The wisdom of “hard power”
July 16, 2008
We regularly stand in awe of the wisdom of Charles Krauthammer. This analysis of the reasons why Ingrid Betancourt was freed from her six years of captivity is a worthy example of a remarkable sage:
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. . . .
And so the innocent languish [under the heavy hand of oppressors in Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan], as did Betancourt [under FARC], until some local power, inexplicably under the sway of the Bush notion of hard power, gets it done — often with the support of the American military. “Behind the rescue in a jungle clearing stood years of clandestine American work,” explained The Washington Post. “It included the deployment of elite U.S. Special Forces . . . a vast intelligence-gathering operation . . . and training programs for Colombian troops.”
But no thanks to the United States from the world or Betancourt.
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