Take Back American Foreign Policy
At the Take Back America conference last week in Washington, DC, the Bush foreign policy was clearly unpopular. References to the Iraq War debacle, to extraordinary renditions and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, were sure-fire applause lines. Indeed, Bush’s foreign policy has been so obviously unpopular, as revealed in last November’s elections, that the conference organizers from the Campaign for America’s Future departed from their previous focus on domestic issues to showcase several discussions on the Iraq War, terrorism, and the military budget.
The Democratic presidential candidates who showed up to woo the progressive audience—Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, and Bill Richardson—all nodded in the direction of foreign policy as well. But the leading presidential contenders have confined their bold new foreign policy approaches to the Iraq War, vying with one another to see who can leave the fewest troops behind. The unpopularity of the Bush approach to global affairs has opened up a golden opportunity for challengers—Democrat, Republican, or Independent—to offer a completely new way for the United States to relate to the world. So far, the Democrats haven’t risen to the occasion. The party’s Real Security alternative is not much different from the Bush approach, minus the human rights violations. It’s the same emphasis on projecting hard power and fighting a war on terrorism.
There’s a real nostalgia in the Democratic Party for the Cold War, for Harry Truman and containment, for the days when the party leaders supposedly stood tall and took no guff from Republicans at home or Communists abroad. Sure, compared to the military evangelism of the Bush administration, the relatively prudent containment approach looks pretty good. In their brief for a new bipartisan consensus around such a revived containment strategy, Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz describe in the latest Foreign Affairs a “judicious retrenchment” that combines hard power with restraining adversaries through engagement. It’s the usual balance-of-power stuff, around which Kissinger reshaped American foreign policy. Two cheers for Henry Kissinger. He might be a war criminal but he looks like a genius next to Wolfowitz.
But warmed-over Cold War is just not good enough.
Just Security
Also at the Take Back America conference, Foreign Policy In Focus and the Institute for Policy Studies unveiled a new alternative foreign policy framework: Just Security. We take aim not only at the Bush administration’s foreign policy but also what we identify as a disturbing bipartisan consensus on preserving and projecting U.S. military power in the world.
The U.S. military budget is now over $600 billion. Have any of the leading presidential contenders called for a freeze much less a reduction? The United States is demanding that other countries dismantle their nuclear programs while we embark on a program to build new nukes—where’s the justice in that? And should the costs of addressing global warming fall on the backs of the poor? Can we continue to push forward with global economic policies that further widen the gap between rich and poor? An unjust foreign policy is both an unpopular and an ineffective foreign policy that traps us in a cycle of fear, hostility, and decline. We will not feel secure until we all feel secure, at home and abroad.
The Just Security framework calls for a reduction of $213 billion in U.S. military spending, dramatic cuts in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals as a first step toward nuclear disarmament, an international process under the auspices of the UN to secure a viable peace between Israel and Palestine, a global carbon fee to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and generate funds to help countries transition to sustainable sources of energy, and a large scale, global plan to train four million new health workers.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt transformed U.S. foreign policy with his big picture Good Neighbor policy of the 1930s. When they dramatically reoriented the U.S. approach to the world, neither Ronald Reagan nor George W. Bush (post-September 11) approached the matter piecemeal. They offered a large-scale, comprehensive foreign policy vision (Peace Through Strength, Global War on Terror). Those who oppose the current administration’s foreign policy should take this lesson to heart. We should be thinking not just about Iraq or about cutting one or two old Cold War weapons systems. Judicious retrenchment, judging from the elections and the polls, is not what Americans want. We should be aiming high. We should be aiming for a Just Security program.
To read more about the Just Security plan, check out these excerpts in AlterNet and TomPaine.com. And here’s a link to the entire document in PDF version.
Perils of Militarism
The Iraq War has been a disaster in many ways. One often-overlooked drawback has been the Bush administration’s discrediting of civilian control over the military. The neocon war planners, many of whom had never served in the military, completely blew it. The harshest criticisms have come from the military itself. In the short term, these military critiques of the war may help end the war sooner. But there is another danger, warns FPIF contributor Adam Elkus in The End of Supreme Command.
“The legitimacy of civilian control over the military will take decades to recover from the disaster of Iraq,” Elkus writes. “Military activism in the political process could become increasingly commonplace, with politicians unable to convince the public of their ability to decide security matters without the public endorsement of retired or active military figures. And whoever sits in the White House in 2009 will have to deal with the fact that their authority over the military has been diminished. The militarization of U.S. foreign policy—as well as border policy and even domestic affairs—has accelerated during the Bush years. Without a civilian check, this dangerous process could have even more drastic consequences.”
In Colombia, meanwhile, the Bush administration is still supporting arms sales despite the evidence of corruption, human rights violations, and the counter-narcotics failures of Plan Colombia. Congress, however, is using the human rights angle to challenge military aid.
“The rationale for prohibiting military assistance to nations with poor human rights records is simple,” writes FPIF contributor Stephen Heidt in Keep the Freeze on Colombia. “It does not serve U.S. interests to materially support organizations in cahoots with foreign terrorists, even if those organizations are bosom buddies of the current administration in Washington. Moreover, dangling military assistance can be a tool to motivate foreign nations to clean up their human rights records, assuming that tool is actually utilized. By freezing the funds, Congress is making a clear foreign policy statement that President George W. Bush is unwilling to support: Colombia must clean up the corruption in the military or forgo further assistance.”
The terrible loss of life in Darfur has prompted many to call for a military intervention. Some have called for a U.S. military strike against Sudan. Grassroots movements have backed UN intervention. But FPIF contributors Steve Fake and Kevin Funk are skeptical even of UN intervention. In Saving Darfur or Salvation Delusion, they argue that “Even if well-intentioned, it is entirely possible that an intervening force would cause more harm than it could potentially alleviate, especially given Khartoum’s disapproval of its deployment, and the possibility of an insurgent movement rising against it. Crowds of Sudanese have demonstrated against a UN presence, and the contention that UN forces would turn Sudan into ‘another Iraq’ resonates strongly in the region.”
Green Market Hustlers
Everyone from Al Gore to the Google billionaires to the backers of the Kyoto Protocol have a solution to global warming. It’s called cap-and-trade, which sets a ceiling on carbon dioxide emissions and then sets up a market for trading permits to pollute.
FPIF contributor M.K. Dorsey picks up a theme from our Just Security report by debunking the shell game of cap-and-trade. In Green Market Hustlers, he writes, “On a global scale, carbon trading is little more than an untested economic experiment that may not avert climate catastrophe in time. Moreover, carbon trading aids and abets climate injustice. In the main, trading is designed to parcel, privatize, and sell the right to pollute carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The very same petroleum, natural gas, and electricity concerns disproportionately responsible for carbon dioxide emissions and climate change—who denied the existence of climate change and are now urging gradual steps to address it—all stand to make windfall profits on untested and perhaps unverifiable cap-and-trade schemes.”
Also this week at Foreign Policy In Focus, we have a strategic dialogue on the question of microcredit. Are these very small loans to the world’s poor the solution to global poverty or are they an over-hyped finger in the dyke? FPIF asked economist Robert Pollin and the folks at the Microcredit Summit Campaign to address this question.
Pollin argues that microcredit is a tool but not the tool. It all depends on the context. “For large numbers of micro enterprises to be successful, they also need access to decent roads and affordable means of moving their products to markets,” he writes in Microcredit: False Hopes and Real Possibilities. “They need marketing support to reach customers. They need a vibrant, well-functioning domestic market itself that encompasses enough people with enough money to buy what these enterprises have to sell. Finally, micro businesses benefit greatly from an expanding supply of decent wage-paying jobs in their local economies. This is the single best way of maintaining a vibrant domestic market.”
In response, Sam Daley-Harris agrees that microfinance is one tool of many. But, he argues, we cannot always wait for the larger development program. “Perhaps the cruelest charge is that real lending should go to small and medium businesses capable of creating jobs and not to microbusiness and the subsistence activities in the informal sector,” he writes in Debate on Microcredit. “Certainly financial services should be made available to small and medium businesses, but to say that they should not go to microbusinesses is to sentence the poorest to a cruel life of waiting: waiting for the wage employment and economic growth that may never come or the charity that may bring momentary relief, but without dignity or empowerment.”
Going to Atlanta?
This week, a different effort to take back America will happen in Atlanta: the U.S. Social Forum. It’s the first time that the World Social Forum will have a North American version. (For more on the WSF, check out our Strategic Focus, which included this piece by Walden Bello on The Forum at the Crossroads).
FPIF contributor Sameer Dossani is heading down to Atlanta (along with several FPIF staffers). He wants you to join him. Here’s why: the time is right, it’s necessary to strengthen resistance, and we owe it to the world.
On this last point, Dossani writes in Three Reasons I’m Going to the Social Forum, “We must be honest and say that the U.S. government has played a terrible role in undermining efforts toward meaningful democracy and equality. If we who live in the United States do not stand up to this force that has been so powerful around the world, who will? We owe it to those in the Global South and around the world to come together and demand another United States, one based on principles of solidarity and democracy, and with it another world altogether, where systems and institutions are built by the people and remain responsive to human rights and human interests.”
LINKS
Take Back America conference; https://secure.ourfuture.org/tba07/
Real Security, Democratic Party; http://www.democrats.gov/rs.html
Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz, “Grand Strategy for a Divided America,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007; http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070701faessay86406/charles-a-kupchan-peter-l-trubowitz/grand-strategy-for-a-divided-america.html
John Feffer, “American Foreign Policy is Broken; Time for a New Approach,” AlterNet, June 19, 2007; http://ww.alternet.org/audits/54160/
John Feffer, “Justice and Foreign Policy,” TomPaine.com, June 19, 2007; http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/06/19/justice_and_foreign_policy.php
Just Security, Foreign Policy In Focus and Institute for Policy Studies, June 2007; http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/070608-justsecurity.pdf
Adam Elkus, “The End of Supreme Command” (http://fpif.org/fpiftxt/4327); The Bush administration has discredited civilian control of the military. The consequences are potentially disastrous.
Stephen Heidt, “Keep the Freeze on Colombia” (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4316); Colombia is full of drugs, guns, and human rights violations. Why is the United States still giving it military aid?
Susan Rice, Anthony Lake, and Donald Payne, “We Saved Europeans, Why not Africans,” The Washington Post, October 2, 2006; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/01/AR2006100100871.html
Steve Fake and Kevin Funk, “Saving Darfur or Salvation Delusion?” (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4314); It’s amid the U.S. government’s contradictory posturing and less-than-humanitarian geopolitical motives that the activist movement addressing Darfur operates.
M.K. Dorsey, “Green Market Hustlers” (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4313); Little green (business) men have hijacked the climate debate. Their market-based proposals are out of this world—and not in a good way.
Robert Pollin, “Microcredit: False Hopes and Real Possibilities” (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4323); Is microcredit the solution to global poverty? Robert Pollin maintains that context is everything.
Sam Daley-Harris and Robert Pollin, “Debate on Microcredit” (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4324); Sam Daley-Harris argues for improving microfinance so that it lives up to its potential while Robert Pollin counters that microfinance must be embedded in a larger development program.
Walden Bello, “The Forum at the Crossroads” (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4196)
Sameer Dossani, “Three Reasons Why I’m Going to the Social Forum” (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4322); Activists from all across the United States are converging on Atlanta.
© 2007 Foreign Policy In Focus
Where is the strategy of peace?
I see the strategy of war, but where is the strategy of peace?
Are we doing anything to win the hearts and minds of the people in the Middle East?
Are we working overtime to solve the problems in Palestine?
Are we sending aid and volunteers to help poor people?
Is the president working to set a positive example of legitimate governments, fair markets, and healthy environments in this country?
Are we organizing concerts or sporting events to bring people together so we can realize our common humanity?
I recently heard that our aid in Pakistan after an earthquake did more for our efforts than anything else. Do we really need to wait for an earthquake in order to be nice to people?
We spend billions of dollars on the strategies of war and yet we don’t fund strategies of peace.
It makes me wonder if we are trying to create a better world or if the Bush administration just wants to smash the national governments and national industries that are standing in the way of global corporate profits.
If we really are trying to make the world a better place, then where is the strategy for peace?
http://www.peaceisactive.com
Excellent points, Nathan. Peace is the most urgent and noble aspiration of mankind.
The Party’s Over: Greens call Democratic Party a lost cause for voters opposed to the Iraq War
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Democratic Congress members’ capitulation on war funding strips away illusion that Dems oppose the Bush agenda, say Greens
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Greens appeal to antiwar voters: stop wasting your votes, support and join a real antiwar party
http://www.gp.org/press/pr_2007_06_06.shtml
www.uspeacegovernment.org
one question seems to appear in these posts more than any other; it’s a variation of the classic “what is to be done?”
my advice: pick the one issue that makes you the angriest and focus on that. link up with like-minded people and brainstorm your strategies. take action (non-violently, please).
flaming each other in these pages is not an action that’s going to further anybody’s agenda but incurious george’s.
Russ-John Hagelin/US Peace Government.
I voted for John Hagelin and the Natural Law Party in 1980 when Reagan ran for election.
The newspaper reported that only 1 vote was cast for the NLP, in our county. That’s when I began to feel that votes were being manipulated! There had to be at least 2 votes in our county. But, the paper knew they had better not enter 0, because everybody that voted NLP would know.
I’ve been struggling for a third party a long time!
RE: “WHAT IS TO BE DONE?”
hazmat June 25th, 2007 1:15 pm
“pick the one issue that makes you the angriest and focus on that….flaming each other in these pages is not an action that’s going to further anybody’s agenda but incurious george’s.”
It is to be hoped that the posters on this website do more than post - which has its own vivifying and thought-clarifying effect - and are in some other way active.
As I have stated before, my own view is that the plight of the left is not the power of the right (popular or corporate), but the depoliticization of the New Deal electorate in a post-industrial labor force. Hence my focus on labor recruitment and labor-community outreach through my union: it stands a chance of educating people through working relationships, vs. media. (Anyone interested in the ‘post-industrial labor’ question and resulting weakness of countervailing force against the right can see my posts elsewhere in which I quote the normally right wing Broder on labor.)
Democrats who want to bomb Iran: Hillary, Obama, and Edwards.
So don’t we need to take back the Democratic party first??????????????????????????????????
NMBill: I ran for Congress with the NLP in ‘96.
The NLP went to great expense and trouble to obtain ballot access by petitioning on the streets. I heard this from an employee at the Wake County (NC) Board of Elections: “Too many candidates on the ballot would just confuse people”.
When we’d finally met all the requirements for ballot access in NC, the chairman of the State Elections Board still refused to allow the NLP on the ballot. But he gave way when our party chairman pointed out to him that he could not legally deny our place on the ballot.
I got a thousand votes and did not spend a dime, except for gas.
The NLP had a great and intelligent message. It was really inspiring to be involved with such an enlightened party. The NLP was light-years ahead of the times. It was a soft, powerful, and intelligent entry into the very disorderly and incoherent field of US politics, something still badly needed. The two-party stranglehold has yet to be broken and appears quite firmly entrenched.
The US is a very strange nation politically, offering essentially no choice at election time.
But if you need laundry soap, you’ll need a field guide before you can make sense of the variety.
If Democrats can become convinced that Democrats are just the same as Republicans, why then doesn’t it work the other way around ?
Why isn’t it possible to point out that Democrats do everything that Republicans wish for, so they might just as well vote for them ?
I think that as much as it is useful to point out the problems of the Democratic Party, it nevertheless remains the most important to fight the Republican Party until it withers away and merges with the Democrats.
This has recently happened here in South Africa, where the former National Party, whose ideas and worldview was completely bankrupt, being the inventors of ‘apartheid’, has shrivelled away, and after it merged with its former arch-enemy the ANC, it has completely disappeared. It can happen: these people are in politics only for themselves so to them it does not matter to which party they belong, as long as they can have a place at the trough and eat with the other pigs.
Many fanatical Republicans would be all too happy to switch allegiance if it would give them the opportunity to stay in power for an extended period.
This could all happen. As an outsider I am just amazed how you Americans continue to take a party that is full of complete extremists seriously. Even many progressive people are too often distracted by the discussion framework that the Republicans set up (Now I agree, right after 9-11 it was difficult to set your own discussion framework; but right now it should be much easier). Really, in a normal democratic society with a well-informed citizenry, an extremist party like the Republicans would only get 10% support at most (and then people would start to worry about them already).
I have compiled a sort of simple voter’s guide for how to make an assessment of a candidate just by the ‘label’ under which s/he chooses to run:
REPUBLICAN: Unelectable. Most likely, this person is a fugitive for the law and pursues office just to cover up for his or her past crimes. The American people would probably be better off having this person behind bars rather than in political office. Let us criminalize ‘politics as usual’ and just call a spade a spade.
DEMOCRAT: you are electable, but the American people have to constantly keep an eye on you, because in the end you are not very reliable. They may get tired of you very soon.
INDEPENDENT: So you have nothing to do with all of this mess. Well, that is a positive thing….for a start ….
GREEN: So you have nothing to do with this PLUS you have actually got an idea of where to go. WOW, that is great !!
LIBERTARIAN: So you have nothing to do with this PLUS you have actually got an idea of where to go. WOW, that is great !!
Etcetera, etcetera……
I think you progressives in the U.S.A. really have to start an election campaign on your own, with a simple message like this: Vote for what you believe in, keep Democrats under scrutiny, and NEVER in ANY CASE vote for a Republican, however smart or articulate they seem to be. If they are not criminals already, if they have not already been involved in the largest fuck-ups and scandals in American political history (Watergate, Iran-Contra, Iraq war, both ‘wars on terrorism’ by Reagan and Bush II, supporting various tyrants and terrorist groups, largest deficits ever), they are anyway too fraudulent or too stupid to be able to govern. You don’t have to accept all this. Just say no. Do you really think they are ‘tough on crime’, ‘tough on terrorism’, ’support families’ or ‘promote Christian values’ ? Think again.
Another important progressive message for an election campaign is: Always try to vote for the candidate with the smallest amount of ‘campaign contributions’ (unless it is a republican of course, I heard Bush’s worth is going down as well). Companies try to bribe candidates with large sums of money and these candidates are always more accountable to their contributors than to their voters. Follow the money and you know whose politics is reliable and whose politics is compromised by too many ‘donations’.
Please, after this whole disaster of the Bush administration, let at least something good come out of it. Get a complete overhaul of your electoral system and voter’s education. Do it also for us, living in other parts of the planet. We are tired of being terrorized into submission by the biggest bully on the block. We are just as much human beings as you are, whether we are black, white, brown or yellow. We all have families that we love and we all aspire to become happy, to contribute our talents to society and to make a decent living out of that. We are told that we must fight corruption, but when are you going to do something about your own corruption ?
Nathan Andover June 25th, 2007 12:00 pm
Nice ideas but where is the money going to come from. We are 9 trillion dollars in debt.
We have 50 million people without health insurance.
The housing market is collapsing
American based Corporations want to hire anyone but an American.
We are doing nothing about our contribution to global warming.
Corruption is rampant in our own Government.
We have sat by doing nothing as our civil liberties have been stolen.
We have uncontrolled borders which makes us just a piece of ground rather than a country.
You are still talking like we are rich and lead the world, when what we really need is to clean up our own backyard. That is the best contribution we could make to the rest of the world.
Lobo Gris
Where’s the peace? Here’s one small piece: first of all the context of the lead article is tremendous to me, but in the writing, and here’s the small peace, I would change Bush administration to US administration, this might feel creepy at first but it does away with the energy of some enemy imagery (see Marshall Rosenberg), but it also empowers by mentally re-engaging with the executive of what is this thing called the United States of America.
What to do? I agree with chasing your angriest thread, knowing it’s counter strand is bliss.
Of course you’re invited to join Puck Twain’s thread of impeachment. As Naomi Klien’s writing suggests: It’s All One War - Iraq, Paletine, Immigration, Drug… - It’s All One War.
I feel the call for impeachment consecrates all the angry blissfull threads to a national conversation that will, in Scott Ritter’s terms, repudiate the basic behavior of war - the North American contentent still offers some semblence of peace where this conversation can be cultured.
Regardless if impeachment of the US administration occurs or not, does not preclude us from victory. A call for impeachment will send a resounding message to the turn on a dime for a vote politians, as well as culture the conversation that will grow the civic reponsability Scott Ritter also calls for - Great Victories!
So this is my mantra:
One Mind: Impeachment!
One Heart: Impeachment!
One Voice: Impeachment!
Feel free to join me. I guarantee your anger will take a blissfull bounce!
Nathan: Very well put. And we’re long overdue for establishing Kucinich’s plan for a Department of Peace.
Winnetou: Thanks especially for the idea that today’s Republicans were the Democrats of yesterday. All too true, especially in the Old South when Democrats started responding to the demand for Civil Rights. But apart from that, in the long view of social progress, those on the right generally express the ideas from what they perceive to be former successes, whereas those on the left express what they see to be needed for the future. As we grow older, we have to let go of the things that didn’t work in their day, find the ones that are suited to this time, and not waste our energies villifying those who see things through the rear view mirror of the mind turned toward the past.
Puck Twain: Agree with your saying we need, in our own minds and hearts, to restore some dignity to the notion of the U.S. Executive Branch. Hurling expletives may feel good for an instant or two, but ultimately what we harbor in our hearts either feeds us or destroys us ultimately.