Getting Serious about Foreign Policy
I have recently accused certain political and media elites of wielding disproportionate influence in the foreign policy debate unleashed by 9/11. Certain ideas are taken seriously and others are shut out of the realm of possibility. This is all due to the fact that the Republicans have chose to fight a "war on terror" and everyone jumped on board in those flag-waving days after 9/11. Herein lies the problem. Most Americans saw, for the first time, the vulnerability of their country and experienced the chaos and ominous environment that follows a terrorist act. There was a moment of bonding that initially occurred in which even I, a cynic, felt that maybe, just maybe, the best features of our nation might come out and deal with the issue of international terrorism as a world leader, with our allies at our side.
You see why I'm a cynic. Even as I watched members of Congress sing on the steps of the capitol I couldn't help but feel dread--dread that this nation was about to react to those events in the Fall of 2001 in entirely the wrong fashion. Five years later that is exactly what has happened and it has been even worse than I imagined. At first I thought we would merely piss off the Muslim world with our reaction. Instead we have lost our status as the moral and military leader of the world. That is an immense foreign policy failure, perhaps the biggest, and we now need to design a new foreign policy that is a sharp, clean, permanent and unambiguous break from that of the Bush administration. Criticism is easy but there are two more years of this criminal administration left--its time to get serious about foreign policy.
1) Acknowledge that terrorism is an asymmetrical threat. The only reason this is not discussed in the mainstream is because the post-9/11 vulnerability complex played right into the Republican's protection racket. This then evolved into a paternalistic permanent campaign slogan of, essentially, "vote Republican or the terrorists will win." I do not know how much the American people buy into that anymore, but the GOP is not letting it go as a campaign tactic. It is impossible to have a good foreign policy when the party in power accuses the party out of power of being terrorist sypathizers without any evidence whatsoever. This is quite different from Democrats criticizing Bush and the Republicans: by a dozen different measures Bush and the GOP have increased the terrorist pool, dried up our international resources through a unilateral policy and bankrupted and overextended our military. These are sobering facts one can point to. The last time Democrats had a record on fighting terror was under Clinton, and the GOP has attempted to tarnish that record with boldfaced lies. The Republicans simply can't be trusted with the foreign policy agenda anymore. They're out of ideas. And while there is no single Democratic response to these questions, their ideas have yet to see the light of day in this political environment. If the Right wing wishes to criticize a future Democratic majority's foreign policy, let them, but it will have to be on the merits, not based on cheap fear mongering.
2) With political barriers removed to the execution of a wise foreign policy, we can look at the specifics. Using a vast military to fight underground terrorist cells is ludicrous. That is what is meant by aysmmetrical. There are no armies large enough to legitimately engage the United States in conventional warfare, which is why terrorism is inevitable in a unipolar world with dissatisfied actors. I don't know how many Special Forces or Navy SEALs units you could recruit and train for the cost of just one of our pricier units of military hardware, but I bet its a lot. Rather than investing in a global network of forward-based military installations and state-of-the-art air superiority we could be training a corps of skilled warriors adept at the art of covert ops. This should all be exciting stuff for the Right wingers and their military fetish. I can't help but think that blunt force and good 'ol Congressional pork are the factors sustaining our current military arrangements.
3) "American Exceptionalism." What does this term mean? In short, it means two things: we have the might and the right to exercise our will over the world. The problem is that our military might was built rapidly upon our entrance in WWII. That generation of military and political leaders built and earned respect in the world, which gave us our moral standing. Over time, when military power was simply assumed instead of built from scratch to fight fascism, we settled into complacency. We assumed we could handle any military situation. One disastrous war in Southeast Asia later we reacted against the military and lost sense of our moral bearing. To conservatives this was the disaster. Militarism became sexy again in the 1980s but wasn't tested until the first Gulf War, breaking our "Vietnam Syndrome." At the same time the Soviet Union collapsed, making us not only the most powerful military in the world in fact and demonstrably through the Gulf War, but restored our international moral credibility. I'm not interested here is listing the various immoral foreign policy choices made by the United States, but simply to suggest that the atmosphere led to American Exceptionalism, which led, eventually, to Gulf War II. The reason why the Iraq invasion gets compared to Vietnam is because the sequence of events is the same: American triumphalism (WWII/Cold War) leads to ill-advised adventure in regional conflict (Vietnam/Iraq) which then erodes American influence in the world. The only difference was the way we entered Vietnam and Iraq. The consequences are the same. We could keep repeating this cycle or acknowledge that we cannot simply do what we wish in the world, nor are we actually capable of doing it. We must work with international organizations, use a combination of carrots and sticks, rely upon experts and factual evidence, not ideology, and start acting like a world leader rather than a man-child stricken with a case of gigantism.
4) Finally, we must acknowledge that foreign policy extends beyond military action and economic sanctions. Foreign policy involves trade negotiation, sabre-rattling, political posturing, concessions, ultimatums, negotiation, long-term treaty frameworks, international forums, one-on-one conferences, the input of experts and area specialists and the wishes of national populations. The Bush style has relied upon a set of flawed assumptions about how the world works and either/or proclamations about the world's actors. Dictators might be bad people but that "insight" doesn't craft a foreign policy. All of the above tools must be used to achieve national goals, which increasingly overlap with international goals. The UN may not be perfect in conception or implementation, but it does provide a forum for the nations of the world. This does not mean that the UN promotes equality or "moral equivalence" between nations but that some agreements can be reached in a public forum. Environmental issues, energy distribution, nuclear proliferation--everyone has an interest in these issues. The United States can take the lead on any of them and make proposals. Treaties and compliance get worked out down the road. Many of the agreements will benefit the United States, and a few will require shouldering the burden. The important thing is that the issues are addressed and we preserve an earned leadership role in the world.
This wasn't meant to be comprehensive or flow logically. I have suggested common sense ways the United States can still be a world leader and earn the right to do so. George W. Bush himself and all the war cheerleaders we hear so much from in the press these days have never earned anything. They by and large don't personally know the costs of fighting war, and find themselves in the position of commenting on matters they apparently know nothing about. I have never been in combat. I have studied foreign policy and security strategy. I am not a published author, nor do I have a team of researchers to help me reach conclusions. Yet despite all this I can clearly see how the United States ought to act, and can see that it is acting in precisely the opposite way. How did I know Iraq would turn out the way it has? Because I know what works and what doesn't work in foreign policy and knew Iraq was far more complex than the White House made it out to be. I feel a little guilty being right, considering almost 3000 Americans and somewhere around half a million Iraqis had to die to make the war mongers see the error of their ways. If those war pundits feel guilt they hide it well as they don't debate the foreign policy errors that led to the Iraqi civil war and instead focus on how evil Iran and North Korea are.