Last month, President Ahmadinejad of Iran came to New York City for the UN General Assembly. Some brave soul at Columbia University invited him to speak. Dr. Bollinger, the President of Columbia, covered his backside by prefacing Ahmadinejad's speech with an inaccurate catalogue of his and Iran's shortcomings.
In every society I ever visited as diplomat or tourist, I profited from the fact that rudeness to an invited guest was considered despicable. In New York City, however, Bollinger was blasted for allowing Ahmadinejad to be invited in the first place. Speaking at an august American university would "legitimize" him.
It isn't only Michelle Malkin and other genocidal bigots of the religious right who believe this. The whole U.S. political system deludes itself at regular intervals that Americans have the power to legitimize or delegitimize foreigners. We would laugh at any pundit who claimed that accepting an invitation to visit Tehran would legitimize President Bush. But we are apparently sincere in our faith that foreign politicians draw their right to rule from the applause of an American audience.
To simplify a complex notion, legitimacy is that attribute of individuals and institutions that causes their instructions to be obeyed. As a U.S. diplomat, I learned the hard way that legitimacy is too vital a commodity to leave to outsiders to dictate who gets it. Each society awards legitimacy on the basis of internal competition. Heredity, looks, and presumed aptitude for successful violence against aggressors are key factors human use. But chimpanzees have pretty similar criteria.
Profound moral instincts underlie many of the rules governing legitimacy. But legitimacy isn't itself necessarily moral. Hitler was legitimate to millions of Germans, in the sense that they obeyed his abhorrent orders even when it was possible to do otherwise. If traffic lights were not legitimate, we would stop driving or else die painfully. But if President Bush were not legitimate, our troops would not now be floundering now in Iraq.
By being the potential aggressor against whom foreigner leaders burnish their credentials, the United States has some ability to legitimize its enemies. U.S. policy helped render Fidel Castro immune to Cuban domestic opposition for 36 years. As a superpower, we can also delegitimize our friends, by letting them sidle discreditably close to us. By doing so, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines gave U.S. diplomats the ability to hand power to his democratic rivals simply by pulling the plug on support for him. But in terms of day-to-day diplomacy, withholding legitimacy from unfriendly foreign leaders is like holding our breath. Bystanders place bets on long we will last and what shade of blue we will turn.
Non-domestic sources of legitimacy are weak. The most effective of them, one this White House hates using, is strenuous adherence to the handful of universal moral norms hard-wired into the human psyche. Hospitality is such a norm. America's rudeness to a guest did not weaken Ahmadinejad where it mattered. On the contrary, it gave ordinary Iranians another reason to conclude the United States should not be trusted as an arbiter of legitimacy in their own society.
One odd thing is that delegitimizing Ahmadinejad is not really in our best interest, even if we knew how. We are asking Iran to renounce a sovereign right to a full nuclear fuel cycle. No current U.S. politician could make such a renunciation and survive in office, no matter how money and praise foreigners showered on him for doing so. Gorbachev, who nobly relinquished an oppressive Soviet empire, is despised by his own people.
Because Ahmadinejad was elected with a reasonably honest popular majority, there is a tiny chance that he will be strong enough to make a deal. It helps us that he believes nuclear weapons are contrary to divine law. Any less popular replacement would have no choice but to emulate President Bush in putting national security -- in the form of a credible nuclear deterrent -- above the religious ban on mass murder.
Before the Iraq fiasco, the American Enterprise Institute's public intellectuals happily exploited the Bush Administration's ignorance and narcissism. They massively exaggerated America's ability to rig the rules of foreign political competition to legitimize charlatans like Ahmed Chalabi. Now they spread the lie that Iran is Germany and Ahmadinejad is Hitler, not because they believe it - some of them know history and geography pretty well -- but because no honest argument would trump the State Department's national security argument for pragmatic diplomatic engagement with Iran.
Vice President Cheney went on television October 21 to stress that he is deadly serious about war with Iran. I believe him. Until Cheney is safely out of office, international relations remain a life or death issue for the American people. It therefore behooves us to treat the mirage of America's cross-border legitimacy with the seriousness and sophistication the topic deserves.