The third lesson of Nelson Mandela: with great foreign intervention comes flawed moral reasoning.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top - Editorial

When South African prisoner-turned-president Nelson Mandela died on December 5 at age 95, commentators all over the globe wasted no time extracting two main lessons from the great man's life. One about persevering in the long struggle against injustice, the other about refusing to become embittered in the process.

Anyone fighting tyranny can take inspiration from Mandela's fierce, unwavering opposition to the race-based totalitarianism long practiced by South Africa's Afrikaner minority. As President Barack Obama said, "He achieved more than could be expected of any man." And Mandela's post-jail decision to reconcile with the regime that had persecuted him, rather than seeking vengeance, was one of the most stirring examples of power spurned this side of George Washington. "Nelson Mandela could have chosen to be--had the power to become--an even greater monster than [Robert] Mugabe," the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt wrote just after Mandela's death. "Instead, Mandela chose to become a saint."

Saint will be too strong a word for the many Americans, mostly on the right, who remember less nostalgically Mandela's Cold War-era partnership with terrorism-supporting communists such as the longtime African National Congress (ANC) leader Joe Slovo, his affection for Fidel Castro ("Long live the Cuban Revolution! Long live Comrade Fidel Castro!"), or even his more recent statement, in 2003, that "if there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings."

In the globe-straddling ideological proxy war between the mostly free, capitalist-friendly, U.S.-led West and the mostly captive, communism-expanding, Soviet-led East, many Republicans believed Mandela chose the wrong side, both pragmatically and ideologically. "The release of Mandela," William F. Buckley wrote in 1990, "for all that we can know, may one day be likened to the arrival of Lenin at the Finland station in 1917." Five years earlier Buckley had proclaimed that "where Mandela belongs, in his current frame of mind, is precisely where he is: in jail."

Such sentiments, jarring as they are to our 21st-century ears, suggest a third lesson from Mandela's life: Massive American engagement with the fortunes of other countries, no matter how justified, is inherently corrupting. And not just for the William F. Buckleys of the world.

The American anti-apartheid movement of the mid-1980s, in which...