Hard to get you head around, is it not?

Their plan is to create civil war
throughout the Mid-East.

They are not ignorant,
no lack of planning,
their plan is perfectly unfolding.

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Today, are we searching for I deals or Ideals?
-Thinking

Who's we?

joejoejoe summed up the foreign policy outlook of most Americans in a Cafe post several month's ago.

Don't tread on me for security and a Good Neighbor policy for everything else.

Neither of these require understanding other cultures and they would work just fine if our political leaders would adhere to them.

I'm not sure the US is particularly bad at foreign policy. After all, the US has done a fairly good job at prospering spectacularly over 230 years in a challenging and sometimes-hostile global environment. Following the 20th century expansion of the US presence around the globe, some overzealous leaders have embarked on a few wars that have gone badly. But where in the annals of human history are the examples of the major powers that have not suffered from misguided and disastrous wars during their imperial phase?

I think Emma is right about the deep tension between the foreign policy outlook of most ordinary Americans, on the one hand, and the outlook of those who have run our foreign policy on the other.

The second World War and the Cold War aftermath produced a global US presence and a mighty military machine to back it up and project power all over the world, far beyond US shores, in the defense of "interests" that are only tenuously connected to the security of Americans.

To support this new global imperium, the expanded national security state also created a foreign policy bureaucracy and intellectual establishment that typically thinks in classical great power terms. It's models are the Roman and British empires, and it is governed by an ethos of "national greatness."

But the majority of the US public is still true to America's republican roots. It believes war is for defense against aggression, and that the country should maintain peaceful relations with countries that do not aggress against us.

Because of this self-defense orientation of ordinary Americans, leaders of both parties have resorted to lies and hyperbole to enlist public suppoirt for their wars, and promoted nightmare scenarios of falling dominoes, terrorists training with weapons of mass destruction, uranium smuggling for bomb-building, etc.

Americans are generally trusting people when it comes to their government. If the war is short and easy, people don't ask too many questions, victory comes quickly, and the whole adventure is quickly thrown down the memory hole. But if a war goes badly and is more difficult than promised, the media eventually begins to report on the actual facts and exposes the lies that sold the war. The public discovers that the security issues are not as they were advertized, that the war has only a tenuous and theoretical connection at best to the defense of the US, and consequently public commitment to continued prosecution of the war evaporates.

The biggest problem in US foreign policy is the tendency to substitute morality for national interest. This is but one of the many deleterious effects the religious disease has on American thinking.

We (the American people) are responsible for the type of leadership we have. We have a lifestyle which depends upon unsustainable consumption of non-renewable resources. Since we don't have enough of these raw materials of our own we need to get them from elsewhere.

Over the decades we have done this by a variety of means from outright conquest (Hawaii), to standard colonialism (Philippines), to installing puppet governments via gunboat diplomacy (banana republics), to covert support of revolutions (the Shah in Iran).

The public has acquiesced in this by our willfully ignoring how the "sausage gets made" through to our adopting of the SUV lifestyle. The fact that the Bush regime has been more ham handed at this than some others is just an unfortunate wrinkle. The US has about 4% of the world's population and consumes 40% of the resources. Is it surprising that the rest of the world is starting to push back?

As Pogo famously said: "We have met the enemy and he is us".

Let me know when a politician stands up and says that the US is engaged in a consumption pattern that is unsustainable and needs to lower our use of material wealth to a realistic level. This is more than "conservation" or "smart growth" this is restructuring our basic capitalist growth model.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

From the Congo to Vietnam, American foreign policy mandarins kept confusing nationalism with communism. Ho Chi Minh and Patrice Lumumba become blank canvases on which policy makers could paint the face of their favorite bugaboo. Today, nationalists are called terrorists instead of communists. Of course the two can overlap, and some nationalists are also terrorists and/or communists.

I think this is backwards.  American foreign policy mistakes have generally occurred when the foreign policy mandarins were overruled by politicians pursuing their own agenda.  That was true during Vietnam and it's true now.  Before the Vietnam war, many of the "Asia hands" in the State Department were purged by right-wingers who blamed them for the loss of China to communism.  Similarly, in the run-up to the Vietnam War, the Iraq experts in the State Department were systematically shut out of policymaking.  There is a long-running antipathy on the part of the right towards foreign policy mandarins, who they think are hopelessly addicted to appeasement and capitulation.

Trouble, is, sometimes they're right.  In the late 1930's the foreign policy establishment was almost universally against any serious confrontation with Germany or Japan.

It isn't ignorance that causes bad foreign policy decisions.  There are plenty of knowledgeable people available to decision makers.  It's blind adherence to ideology and a lack of judgment.  Sometimes force is needed and sometimes it isn't.  If politicians were less worried about looking "tough" or less beholden to one-dimensional views of when being tough makes sense, then we might have avoided some of the recent disasters.

I think historically, the big mistake was overestimating the Soviet Union. Faced with what we thought was a mortal threat to our very existence, it sort of made sense to choose "friends" who we'd never choose on their own merits.

Now it turns out the Soviets had nowhere near the capabilities we thought they did. They were really good bluffers, who inspired a paradigm where everyone was a Cold Warrior. Within this framework, some fell for the bluff a little harder than others. They felt the CIA was consistently underestimating the Soviet threat, not the other way round.

These resurrected Cold Warriors (Cheney, Rumsfeld and their entourages) populate the Bush Administration. They're still fighting the Cold War, only substituting the Islamists for the Communists. They don't recognize that the Islamist threat is largely a consequence of their Cold War methods.

So we bounce around, supporting this or that faction which happens to oppose the enemy of the day. Often, we know very little about these "allies" and frankly, care even less. First it's the Shah of Iran, then Saddam, then Iraqi Sunnis, then Iraqi Shiites, then a different faction of Shiites. First it's the Mujahadeen, then the Afghan warlords, then the Karzai government. First, we're protecting UN food shipments from Somali warlords, now we're all about the warlords and the Ethiopians (of all people) against the ICU. Why? Because the ICU are IsLAMist!

Central America, Chile, Cuba, Haiti, Phillipines, Southeast Asia, the pattern has repeated time and time again. If the Islamists ever make significant inroads into the heavily Catholic former Spanish colonies, we'll be propping up some future dictator there again, as well. Yesterday's ally is today's problem child, against whom we seek out tomorrow's ally, who will in all likelihood become next week's problem child, etc.

There's a long enough history where I think we should be more selective of our "friends" and more neutral towards those other factions.

At the risk of being flip, we act much like teenagers (afterall we are a young nation.) We know everything: We're always right: We're invulnerable.

Unfortunately, the LNCB program so far seems to have had the effect of squeezing out 'extras' like social studies. The result: we'll have a bunch of well-skilled ignoramuses, blind to the world they live in...what a choice.

This was my constant gripe when I was still in the world of education. Increasingly, educational establishments exist not to educate, but to train. It's true now even in "higher" education. Colleges have been increasingly enlisted into the project of providing the sort of job skills and training for the business and professional world that used to be the business of the companies themselves. Pre-professional programs at the college level are governed by professional organizations that prescribe massive, comprehensive curricula that squeeze out room for anything but the student's major rquirements and lowest-level distribution requirments.

Think about this the next time edcational reformers talk about how important it is to impart various kinds of skills so that American students can "compete" in the global economy. Maybe for a democracy that aspires to have an educated, self-governing citizenry the skills to compete in the office place are not enough.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. Smedley "War is just a Racket"Butler (MGen, USMC; 1933)

"overestimating the Soviet Union"

Communism was very attractive to many of the people of the world, the underclass and the intellectual elite, for many many years. As recently as 1982 it took real courage for Susan Sontag to denounce the communist rulers in Poland.

And communism was indeed well matched to the demand economy required in wartime. Witness the feats of the Soviet Union in WWII and after, building a fearsome nuclear arsenal in few short years. When Khrushchev said "we will bury you" it was not a joke, communism was still spreading to many countries around the world, and few could be certain that the US would survive.

Think Wal-Mart.

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Today, are we searching for I deals or Ideals?
-Thinking

Increasingly, educational establishments exist not to educate, but to train. It's true now even in "higher" education.

When has it ever not been thus? Here's H.L.Mencken:

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality."

Some things never change.

In retrospect it may well be admitted that the late 1930's foreign policy establishment was right about Germany. Supporting the Soviet Union against the Third Reich was a historical mistake that for half a century gave half of Europe to Stalin. Weakened after their historical mistake to attack Russia and getting into a two-front war, the Germans would have been less of a challenge than the Communists were made into (with U.S. support!).

/Tuomas

We are better than other countries. In fact we are the very best of all countries. Is that ok to say that?

When you look at the political leaders we have produced in America and then consider Europe in just the last century. Lenin, Kaiser Wilhelm, Mussolini, Franco, Milosovic, Nicolai Ceascescu, Stalin, Tito, Adolf Hitler, etc. These guys for a Century were an assembly line of Megalomaniacs and psychopaths. And when these lunatics got out of the asylum and started ransacking the place, who had to come and close the barn door and pick up the pieces.

No 20th century European leader ever hung up the phone and shouted, "Damn, the Western Hemisphere is blowing itself to bits again, I guess we have to go straighten this mess out".

Europe may boast of how enlightened their foreign policy is, but for quite some time they couldn't seem to go a decade without producing a Dictator for the ages.

Don't you just love ratings issued by lurkers who never themselves post or comment?  Thanks a lot young John T.

We're bad at foreign policy because we have no really really good diplomats. People who are patriotic and looking out for American interests while capable of great empathy for others. You get more and cause yourself less pain using diplomacy than dropping bombs and making war. But then of course, the weapons manufacturers won't make any $$$$$, and they wouldn't want that!!!.

A difference, though, is that these weren't elected
- and were often not particularly popular around Europe, if you get my drift.

/Tuomas

I think the reason that we've gotten worse in our policy is because we lost sight of the goals set forth by the founding fathers, independence, avoiding long-term entanglements with any other country for any reason, practicing our own freedoms, freedom of/from religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press(as something other than a scandal-mongering advertising bed), and the whole life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness as set forth in the Declaration of our Independence from then-king George III of England. Well, now we've got King George Bush of
whatever special interest he's sold out to this week, typically the oil industry gets a lot of the old representation in the bidding, but there's a way that that can be changed, namely
by continuing to push for energy independence
and that doesn't mean just trading one corporate interest for another, but also by simply taking issue with the old home power bill for starters, and working from there. Insulation, pellet stoves, solar lighting systems, 'green' appliances, may seem kind of hokey, but reducing our energy needs nationwide is good 'foreign' policy, as it depressurizes the whole dirty mechanism that's got our military in Iraq today.
They're working on self-powered homes, it'll be 21st century homesteading, compost pile optional.

I often wonder what country has ever handled foreign policy well. Only the countries that depend upon other nations for their security can afford to remain neutral and pursue an isolationist foreign policy.

For the rest that are always asked to exert influence where they have no interest and not act when there is compelling national interest, we stumble forward doing the best we can.

Best Regards,

Jim Ashmore