Saturday, June 19, 2010

The False Dichotomy of Modern US Foreign Policy - and Real Alternatives to It.

As a follow-up to the discussion of immigration and the pointing out of the recent reversing of polarities in regards to this issue between supposed liberals and conservatives, I thought I would point out a few unfortunately obscure scientific and historical facts surrounding foreign policy: an issue integrally tied to immigration that has also seen a shift in polarities in recent decades, and one that has left American voters without a scientifically valid choice between the major parties whatsoever.

The modern foreign policy debate seems to dwindle down to a false dichotomy between Democratic and Republican Party lines; with both alternatives so deeply flawed that debates tend to quickly degenerate into mudslinging, leaving the American voter with the abysmal choice of which is the lesser evil. The choices in question, for those who live under a rock, are globalist institutionalism in the case of the Democrats, and George W. Bush style unilateral nationalism when it comes to the Republicans.

The criticisms of both are familiar to most Americans who are even marginally interested in politics, but for the sake of convincing those who honestly believe one is in any way more redeemable than the other, it helps to review them and why, even when approached with the noblest of intentions, they are simply incompatible with reality.

Nationalism:

George W. Bush's ineptitude as an orator and PR-retaining politician left him open to some of the most brutal and accusatory criticisms of a president in US history. But leaving all the colloquial conjecture about implied racism, ethnocentrism, Christian fundamentalism and other liberal buzz-words to muck-raking clowns like Michael Moore, it is important to determine what about GWB's policies led to the disastrous consequences they resulted in, and more importantly, what historical trends and figures they resembled.

George W. Bush's stated position on the Afganistan and Iraq invasions, as well as his discourse on other threats to US security such as North Korea, Iran and Syria, always adopted a sort of liberal humanitarianism rather than brutal ethnocentric supremacy. In attempts to garner support for his invasions, Bush Jr. didn't limit himself to pointing out that these countries were dangerous because they housed terrorists; he went into detailed descriptions of the dictatorial brutality of both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein's Ba'athists, insisting that these governments' refusal to cooperate with global institutions and radical anti-US sentiment did not represent the will of their people, and that the goal of our invasions was not only to eliminate the threats both presented and harbored by these governments, but to rebuild those countries in a way that guarantee a better life for their citizens and security for the rest of the world. My purpose here is not to judge whether or not GWB believed in this rhetoric - dubbed "nation-building" - or had ulterior motives, but it is difficult to make a case that ethnocentrism was any sort of driving force behind it, even if some of his supporters hold him in high regard due to their own ethnocentric convictions.

The problem with this type of foreign policy, and it is far older than many Bush supporters tend to realize or admit, is that it has an historical tendency to accomplish the exact opposite of what it intends to do. You will recall from Premise 2 that even the most brutal totalitarian dictatorships rule through compliance rather than coercion, although non-compliance becomes far more costly in a repressive environment and thus conditions must be far worse in order for it to happen. In consistency with this premise, the grand majority of brutal dictatorships come to power through feverish popular support, even if not by means legitimately accepted by the system they replace, and then succeed in making non-compliance far more costly by the time it may be turned on them. This feverish support is most often a form of non-compliance against the status-quo they come to replace, often quickly forgotten in light of the successors' own brutality, but instrumental in their coming to power. Adolf Hitler was formally elected Chancellor of Germany TWICE, popular first and foremost for his stark German nationalism that opposed the Weimar government's acceptance of Germany's status as a secondary economic power to the winners of WWI. Many of the radical communist elements of the Cold War era - the Viet Cong, Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas - although coming to power through force, nevertheless had powerful popular support and were seen as the only alternative with the power to take on the oppressive and unaccountable status quo that preceded them. Our modern enemies are no different. The subversive elements of the Saudi government that relentlessly fund and abet terrorist groups, including Al Quaeda, openly admit that their #1 enemy is the Saudi monarchy due to its having sold out the country's national sovereignty to the west. Saddam Hussein, who let's not forget was a US colonial puppet for over a decade before he became a thorn in our side, was also very high on their enemies list. As for Iran's assinine and unapologetic Islamic theocracy and its smaller Shi-ite extremist offshoots like Hamas, they too initially garnered support as alternatives to what locals saw as the US puppetry of their governments, particularly the Shah, and by some accounts were aided by the CIA in seizing power to avoid the alternative of a Communist insurgency doing so. Soviet puppet dictatorships, like mid-1900s Egypt, equally made the list of these insurgencies' targets.

Whether the governments these elements replaced or hope to replace were deposed legitimately or violently, they share one common element, and that is that every one of them was either installed by an earlier version of foreign intervention, or at the very least kept in power by it long after it had any domestic legitimacy. Weimar Germany was the product of Allied Powers Treaties in the 1920s. Most Latin American governments brutally opposed by Communist insurgencies - including those deposed by them - were the descendents of Creole revolutions that declared their independence from European powers. The original United States only guaranteed political participation and proprietary rights to land-owning white males, a normal phase of development for the late 18th century that slowly expanded these rights in later decades to other sectors of the population. It is no surprise then that many other American governments shared the US's legalized political and economic inequality at their inception. The difference was that when the indifferent hand of natural selection showed up in the form of political elements seeking reform and rights guarantees within the bounds of the systems in place, the US and Western European powers - many of the latter still under the control of accountability-devoid monarchies or aristocractic legislatures - threw their weight behind the incumbent systems in an effort to protect the economic interests of their domestic corporations, usually in the form of force. Similar patterns are observable in East Asia and the Middle East, in these cases in the form of domestic nationalist and economic rights elements' decades of fruitlessly seeking not necessarily independence from European Empires, but the recognition of their proprietary rights and equal participation in the political system (recognition of labor and agrarian unions as legal organizations, ending tax code loopholes for foreign corporations, etc.); efforts thwarted often violently by governments protecting the interests of their corporations.

I am not here to discuss the morality of the colonial policies mentioned above nor that of the reactionary brutality of the zealot revolutionary elements these ultimately bred. But the former as a response to peaceful political efforts at reform, often in unapologetic compliance with foreign interest, tends to bolster the popularity of the latter, often laced with religious extremism as in the case of Islamists or class warfare extremism as in the case of Communist guerillas during the Cold War. And interestingly enough, the rhetoric used by the colonizing governments undertaking these policies was often similar within the context of their time to that used by George W. Bush - a need to preserve cultural civility in the face of the brutal savagery of the adversary. There is no apology for the Viet Cong or for Al Quaeda, they deserve every bit of negative press they have received and far more, but what the bearers of the status quo neglect to mention is that the sociopathy of these elements only becomes popular enough to pose any real threat to civility and safety as a result of decades of the corruption of their predecessors and the repression of those who opposed them civilly, often quielty upheld and encouraged by the foreign governments these animals so fervently oppose.

Some moderate neo-cons will concede that past imperialism has created these problems, but make the argument that now that we have created these enemies for ourselves, it is our responsibility to ourselves and the entire world to stop them. In terms of intent, this may not be a bad principle to adhere to, but in practice, nation-building simply does not accomplish this. Saddam's Iraq was a brutal and anti-American dictatorship, but one thing it was not was any sort of Muslim theocracy. Since its destabilization, Islamic Fundamentalists have sprung up in Iraq like mushrooms in shit, fed resources by established Islamists like the Iranian government and elements of the Saudi, and fodder for their violence by the economic instability caused by decades of foreign (our) involvement. Most Iraquis, according to statistics as well as accounts of veterans who have been to Iraq, detest the idiots running around blowing themselves up, but are also wary of the US presence as they see it as responsible for this phenomenon. They want self-government that keeps the fundamentalist criminals under control, but realize that upon the withdrawal of US troops, this can only be accomplished through the election of a new Saddam that is able to take on them and the support they receive from foreign Islamist governments, who have now successfully grown into a colonizing force of their own. The Taliban in Afganistan were an example of colonization by these same powers following a decade and a half of a Cold War front that left a weak and unpopular government in charge. In the Cold War era, parallels could be drawn between such countries and Viet Nam, Nicaragua, Cuba, Peru, Guatemala, and just about any Cold War front. Even where the US government succeeded in keeping the insurgents from toppling its puppet government in place, not one case exists in which it was able to eliminate them completely in light of their support from established Communist dictatorships (the USSR, China, and later Cuba). Chasing them around the Asian and South American jungles in which they hid became an insatiable toilet for US resources, and the excesses required to expedite this a non-expendable source of young and bitter displaced souls that became fodder for their ranks. Meanwhile, the real enemy in Moscow had every opportunity to exploit this wastefulness. A similar parallel can be drawn surrounding the pre-WWII stand-off between the Allied Powers of the West and Stalin's USSR and Hitler's Germany; in which hysteria on the part of more democratic western states (US, UK, France) regarding the looming deposition of monarchic governments in secondary European powers (Spain, Italy, Portugal, various Austria-Hungary successor-states) resulting in the coming to power of Stalin and Hitler sympathizers caused the former to futilly fund the monarchies and attempt to keep them in power. This gave the opposition no choice but to turn into violent militias seeking support from the USSR and Germany, and just about every single state in this category eventually fell into the hands of a brutal totalitarian dictatorship that resembled Germany and the USSR even if it did not support them; all while the real enemy sat in Moscow and Berlin, mobilizing their resources for war and acquiring fodder from these bughunts, openly admitting to an agenda of global domination.

If there IS any need for military action against dangerous regimes, the regimes that qualify would be the new colonizer hopefuls that prevent places like Iraq and Afganistan from governing themselves, undoubtedly created by our own foresight-devoid meddling, but arguably the source of the threat that becomes more powerful every time we waste our resources on the fallacy of containment. However, as will become evident in the following discussion, even such intervention is not necessary.

Globalism:

In contrast to nationalism, far fewer arguments are made that challenge the humanitarian nature of diplomacy and attempts to solve international crises through treaties and other institutions. If anything, popular detractors from Obama's attempts to employ the UN in dealing with Iran, just as detractors from JFK's dealing with the USSR and FDR's dealing with the USSR, Hitler's Germany and Imperial Japan before them, tend to paint these policies as treason and the surrendering of American sovereignty to the will of dictators who wish to destroy our way of life. Yet in a sense, globalists agree with the nationalist ideals of GWB described above, they just seek out a different approach to accomplish the same goals. Institutionalists attempt to reach out to the constituencies of these murderous governments, hoping to instill in them the sense that we are not the enemy and are willing to appease their "way of life" (that their government dictates) but in return they must become less radical and accept ours. The obvious problem this approach is oblivious to is that these governments do not represent their constituencies in any significant form so any attempt to appease them by appeasing their government breeds indifference at best and hostility at worst. Furthermore, the majority of these governments have their domestic media on a tight leash and do not allow foreign media in their countries, allowing them to edit and censor the words of our leaders and continue to make the west appear as the enemy. However, these obstacles are only in the tip of the iceberg.

The real problem with institutional globalism is that, like nation-building and often in parallel to it, it tends to accomplish the opposite of its intention. International institutions, whether formal organizations like the UN or treaties and pacts, lack any significant power of enforcement. Put simply, the murderous regimes who enter into agreements not to build weapons or support insurgencies in exchange for humanitarian aid to their starving populations and the disarmament of their adversaries have absolutely no real incentive to follow through on their end of the deal. The USSR consistently cheated on every arms and non-proliferation treaty during the Cold War, just as it and Hitler's Germany continued to fund insurgencies in unstable European countries and build weapons in the pre-WWII days, while the naive suckers on the western side of these treaties foolishly adhered to them. It is naive to believe that modern Iran and North Korea do not continue to actively pursue nuclear weapon programs, or that Islamist governments do not find ways to funnel money into insurgencies in places like Iraq and Afganistan. When caught red-handed doing so, as has happened to every government mentioned multiple times, they respond by making a speech peppered with inconsistencies that make our most inept politicians sound credible, and then proceed to enter into a new treaty that makes additional demands on the west in exchange for them adhering to what they have already signed onto. It is silly to even bring discussions of morality or honesty into this picture - these are criminal governments accountable to no one that have no incentive to follow through on their promises, only a complete idiot would believe that they will do so anyway.

The fundamental problem of the above scenario is one few people in the modern US are familiar with, and it is also the reason nation-building is neither a necessity in light of globalism's failure nor an alternative to it. Put simply, another consistent trend among totalitarian regimes is an abysmal economic incompetence. Despite a wealth of natural resources unmatched by any country in the world, the USSR's 70 year history was peppered with shortages, famines, disastrously low GDP per capita and standards of living; along with the secondary effects of sky-rocketing black markets and organized violent crime. Iran is more homogeneous and less restrictive economically, but it too significantly underperforms its capacity of productivity when its natural resources and wealth are taken into account. There is no need to even point out the colossal economic failure of places like North Korea, Cuba and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela - photos of famined children are the trademark association with these countries for most Americans, and somehow no one asks the question how these governments stay in power with all their natural wealth and such abysmal distribution. The correlation of militance and economic failure is not coincidental. Even if it does not nominally declare itself a state-run economy, a totalitarian regime has an inherent need to bring many sectors of the economy under its unilateral control to prevent the growth of opposition and freedom of expression. Government-run economies are colossally inefficient, and simply cannot mobilize their resources in a way that allows them to build a world-class military and avoid famines at the same time. Need I point out that the United States' commitment to a free market economy, despite our disastrous experiments with government involvement in certain economic sectors, has allowed us to never fail to accomplish both at the same time, even during prolonged military conflicts like WWII?

Premise 2 suggests that after a decade or two of allowing famines in order to build weapons, even the most heavily brainwashed and idealistic population becomes wary of their government and in light of starvation and extreme shortages of other necessities, non-compliance becomes less and less costly. This is why, after a decade or two of arms races, the dictators in charge of these crippled economies tend to approach their sworn enemies in search of arms treaties in exchange for hand-outs. Joseph Stalin managed to acquire a nuclear bomb for the USSR, but the 7 years following his death in 1953 were some of the most desolate in the USSR's history - a result of both agricultural and industrial sectors of the economy crippled by lack of sound economic mobilization, brutal executions of professionals to instill compliance, and an infrastructure destroyed by corruption and unaccountabiliy due to a system that left no incentives to the contrary. Eisenhower - a WWII General who had witnessed the Soviet military with his own eyes and was well-aware of that regime's incompetence - refused to enter into any deals with the USSR, and by 1960 the country was literally on the verge of famine-driven dissolution. In globalist JFK, Nikita Chruschev saw the opportunity to exchange disarmament and limited emigration for humanitarian aid, and the array of treaties in the ensuing decade was what allowed the USSR to sustain itself, and the eventual deposition of Chruschev by the Brezhnev regime. When Brezhnev died in 1982, the USSR again saw its impending dissolution by means of shortages and famines left behind by his incompetence, but Reagan refused to accomodate Gorbachev's bid for a new treaty in 1985 - agreeing to humanitarian aid but refusing any kind of arms argeement, essentially telling Comrade General Secretary that the US and its flourishing free market economy would build all the weapons we wanted, and he and his bankrupt socialism were welcome to try to keep up. Gorbachev is documented to have admitted in the same meeting that this was the end of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent domino effect by which it fell apart in the next 6 years proved him right. Had Reagan accomodated Gorbachev, who was admittedly not a hard-liner and somewhat well-intentioned, Gorbachev would have in all likelihood been deposed by the next Stalinist extremist in the same way Chruschev was. A half-ass attempt at this occured in the final months of the USSR in 1991, but by this point the citizens were so disillusioned with the regime that nobody, not even the military, supported the failed coup, which lasted a measley four days. Other examples exist on a smaller scale, with modern dictators Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chavez, Kim Il Jong, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and others all having routinely received various forms of aid for their starving masses and struggling economies in exchange for various concessions and treaties that they have no incentive to follow. The result is a weakened defense for the United States and our allies as we sheepishly follow the agreements while they do not, and just enough empowerment for them to keep arming themselves and meddling in the affairs of other countries without having to worry about their own populace deposing them in famine-driven riots.

The ALTERNATIVE

And THAT is the alternative to both globalism and nationalism that allows the defeat of totalitarian aggressors. This notion of letting them choke on their own economic incompetence may seem oversimplified or far-feteched, but history shows us time and again that it is the only reliable and permanent means of neutralizing a threat.
Interestingly enough, until recent decades at least one major party in the US has always advocated this take on foreign policy - at least openly, while the other major party typically opposed it with ideas collectively called "progressive," which often meant nation-building and globalism in parallel - FDR's dealing with the USSR and Hitler's Germany in the 1930s an avid example. The party positions on this have not always been the same. Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, was the progressive of his time, but later in the 20th century Democrats like Wilson, FDR, JFK and LBJ took to this mentality. Their opposition - William H. Taft, Calvin Coolige, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan - were by no means saints or strict adherents to non-interventionism, all of them can be traced to funding pro-US coups against governments perceived as threatening (a la Pinochet's Chile) and meddling in other countries' affairs in a somewhat nationalist fashion. However, the difference is that most of these administrations did so in secret because their constituency at the time would not have supported it, and that covert interventions or even very limited overt ones like Reagan's one-night bombing raid on Grenada waste far fewer resources and typically have smaller long-lasting effects. Regardless of this, there is no apology for their breaks with the philosophies they ran on - they mostly qualify as covert nationalism and have backfired in the same ways qualitatively as did overt nationalism, just sometimes on a smaller scale. Their successes are the examples in which they adhered to their non-interventionist models, like the Eisenhower and Reagan policies described above.

"Isolationism," by the way, does not refer to this type of foreign policy - it was a term used by more liberal progressives to accuse FDR of using globalist tactics but not military intervention against the USSR and Hitler's Germany in the 1930s.

The blurring of party lines by itself has always been a reality in this country, but the virtual elimination of a representation of this option by either major party over the last two and a half decades has seen a prolonged period of dangerous and destablizing policies in the international arena. Modern elements that seek to change major party philosophies from within, particularly Tea Partiers and their closer affiliation to the Republicans but stark contrast to the neo-conservative status quo, owe their popularity in part to this lack of real choice between the major parties, of which this foreign policy false dichotomy is but one example. These elements are correct in pointing out that the foreign policy prescribed by Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers is this exact non-interventionism, as described by his "Good relations with all nations, entangling alliances with none". The enemies of the original United States were the mind-numbingly self-righteous European monarchies that had the world divided into poorly controlled colonial holdings, and Jefferson realized that their incompetence and unpopularity at home and in these holdings would not allow them to compete militarily with the flourishing free market capitalism of the United States. He would turn over in his grave at both nation-builders referring to their meddling in other countries' affairs as "capitalism," and globalists' and insurgencies' citing their opposition to these policies as "dismantling capitalism". Capitalism implies that the government stays out of the economy, and this includes the economies of foreign countries even if our corporate interests are invested there. The labor elements in those countries are perfectly capable of instilling reform to gain fair market condition agreements from their foreign employers - a perfectly acceptable bargaining component of capitalism. Their government and ours using force to keep this from happening eliminates any qualification for the situation being called a free market, and often breeds the militantly anti-free market elements that mistake corporate cronyism for Jeffersonian capitalism.

It is true that nationalism and globalism, even in their crudest forms, do attempt to offset certain losses for their constituencies. Namely, even the most ethnocentric nationalism can be seen as beneficial to the country engaging in it - moral arguments notwithstanding, preventing people in less developed countries from competing with our corporations in a free market fashion allows our corporations to make better profits, which contrary to popular belief usually do translate into a higher standard of living for us - lower prices, higher tax revenues, capital gains for domestic investors, etc. Similarly, globalism attempts to circumvent both the necessity for violence - whether war against the agressor or violent domestic revolution - and famines and extreme shortages; humanitarian goals that many people consider important to their self-interest in the modern world and can save our military's lives and resources. However, seeing as science seeks optimal solutions and accepts that perfect ones are impossible, these policies have to be weighed in a cost-benefit analysis of their actual impact rather than their intent, and the myriad of historical examples illustrate their abysmal results. Nationalism bolsters the popularity and power of violent opposition, which eventually ends up costing the colonizing country far more in resources than it saves in the short term by offsetting competition; and globalism may forego harsh economic and social conditions to some degree, but it also perpetuates them for far longer abroad and exponentiates the threat the governments responsible for them present to the country engaging in these policies. Self-interest dictates that people will compete for their personal gain, and will turn to violence for this purpose if necessary; furthermore, in the case of totalitarian brutality already in place, some internal violence is often required to depose it and is a necessary cost to prevent it from causing many more problems. Policies that don't take these trends into consideration are unrealistic - regardless of their intent - and result in far greater costs, both economic and social, to the constituencies they try to protect. I urge you to fire politicians who have a track record for supporting such policies, and avoid hiring new ones that promote them.