10/19/2006
An Examination of U.S. Foreign Policy
Following are a few tidbits from foreign policy experts you may be familiar with, courtesy of the Sept. / Oct. issue of The National Interest.
Weapons expert and former assistant secretary of defense Graham Allison and Russian strategist Dmitri Simes (publisher of The National Interest) opine on the view of the current global environment as put out by the White House.
“President Bush has identified the nexus of terrorism and nuclear weapons as ‘the single largest threat to American national security.’ Indeed, he has said that the United States is currently engaged in World War III and put a bust of Winston Churchill in his office.
“The question he should ask himself is: What would Churchill do facing a grave threat to his society and way of life? How closely do the president’s actions mirror his model? An American Churchill confronting a threat of such monumental proportions would make defeating this challenge the organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy.
“Churchill was a life-long anti-communist, and had few illusions about the Stalin regime. To defeat Nazi Germany, however, Churchill was prepared to enter into an alliance with the Soviet Union and to accept that the USSR would incorporate some additional territories. In fact, Britain even declared war against democratic Finland because the country cooperated with Berlin, even though Finland entered the war against the Soviet Union only in an attempt to reclaim territory occupied by Moscow.
“No Churchillian willingness to establish a hierarchy of priorities is evident in the Bush Administration’s current foreign policy, particularly once democracy promotion officially replaced the fight against terror as the number one U.S. objective in the world.”
Allison and Simes do praise Bush for his performance at the G-8 Summit in St. Petersburg last summer, specifically with some of the initiatives Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to in the realms of combating nuclear terrorism and cooperation on nuclear power. But .
“Commendable as these steps are, they represent largely a declaration of intent whose implementation will depend on cooperation between the two governments, including their security services. Taking into account that many sensitive matters are involved for both sides – particularly for Russia, which would need to open further its nuclear facilities – it is next to impossible to hermetically insulate cooperation on nuclear terrorism from trends in the overall U.S.-Russia relationship, and these trends lately have been far from encouraging. The administration claims that there is no contradiction between the need to cooperate on nuclear terrorism with Russia and aggressive attempts at democracy promotion in the former Soviet space and even in Russia itself. It is possible to argue that democracy promotion in cases like Belarus, which essentially amount to regime change, should be a paramount foreign policy objective. But it is hard to take seriously the argument that the United States can realistically expect to try to undermine Putin’s role in Russia and Russia’s influence on its periphery on the one hand and receive whole-hearted Russian cooperation on matters nuclear, such as putting pressure on Iran, on the other. Growing U.S. military assistance to Georgia is specifically mentioned in Moscow as a reason why Russia should be entitled to sell weapons to Venezuela. This could lead to a pattern of escalation and further bitter disputes between Washington and Moscow. Thus, America’s ability to limit the risk of WMD attacks has been weakened by efforts to bring transformational change in the post-Soviet space, which the Russian government considers dangerous to its vital interests ..
“Some argue that even if the United States had been able to prioritize and to display more sensitivity to the interests of other major powers, it still would not have received much in return. Russia is frequently mentioned in this regard, and there is an element of truth in this argument. Clearly Moscow has been much less than a perfect partner for the United States, and in its current resurgent mood Russia would probably refuse to work in lock-step with American foreign policy no matter what. Then again, foreign policy is rarely about absolutes: There is a spectrum between total defiance and total submission, and moving Moscow along the spectrum can make quite a difference to the United States ..
“Yet, notwithstanding President Bush’s misplaced praise for President Putin’s soul, the United States sided with Russia’s new neighbors in almost every single dispute they had with Moscow, treating Russian influence in the post-Soviet space as unacceptable neo-imperialism .
“We are suggesting that in dealing with Russia, the Bush Administration think first about what matters most to America’s interests and well-being. The likelihood of terrorists exploding nuclear bombs in American cities is significantly affected by the depths of Russian cooperation with the United States in securing nuclear weapons and materials not only in Russia, but worldwide. The likelihood of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is significantly affected by the depth of Russian cooperation with the United States in a joint strategy to prevent this outcome .
“As Churchill observed in the dark days of World War II, when confronting mortal danger, ‘It is not enough to do one’s best. What is required is that one does what is necessary for success.’”
Personally, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 I wrote in my “Week in Review” column of the necessity of fighting a ‘dirty war,’ as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld put it. But whereas the White House focused on fighting terrorism, I took the phrase ‘dirty war’ to mean we needed to cut some back room deals with the likes of France and Russia with regards to both Iran and Iraq. Both France and Russia had large commercial interests there and the United States should have in essence guaranteed them in return for stability. In light of what has transpired on the ground, I’m more of a believer in this strategy than ever before, though it’s too late in the case of Iraq and it’s 11:59 pm in Iran.
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Michael Scheuer, the former senior CIA officer who tracked Osama bin Laden, also has an essay in The National Interest.
“Courting Catastrophe: America Five Years After 9/11”
“America will be attacked by Al-Qaeda again, and more destructively than on 9/11. Why? Simple. Our bipartisan governing elites willfully refuse to recognize the severity of the Islamist threat. They are waging a feckless war that misrepresents the enemies’ motivation, keeps borders open, applies insufficient force, and pursues status quo foreign polices, ensuring the next Islamist generation is more anti-American and numerous – and still has the opportunity to strike the American homeland.
“Time is short. America faces an existential threat the Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc foresaw long ago. Belloc had great respect for Islam’s vitality, mobilizing skill, latent military power, patience and endurance. He wrote the following in 1938 but, in Munich’s aftermath, it went unnoticed. ‘The future always comes as a surprise,’ Belloc said.
‘ but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise might be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam .It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it was in the past .It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of the tremendous struggle between Christian culture and for what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.’
Michael Scheuer:
“(U.S.) leaders have failed to understand their enemies’ motivations. Ignoring Sun Tzu’s advice, they have not prepared citizens for the price they will pay in blood, treasure and lifestyle to defeat the Islamists – if indeed there is time to understand and prevail.
“An essay by Rami Khouri, editor-at-large for Beirut’s Daily Star, is pertinent. In it he wrote,
‘Sensible middle class Americans get on with making a living in challenging times, while their federal government in Washington conducts a fantasy foreign policy based on make-believe perceptions and imagined realities .Washington’s policy is a mishmash of faulty analysis, historical confusions, emotional anger, foreign policy frustrations, worldly ignorance, and political deception all rolled into one. President Bush completely ignores the impact of American, Israeli and other foreign policies on the mindset of hundreds of millions of people in the Arab- Asian region .This is willful political blindness that makes the analytic basis of American foreign policy a laughingstock around the world.’
“Khouri’s words must be taken with a grain of salt; he detests Mr. Bush. But his diagnosis accurately reflects the endemic shortcomings of the U.S. approach .
“The Islamists are not fighting America because they hate freedom; because we hold regular elections; because women are in school; or because Budweiser flows.
“U.S. national security is threatened by the Islamists because of what America does in the Muslim world, not because of its beliefs or lifestyle. In claiming the present war is based on the foe’s hatred of freedom, U.S. leaders prove themselves either unschooled fools or liars.
“Indeed, Osama bin Laden has been quite helpful in detailing the U.S. policies that inspire jihad, which include our military and civilian presence on the Arabian Peninsula; our unqualified support for Israel; our military presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and other Muslim countries; our ability to keep oil prices acceptable to U.S. and Western voters; our support for Chinese, Russian, and Indian oppression of Muslims; and our support of and protection of the world’s Muslim tyrannies.
“These policies make regular appearances in Bin Laden’s post- 1996 rhetoric; a decade of Western polling shows nearly unanimous Muslim hatred for the same policies. Thus, our elites need not digest arcane data to know the enemy. We are at war for what we do- period. We will be defeated if we do not abandon comfortable fantasies, face facts and shape strategy, policy and action accordingly.”
Scheuer argues that the three presidents after Ronald Reagan (whom Scheuer worships), saw themselves as “world president.”
“Each acted on this believe, and so neglected his constitutional obligation to protect Americans. Presidents now routinely cite ludicrous propositions as foreign-policy bedrocks. Indeed, the media-political-think-tank ‘Washington consensus’ consists of the following ‘Articles of Faith’: American freedom depends on all peoples having that freedom. As a result, America must install democracy abroad, even at the point of a bayonet (and elections alone measure progress toward democracy). Every war, crisis and genocide threatens U.S. national security. Nation- states have a right to exist independent of whether they are sustainable and, in conjunction with the previous precepts, the United States must be prepared to intervene to ensure their existence .
“(These) delusions leave America vulnerable by involving us in wars, disputes and conflicts around the world and by focusing even more rage and anger at us. Moreover, our elites’ lust to enter every trumped-up crisis that gets coverage on CNN while failing to take the boring but absolutely necessary steps to increase our security marks their deplorable lack of the Founders’ common sense. Note their readiness to intervene in Darfur, while not finding the money, personnel and will to secure Russia’s nuclear arsenal.”
Scheuer concludes by calling for the U.S. to recognize the following basic truths in order to reduce the sources of anti- Americanism in the world.
“First, American freedom does not depend on that of others. Our freedom survived civil war, world wars, racial strife and Cold War. Only now, by trying to impose our version of freedom abroad, do we risk it at home.
“Second, it is ahistorical to claim America must install democracy abroad. The Founders were explicit: Our duty to the world is the example of effective self-rule. By trying to impose our version of self-rule abroad, we forfeit the soul of the republic.
“Third, no nation has a right to exist – not America, not Belgium, not Israel, not Bolivia, not Saudi Arabia. Nations survive if they can defend themselves, limit societal rot, and do not cultivate too many mortal enemies.
“This is why, in a world of nation-states, it is not always true that all men are equal. In war, our leaders’ constitutional obligation is to protect Americans. Claiming an American life is not worth greatly more than any foreigner’s is absurd, lethal heresy. America wins wars by using overwhelming force to inflict catastrophic damage that quickly ends fighting .The world is littered with half-fought wars because U.S. presidents ignore history and listen to just-war theorists, whose philosophy shelters moral cowardice and contributes to the proliferation of never- defeated, always-resurgent enemies .
“U.S. policy right now – its foreign policy and its domestic policy – is deservedly a laughingstock to Islamists. We and our NATO allies – about half the world – are not laughing. Indeed, our absurd national circumstance has become reduced to those prescient words of bumper-sticker fame: ‘Keep smiling, the boss loves idiots.’ But God may not always favor fools and the United States.”
Well, the above gives you something to chew on.
I’m off on a long driving tour of the American West and the Great Plains and am going to treat myself to a little break from this column. Next one Nov. 9, or a few days before.
Brian Trumbore
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