Our Foreign Policy

This is going to be a tough nut to crack since there’s no easy way around a lot of what I’m about to say. Our foreign policy over the course of the past two hundred years, can be likened to having to deal with a bipolar individual (my apologies up front to those who suffer from this disease).

We were supposed to stay out of foreign relationships and alliances that got us entangled in things and places where we had no business being. The founders knew that those sorts of things usually ended badly. The Monroe Doctrine was supposed to establish an umbrella over the western hemisphere where the nations on both continents could develop free from European intervention. The only problem was that it didn’t mean free from U.S. intervention.

The Mexican American War became our first war for empire. We were so enamored with the whole Manifest Destiny mindset that we were willing to do whatever it took to expand our nation’s borders from sea to shining sea. Then there was the Spanish American War. It wasn’t enough that we had carved out a good chunk of the continent for ourselves (not to mention the territories of Alaska and Hawaii). We had to have overseas colonial possessions just like the Europeans. Worse yet, was our purloining of the Panama Canal. Since Panama was originally part of Colombia, we essentially helped stage a revolution that gave us territorial rights (a modified lease) to the Canal Zone, where we finished up the job that Messrs De Lesseps and company had been unable to.

The First World War, the war to end all wars, was only a placeholder for the war to come two decades later. America, despite having sent her sons off to fight in Europe for the preservation of democracy and western civilization, got very little in return for her efforts, but then again we never asked for anything. We packed up and left after it was all over. The big winners were the Brits and the French. They both got to add to their empires and stuck Germany with a bar tab she would be unable to pay, setting the stage for the rise of the Nazis and the second installment of their unfinished business on the continent.

As the drums of war started echoing louder and louder on our side of the Atlantic, Stalin and his Minister for State Security, Lavrenti Beria, initiated a full court press to spy on the United States. Prior to this, the Soviets were content to confine most of their spying on their European neighbors.  As it became evident that the United States would become the biggest potential threat (both ideologically and militarily) to the Soviets and their expansionist plans, more attention needed to be paid to what was happening on our side of the pond. Enter the CPUSA (Communist Party of the USA), its membership, and the message that the responsibility for any good Communist was to do whatever it took to ensure that the Proletariat revolution was a worldwide phenomenon. The CPUSA, on instructions/guidance from the COMINTERN (Communist International HQ in Moscow), set up an underground apparatus to engage in campaigns of agitation and propaganda (AGITPROP), as well as espionage.

The Federal Government was easy pickings as the size and scope of government grew under New Deal programs. Bodies were needed to staff the various organizations and offices that were popping up out of nowhere. Under normal conditions, a vetting process would take place for any sort of civil service employment, but there was nothing normal about the Great Depression. It was into this mix that the Communists inserted themselves as New Deal Progressives.

At the conclusion of the Second World War, the United States pushed the idea that all of the industrialized nations (read the victors) needed to find a way to get rid of their colonial possessions, since that had been a contributing factor to the outbreak of hostilities. The Soviets had either installed puppet governments or had assisted in the installation of governments friendly to it in Eastern Europe and had no colonies per se. The French had been relatively slow to act, especially in French Indo China where a guerilla war for independence would eventually be waged by the locals.

NATO was originally supposed to have been headquartered in France. Control of all nuclear weapons on the continent would have been under control of the NATO Secretariat and North Atlantic Council. The French, who were looking for a way out of Indo China (in the middle of their war with Ho Chi Minh), were amenable to U.S. intervention on their behalf (or in this case, their proxies), in exchange for their support of NATO. Well, over the course of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, neither happened. The French balked at not having control of their nukes, NATO HQ went to Belgium instead, and the U.S. got stuck in Vietnam.

Korea was a different story. The Soviets along with their Chinese allies had been the sponsors of the regime in Pyongyang. It wasn’t until the Soviets had tested their own atomic bomb (courtesy of well placed spies at the Manhattan Project) that Stalin gave the go ahead for the North to invade the South. If the United States had maintained a monopoly on the bomb, it would have made it very difficult to launch an attack, knowing that the threat of nuclear annihilation hung over their heads.

With the specter of Communist expansion looming ever larger, the United States embarked on a mission of threat containment, and took action wherever and whenever it had the perception that communism was making inroads into various locations throughout the world.  This would prove to be a double edged sword since it put the U.S. in a position of installing and/or supporting some of the worst despots in the history of the latter half of the twentieth century (Latin America, Iran, and Indonesia immediately come to mind). The term blowback was coined by military and intelligence experts to describe the potential side effects of our actions and policies, but a simpler way of understanding things would be the concepts of cause and effect and the law of unintended consequences. As a result, we became reviled in as many places as we were respected.

When the first Gulf War broke out, we were invited establish bases and other facilities by the governments of various Middle Eastern countries who were genuinely afraid of the threat that Saddam Hussein posed (the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980’s initially kicked things off with a U.S. military base in Bahrain). We were again putting ourselves in the unenviable position of supporting autocratic or authoritarian regimes. Some claim that it was all for oil, which is partially true, since ready flow and transport of oil throughout that region has a direct correlation on oil prices throughout the world, regardless of where that oil comes from (anyone for $5 or $7 a gallon gas?). In the Muslim world, we were viewed as the infidels or crusaders who had allied themselves with illegitimate governments desperately trying to cling to power any way they could. The idea of attacking American forces and interests as a roundabout means of affecting the policies of the governments in power became adopted doctrine by various political and terror organizations.

Prior to the death of Hafez al Assad and the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq, Iran, and Syria all viewed themselves as candidates for the title of regional hegemon in the Middle East. Iran, in particular, has been keen on establishing an Islamic caliphate throughout the region and eventually expanding its ambitions to the rest of the world (where have we seen that before?). Although not closely allied (as far as anyone is willing to admit at this time), the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that has been around since the end of the first World War, has been on the same Islamic export crusade, since in its view, Middle Eastern countries became subservient to western infidel nations because they had lost their way, and only a return to Islamic precepts would bring about a return to greatness.

Then there’s Russia, a onetime superpower until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It is run by a bunch of ultra-nationalists, oligarchs, and revanchists. At the head of this sorry bunch is a strong man wanna be who has maneuvered himself into a position to be able to circumvent his country’s constitution all for the sake of keeping a tenuous hold on power. They have become the cash whores of the world. If there is money that can be made off anything, just take a look around to see if you can find a Russian company waiting in the wings.

The latest bogey to pop up on our radar scopes has been China. In the past decade she has been flexing not only her economic muscles, but her military ones as well. Rather than settle disputes over territory that contains some of the most coveted resources in the Western Pacific via diplomatic or economic means, she has gone on an intimidation spree to cow her neighbors into submission. Her rapid buildup of military capabilities and her willingness to engage in cyberwarfare, have become very troubling aspects in the awakening of this once sleeping giant.

The most disturbing part of this whole tragic opera is the fact that this president and his two predecessors have been Baby Boomers. Why am I picking on the Boomers? It’s simple. They, although there were previous generations who were idealists, have been the ones who have had the greatest impact on the events that have occurred on this planet over the course of the past two decades. They have, through a myopic looking glass, decided that they can cure all of the world’s problems. It doesn’t matter that they tend to intervene in matters that involve sovereign nations, they know better and it’s being done for the betterment of all. I give you the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the Horn of Africa, and possibly coming soon to a combat theatre near you, Syria.

There are real dangers that this country has to confront on a routine basis. There are folks out there who have made it patently obvious that they want to do us harm. But to conflate nations or groups who really have no direct or deleterious impact on our national security with specific organizations or states who do, diminishes our standing at home and abroad when we try and claim the moral high ground, and dilutes the effectiveness of our military forces. The same goes for our willingness to think that we can geopolitically change the global landscape in the interests of making the world a better place. I’m all for American exceptionalism, but what I keep seeing is nothing that I would even consider exceptional, unless you consider hubris and acting like a hegemon exceptional.