Appeal for a 'Just Security' US
policy By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Insisting that US foreign
policy of the past six years has clearly failed, a
left-leaning Washington think-tank is calling for
the adoption of a comprehensive new approach to
international relations called "Just Security" in
which the US would act "as a global partner, not a
global boss".
Among other features, "Just
Security" calls for reducing US military spending
by a third, or some US$213 billion; carrying out a
"rapid" withdrawal of US forces from Iraq; and
seeking sharp
cuts
in the US and Russian nuclear arsenals as a first
step toward realizing the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty's goal of banning nuclear
weapons.
The new approach, laid out in a
69-page report released in Washington on Tuesday
by the Institute for Policy Studies' Foreign
Policy in Focus (FPIF) program, also calls for
sustained and generous US engagement in
multilateral institutions, particularly those
aimed at reducing the emission of greenhouse gases
that contribute to global warming and enhance the
abilities of poor countries to curb the spread of
deadly diseases.
"This new foreign-policy
approach is more in line with public opinion than
Congress, which recently backed additional money
for the Iraq war," said John Feffer, who led a
team of 14 contributors affiliated with program.
"Leading [US] presidential candidates and
the foreign-policy establishment are being overly
cautious. There's virtually no debate about
freezing, let alone reducing, military spending,
which has soared to unprecedented levels," he
said, pointing to recent opinion polls by the
University of Maryland's Program on International
Policy Attitudes and the Chicago Council on Global
Affairs that suggest strong US public support for
sharply cutting defense budgets and increasing
foreign assistance.
Indeed, since George W
Bush became president in 2001, US military
spending has increased to more than $600 billion,
an amount that is roughly equivalent to the
combined military budgets of the rest of the
world's countries. At the same time, Washington
has used its "global war on terror" to increase
its military presence around the world and its
sales of arms to other countries.
Yet
according to the report "Just Security: An
Alternative Foreign Policy Framework", these
measures have actually undermined, rather than
enhanced, global security.
"US military
interventions, directly or through proxies, have
thrown entire regions into a downward spiral of
conflict," the report asserts. "In the Middle East
and Africa, in particular, the emphasis on
military rather than diplomatic solutions has
prevented regional peacemaking from moving
forward.
"With its emphasis on fighting
wars, the Bush administration has insisted on
focusing just on security," according to the
report. "We must focus instead on a just security,
because there can be no real security without
justice."
To that end, the report calls
for Washington to move "from a unipolar system
presided over by the United States to a secure,
multipolar system that is held in place by a
latticework of international institutions and
laws".
In that respect, it calls for
Washington to pay far more respect to
international law by abiding by the Geneva
Conventions and other human-rights treaties,
upholding the core standards of the International
Labor Organization, and supporting new
international institutions, such as the
International Criminal Court and the Kyoto
Protocol that have been rejected by the Bush
administration.
"We are entering a new
'multipolar moment'. The most aggressive
unilateralist phase in US policy is receding, and
new centers of power are emerging," says the
report, which notes that Washington must come to
terms with China's ascendancy, Russia's
"petropolitik", India's economic heft, a "new
generation of Latin American leadership", and
international civil society, or "the other
superpower".
The report examines five
critical challenges faced by the US and the rest
of the world - climate change, global poverty,
nuclear weapons, terrorism and military conflict -
that it says can only be addressed through
multilateral cooperation and that are subject to
misconceptions, often shared by both Democrats and
Republicans, that get in the way of rational
policy responses.
Free trade and
free-market policies are widely believed to help
the poor, according to the report. But as
implemented over the past two decades, neo-liberal
policies have actually contributed to poverty and
the growing divide between rich and poor both
among and within countries, it asserts.
Similarly, the notion that Washington
needs to spend more than $600 billion a year to
keep the peace - an idea endorsed by all of the
leading Republican and Democratic hopefuls for
next year's presidential election - is also
faulty, according to the report.
"The
United States has taken on the role of the world's
policeman, but the world is not calling [an
emergency telephone number] for our services," it
notes, adding that Washington "is currently
spending more now on an annual basis than at any
time since World War II" despite the absence of a
credible rival.
The report, which is
clearly aimed at influencing the race for the 2008
Democratic presidential nomination, in particular,
calls for a return by the party and the country to
the "principled internationalism" of the late
president Franklin D Roosevelt, as opposed to his
more hawkish successor, Harry Truman, who presided
over the birth of the Cold War and the doctrine of
"containment" of Soviet and later Chinese
influence.
A "new and improved"
containment to be deployed against transnational
terrorism, threatening regimes and the
proliferation of nuclear weapons, as promoted by
"liberal hawks" who identify themselves with
Truman's legacy - while an improvement "on the
schoolyard-bully stance of the Bush
administration" - fails to recognize new global
realities, according to the report, particularly
the necessity to build multilateral mechanisms
needed to confront critical global problems.
"This rehabilitation of Henry Truman's
foreign-policy record is an attempt to pump up the
Democratic Party with steroids lest it appear weak
on the military on the military or terrorism,"
says the report. "It is close to the same Bush
foreign policy, minus the more flagrant
human-rights violations.
"As president
Franklin Delano Roosevelt realized more than 60
years ago, the future of the United States depends
on our becoming a more responsible member of the
global neighborhood ... We will not feel secure
until we all feel secure."
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