(...) In 1919 Moscow's rulers were so exhilarated by the triumph of communism that they determined to bring its benefits to the outside world. This was to be led by Lenin's Communist Party under the leadership of the Comintern. Agents were dispatched and uprisings stirred wherever bourgeois oligarchy seemed ripe for toppling.
Trotsky sat in his armoured train, fantasising that no force on Earth could withstand his revolutionary Red Army. The Comintern boss, Zinoviev, declared that all Europe would soon be one socialist state. Communist ideology followed where crusaders and Victorian missionaries had formerly trod. Within half a century some version of that ideology had overtaken half the globe. The Internationale won the hearts of liberal-minded people everywhere.
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But I shudder to see the new crusaders for capitalism and democracy mimicking the attitudes of Trotsky and Zinoviev. Flushed with victory and blind to the views, or personal sovereignty, of others, they criss-cross the Earth claiming the right to superimpose their order on its states.
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Never was Marx's gibe more true, that capitalism was not about promoting markets but about closing them. There is no greater battery of "economic sanctions" in place against the world's poor than Western food subsidies and trade restrictions. Not only does Europe exclude Third World sugar but it dumps its surpluses on those who once grew it. America bans African and Asian cotton to maintain its own growers.
It is not that Western governments mean to be cruel to the poor. They simply know that Third World farmers do not vote in Western elections. Humbug costs nothing.
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Likewise the interventionist's search for "world order" in the Balkans and the Middle East. They rule Bosnia and Kosovo, without democracy. They subsidise both sides in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. They bomb and try to make amends in Iraq. Always there are the best of intentions.
Lenin too wanted to make the world a better place. But good intentions also pave the road to Hell. The one emotion now binding almost all Muslim countries is a hatred not of Western values but of Western power, as a survey in the latest issue of The Economist vividly records.
Donald Rumsfeld's retort that any such hatred can be "confronted" by military might is pure Trotsky. George Bush's remark to Bob Woodward that he does not mind fighting the whole world alone because "we are America" is pure Comintern.
Advocates of interventionism as diverse as Michael Ignatieff, Philip Bobbitt and Geoffrey Robertson have regarded the role of the West in setting the world to rights as a maxim not requiring proof. It is justified by faith.
Their one enemy is isolationism (which they call appeasement). Their forebears sought a better Chile, a better Nicaragua, a better Vietnam and, I suppose, a better Bay of Pigs.
But I find it bizarre that those who can be libertarian towards individual behaviour at home can be so deeply authoritarian overseas. I believe history will show the West's 15 years of intervention in Iraq as duplicitous, lethal and wholly counterproductive to regional peace and order. Yet at every turn some proto-imperialist will have called it "moral".
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I am not a pacifist, merely a realist. I regard greater humility and deference to the self-determination of states (however awful) as probably wise.
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As for world poverty, that is best met by the judicious application of health, education and charity, and by bilateral trade deals between states. World summits have only made the rich richer and the poor poorer. They do not deliver.
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The post-Cold War craze for supranational action, to intervene at every opportunity to bring the world to order, has lost touch with national roots. It has lost its domestic accountability. Mostly it only prolongs disorder.
Come back, Voltaire. We help the world better by tending our own garden. This week we heard that message loud and clear.
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