THE BEAR'S
LAIR Foreign policy in a bad
world By Martin Hutchinson
Mitt Romney, in a speech at Virginia
Military Institute October 8, said there was a
"longing" for American leadership in the Middle
East and he laid out a foreign policy agenda that
differed little from that of George W Bush.
As such a policy would more or less remove
any possible savings from budget economy, leading
to permanently higher taxes and federal spending
locked in at about 25% of GDP, with an upward
trend as entitlement spending increased, I thought
it worth examining whether there might be a
cheaper alternative that yet achieved rational US
goals.
Traditionally, Republican foreign
policy was isolationist, except under the maverick
Theodore Roosevelt. His predecessor, William
McKinley, for example,
struggled to prevent the Spanish-American War and
would very likely have succeeded had the
battleship Maine not blown up unexpectedly
in Havana harbor, triggering a popular demand for
retaliation against the supposed Spanish outrage.
Under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge,
while the US entered into pacific international
agreements such as the Washington Naval Treaty
(1921) and the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), it
notably did not join the League of Nations. Even
in the hemisphere (Mexico in 1914-16),
interventionism was at that time thought the
policy of the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, rejected
after his departure. The US tradition had been set
by president Washington, who in his 1797 Farewell
Address said "The great rule of conduct for us in
regard to foreign nations is to have with them as
little political connection as possible."
After World War II, a consensus formed in
favor of interventionism, although a sizeable
faction of the Republicans under Senator Robert A
Taft opposed it. With a hugely powerful and
initially monolithic bloc led by the Soviet Union
and China dedicated to acquiring global real
estate, it made sense to interpose US power
wherever possible to prevent this.
Indeed,
the efficacy of interventionism was demonstrated
the hard way in 1973-80, when with a US weakened
by Watergate and economic malaise, the Soviet bloc
took over Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Ethiopia,
Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua and Afghanistan -
Portugal and Italy were near-misses, too, as was
Chile.
Once the Soviet bloc was overthrown
in 1989-91, the case for US interventionism became
much weaker. President George W Bush notably did
not intervene when the Marxist Slobodan Milosevic
attempted to quell the separatist movements in
Slovenia and Croatia. However the 1990-91 Gulf
intervention, supported by the United Nations
against a pretty clear-cut case of military
aggression against a neighboring state, was so
apparently successful (they didn't finish the job)
that intervention on humanitarian grounds became
temporarily fashionable - thus the interventions
in Somalia (1992-93), Haiti (1994-95), Bosnia
(1995-96) and Kosovo (1999). Even under president
Bill Clinton, however, some situations were
thought too difficult - thus there was no
intervention against the Rwandan genocide.
George W Bush ran for election in 2000
promising a "modest" foreign policy. He then
reversed course abruptly after the 9/11 attacks,
intervening in Iraq and Afghanistan. President
Barack Obama has continued many of Bush's
policies, adding an intervention in Libya,
carrying out drone strikes in Pakistan and
elsewhere and, thankfully, taking out Osama bin
Laden through a commando operation in central
Pakistan.
Neither of Bush's interventions
(the Afghanistan one continued by Obama) has been
particularly successful in serving US interests,
improving the lives of the local people or even
making them less anti-American. Their combined
cost, US$1.4 trillion so far, is only 14% of the
disgraceful $10 trillion addition to US public
debt since 2001 but probably represents about the
upper limit of the 10-year spending cuts that
might be achievable elsewhere in the US budget.
The foreign policy differences between
Obama and Romney are not all that great; Romney is
more committed to assisting Israel, wants to send
arms to the Syrian rebels and wants to tighten
sanctions on Iran in an attempt to prevent them
building a nuclear weapon. Obama is more committed
to multilateral action and would probably devote
any savings in the defense budget compared with
Romney to subsidizing various multilateral
institutions which he favors.
Nevertheless, given the choice between
Obama's and Romney's foreign policies, one is
tempted to ask "Is that all there is?"
Neither foreign policy would be
recognizable to Washington, to McKinley, or to
Coolidge. Both are working under the assumptions
ingrained in policymakers by the 1945-91 Cold War;
that there is a Manichean struggle out there
against an enemy of equal power to our own which
must be confronted all the time, throughout the
world, whether by direct military action or by
co-opting international institutions. Romney even
verbalized this in his VMI speech, when he said of
the current Middle East situation "It would be
familiar to George Marshall."
In reality,
the world of 1945-91 is as dead as the Dark Ages,
in spite of Vladimir Putin's valiant attempts to
revive it. There is no Manichean opponent armed
with an arsenal of nuclear missiles comparable to
our own - Russia is a pipsqueak, both
demographically and economically.
If Islam
were united in militant opposition to the
Christian world there would still not be such an
opponent because all the resources of technology,
industrial capacity and weaponry would be on our
side - it would be a conflict similar to the US
Civil War, bloody and prolonged but never really
in doubt because the South's industrial capacity
was limited to the Tredegar Iron Works.
In
reality, much of the Islamic world co-exists with
the US reasonably contentedly; its militant
element is very limited in number, strength and
geographical reach. Activist Middle East policy or
open demonstrations of US foolishness and weakness
both strengthen that militant element but nowhere
near sufficiently to make it a Manichean threat.
The United States today is in the
situation, not of the US in 1965, but of Britain
in 1895, subject to erosion of its power through
peaceful industrial competition and to possible
replacement as the world's leading industrial
colossus but militarily faced only with tribesmen
and colonial rebellions. As Britain discovered in
the Boer War, an activist foreign and military
policy stirs up opposition and damages its
position and safety far beyond any benefit it
might bring.
1895 was not without its
terrorists, especially in disturbed areas such as
the Balkans; Austria-Hungary, lost its Empress
Elizabeth to an Italian anarchist in 1898 and its
heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand to a Serbian
terrorist in 1914. Yet Austria-Hungary survived in
1898, when it reacted with restraint and then
plunged the world into darkness in 1914, when it
over-reacted.
The outline of a successful
foreign and defense policy, by analogy to the
disturbed but stable world before 1914, is thus
apparent. The United States should maintain its
defense forces as strong as economically possible,
to deter somewhat hostile but militarily cautious
powers like Russia and China from trying anything.
It should maintain an active espionage
(including electronic espionage) and commando
presence in the areas where its terrorist enemies
congregate, while at the same time keeping as low
a profile as possible in those areas and
interfering as little as possible with the lives
of their ordinary inhabitants.
In
particular, it should be extremely sparing with
"drone" attacks, which are ethically highly
questionable, risking as they do the lives of
local innocents.
The strong defense force
and the espionage efforts will cost a lot of
money, no question about it. However, to pay for
them, and to reduce the impact of US activities on
those of different cultures who may be alienated
by such activities, there are a number of
economies that can be made:
The United Nations, the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund serve little useful
purpose, and in the latter cases provide bad
advice and market-distorting finance. US support
for them should be wound down.
Foreign aid is generally a transfer from the
relatively poor citizens of rich countries to the
wealthy corrupt elites of poor countries. Since
most of it does little good to the impoverished
majority in recipient countries, it buys little
goodwill, except among the bribed. Senator Rand
Paul (R-KY) is right; it should be eliminated as
far as possible.
In the age of modern communications, most
diplomatic and consular services are superfluous,
and as the Benghazi tragedy has shown, they
provide an opportunity for anti-American activity
and require very expensive security measures. They
should be wound down unless they are needed as a
base for espionage or commando activities.
The US military presence overseas should be
cut back to a minimum of strategically vital
places, with naval support where appropriate.
Medium-sized military presences in, for example,
Germany are very expensive and encourage the
Europeans not to take responsibility for their own
defense.
The Cold War is over, America's
own resources are limited and, contrary to
Romney's fatuous claim, there is no "longing" for
American leadership in the Middle East - very much
the opposite. As Washington said, US relations
with foreign countries should be limited to trade.
Both US security and the US budget will benefit by
such a limitation.
Martin
Hutchinson is the author of Great
Conservatives (Academica Press, 2005) - details
can be found on the website
www.greatconservatives.com - and co-author with
Professor Kevin Dowd of Alchemists of Loss
(Wiley, 2010). Both are now available on
Amazon.com, Great Conservatives only in a
Kindle edition, Alchemists of Loss in both
Kindle and print editions.
(Republished
with permission from PrudentBear.com.
Copyright 2005-12 David W Tice &
Associates.)
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