Financial Times

Chambers fail to grasp importance of US goodwill

By Nous
Perhaps we hardly ever feel much of an urge to examine our attitude towards the United States, and even if such an urge was felt, yielding to it would seem idle for many in business, what with China and India on the rise and the US becoming increasingly an object of angry and contemptuous condemnation. Yet the need to examine our attitude towards the US has never been more compelling.

Our two societies are so dissimilar in moral and spiritual underpinnings that we are not obliged to like the US, just because she is the world's superpower; we are nevertheless obliged to express our gratitude, when she makes a stand to risk her prestige on our behalf. The terrorism that has overtaken the process of nation building in our country has also propelled the LTTE into the position of social and intellectual leader of the Tamil community. The efforts so far to reverse such indignities have amounted to nothing. Even in rare moments when those efforts seemed most honest, we have been forced to confront the uphill task of moving from the romanticism of revolution and militancy into the routine of democratic governance

Meanwhile, wherever we look, life appears to be crude, thuggish, unrestrained and undistinguished. The situation would have looked utterly hopeless if it had not been for the recent US intervention, which suggests a certain willingness to risk American prestige in our conflict.

Yet, if America's usefulness was seen merely in terms of superpower politics, we would be doing a great disservice to our own government, whose decision it was to try to bend America's ear, and to our southern comrades who in a rare demonstration of judiciousness acquiesced in the decision. For, it may be pertinently asked, what possible value would the United States be to us, even as a superpower, if her sensibilities as well as the ideas and ideals that animate her had mirrored say those of the Chinese or the Russians or even the Europeans for that matter?

Indeed, it is because there is presently a discernable difference between the US and others who stand to serve our ends that we should consider her by far the most useful.

To us, this difference has to do with the clear perspective on terrorism that the US has come upon, and the unique understanding that she has on nation building, which is informed by America's own historical struggles to secure the blessings of liberty to all her inhabitants, as a process whose completion has no conceivable date in any calendar.

The singularity of US objectives shone through the remarks that Nicholas Burns made recently: "Sri Lankan Tamils have legitimate grievances… [But] there is no moral equivalency between the government and the LTTE. The government is democratic and… the people of this country ought not to have to live a further 15 to 20 years with a reprehensible terrorist group keeping this country perched on the edge of war."

It is difficult to deny that, when the emphasis is on the enemies of constitutional democracy, we stand to benefit from a genuine cooperation with the US.

The danger, however, lies in thinking that the US is somehow obliged to help us, and that the character and scope of American involvement ought not be linked, as it inexorably is, to her sense of self-preservation.

There is perhaps no higher ethical principle that could help forge the foreign policy of a (free) nation than the principle of self-preservation - and our own need for charity and philanthropy should never be allowed to obscure that. That the US foreign policy actually finds itself functioning in a global environment that demands policies aimed at the advancement of liberty and the elimination of terror inspired by the unruly and the distempered cannot easily be gainsaid, even though such an aim might fall short of the French proposal to use tactical nuclear weapons.

Besides, any nation resolved to uphold the Western ideals of democracy and the rule of law and faced with a militancy bent on subverting the democratic resolve would be well served by the present manifestation of the US foreign policy, if the wit for rational cooperation could be found. This is where our own trade and industry associations have failed miserably. They, instead of exploring the ways of developing a deep and abiding friendship with the US, have been busy mingling with NGO worthies exploring ways to educate their supposed inferiors on the need for peace.

Those of us whose outlook is largely shaped by the belief that the mysterious is divine and that Nature dances to the tunes of religious chants, rhymes and formulas are apt to find the global war on terror unconvincing.

However, the elimination of terror is all-consuming for a civilization shaped by the belief that "there are no fearful powers to be propitiated in fearful ways ", that the world is intelligible. The dignity of being a rational animal has any meaning only in a rational universe. The Greeks dismissed the terror inspired by the mysterious; it has now fallen on the Americans to eliminate the terror inspired by men.

(The writer could be reached at letters@nous-makingcents.org).

Back to Business