Moral Equivalence - Cold War

Cold War

In the Cold War context, the term was and is most commonly used by anti-Communists as an accusation of formal fallacy for leftist criticisms of United States foreign policy and military conduct.

Many such people believed in the idea that the United States is by definition benevolent, that the extension of its power, influence and hegemony is an extension of benevolence and brings freedom to those people subject to that hegemony. Therefore, by definition, those who opposed that were by definition evil, trying to deny the benevolence to people. The USSR and its allies, in contrast, practiced a totalitarian ideology. A territory under US hegemony thus would be freed from possibly being in the camp of the totalitarian power and would help to weaken it. Thus, all means were justified in keeping territories away from Soviet influence in this way. This extended to countries not under Soviet influence but instead said to be sympathetic at all in any way with it. Therefore, Chile under Salvador Allende was not under Soviet domination, but removing him would help weaken the USSR by removing a government ruled with the help of a Communist Party. The big picture, they would say, justified the tortures carried out by the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship as it served to weaken the totalitarian Communist camp and in time bring about the freedom of those under its domination.

Many of those who criticized US foreign policy at the time contended that US power in the Cold War was used only to pursue an economically-driven agenda. They claim that the underlying economic motivation eroded any claims of moral superiority, leaving the hostile acts in (Korea, Hungary, Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua) to stand on their own in justifying the human lives the conflicts had destroyed. In contrast, those who justified US interventions in the Cold War period always cast these as being motivated by the need to contain totalitarianism and thus fulfilled a higher moral imperative. That was so despite such things as the overthrow of Guatemala's elected non-Communist Jacobo Arbenz, for instance, on behalf of the United Fruit Company with whom senior US officials had an important business relationship.

These people denied the existence of an "economic-driven agenda". There was in fact, a moral difference between the Soviet Union and the United States, and that policy arising in defense of the "moral superiority" of the US could not and can not be "immoral." Hence an argument which claimed that the two parties could be viewed as "equally" culpable in a struggle for supremacy, would be advocating "moral equivalence."

An early popularizer of the expression was Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was United States ambassador to the United Nations in the Reagan administration. Kirkpatrick published an article called The Myth of Moral Equivalence in 1986, in which sharply criticized those who she alleged were claiming that there was "no moral difference" between the Soviet Union and democratic states. In fact, very few critics of United States policies in the Cold War era argued that there was a moral equivalence between the two sides. Communists, for instance, argued that the Soviet Union was morally superior to its adversaries.

Leftist critics usually argued that the United States itself created a "moral equivalence" when some of its actions, such as President Ronald Reagan's support for the Contra insurgency against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, put it on the same level of immorality as the Soviet Union.

Following the dissolution of the USSR, the expansion of US influence has continued. The purveyors of the moral equivalence device have continued to demand this in the form of NATO expansion, the overthrow of rogue states, the invasion of Iraq, and the War on Terror. The morally inferior opponents have been recast as Islamic fundamentalists, anti-Israeli powers, Russia, China, drug traffickers, and Serbian nationalists, among others.