really need to take seriously the true complexity.
It's so complex that even if people try their best, they're very bad at doing this.
And saying we're going to go and attack a country and kill a lot of innocent people
when we just have a guess that it might be better is not good enough.