Free Societies Are Resented Because Their Governments Arm the Jailers

People in free countries are periodically astonished to discover how much they are hated in countries that are not free. The astonishment produces a small literature of explanations: envy, religion, humiliation, the pathologies of the resenting culture. Some of it is true. All of it leaves out the factor that is easiest to check and least comfortable to name.

The governments of free societies help the dictators. They sell them weapons. They buy their oil and their minerals on terms that keep the regime solvent. They prop up its political stability when it wobbles, because a wobbling regime is bad for contracts. They train its officers and receive its ministers. From inside the country, the free world is not an abstraction that believes in liberty. It is the supplier of the equipment used against you.

Seen From the Other Side

Put yourself in a country governed by fear. You know who is holding you down, and you know where his instruments come from. The armoured vehicles have a manufacturer. The surveillance software has a vendor. The loans that let the regime pay its security services have a lender. And when the regime is in trouble, the ambassador of some democracy arrives to express concern and to make sure the arrangement continues.

You are also told, from that same democracy, that it stands for freedom and human rights and that it would like you to have them too.

The natural response to that combination is not gratitude for the sentiment. It is contempt for the hypocrisy, and the contempt attaches not to the arms dealer or the oil company, whom you never see, but to the country whose flag is on the equipment. That is a large part of what free societies experience as inexplicable hatred.

Why Representative Government Cannot Stop It

Now ask why the governments of free countries behave this way, when their populations would mostly rather they did not.

The answer is the one I keep arriving at on this blog. The government is a representative body, and the interests it represents most reliably are the ones organised enough to reach it. The arms manufacturer reaches it. The energy company reaches it. The bank that holds the regime's debt reaches it. The citizen who would prefer his country not arm a tyrant has a mild preference and no lobby, and he is outvoted before the question is ever asked, because the question is never asked.

So the petty diplomacy continues, administration after administration, of every party. It is not a policy anyone campaigned on. It is what the structure produces, and I have argued elsewhere that this is a general property of the system rather than a failure of particular governments. The representative regime will go on serving the business community in its dealings with dictators as long as it is a representative regime, because the business community is what it is built to hear.

Under that arrangement there is little chance of abating the animosity. You cannot persuade a population that you wish them free while your government is under contract to keep them otherwise.

What Would Change It

Here is the part of the argument I consider important, and it is not the diagnosis.

Suppose the free societies of the West decided their foreign policy directly. Not by electing someone who promises to be principled, but by voting on the question: do we sell weapons to this regime, yes or no.

I do not know how every such vote would go. Publics are not saints, and there are cases where fear or interest would carry the day. But I am fairly confident about the aggregate, because the public has no contracts with the regime, no debt to protect, and no career in the arms trade. Its interest in arming a dictator is close to zero, and its distaste for it is real, and a decision procedure that counts the public rather than the lobby would reflect that.

And the effect on the people living under the dictator would be visible. For the first time they would be able to see the free world's intentions directly, in decisions taken by its citizens rather than by its ministries. They would see that when the question was put to the people, the people declined to arm the jailer. That is a different message from a speech about human rights delivered by the same government that signed the contract.

The Only Proof That Would Be Believed

Free societies have spent decades trying to convince the unfree that their intentions are good, and the effort has mostly failed, because the evidence points the other way and the people receiving the message can read evidence.

It is only by taking the decision out of the hands that profit from it that the free world could prove its intentions are not to subjugate but to help. Words will not do it; the words have been said, at length, by every leader for a century. Only a change in who decides could produce a change in what is decided, and only a change in what is decided would be believed by people who have every reason not to believe.

That is a foreign-policy argument for direct democracy, and I think it is one of the stronger ones. The domestic case rests on what the public would gain. This case rests on what everyone else would finally be able to see.