Hi frankw1900; That was a great post, and I agree completely with your characterization of US actions during the Cold War as being necessary. I even agree that the current world competition is largely a matter of modernity versus archaicness (my lousy word choice, not yours).
But I don't agree that the US is the unique leader of that modernity. In terms of many aspects, Europe or Japan is the leader in modernity, not the US. The US is barely big enough to be 1/4 of the advanced world (and the right wing conservative portion of the US is an even smaller fraction of the advanced world). And there are many areas where other corners of the world are more advanced. With those other advanced nations, we are often at deep disagreement over the tactics of how to treat international relations.
Re: "Part of that strategy should be to make embracing modernity easy as possible because even then, for an unprivileged person in a poor country, it's still hard, hard work."
We agree on the desired objective, but disagree over the technique of getting there. I hold that our enemies will emulate us through simple envy. We need only wait (as we have waited with Iran), and in the absence of our pushing them to defend themselves, they will slowly embrace the future.
Re: "Another part of the strategy should be to take the struggle to the aggressor and that does mean the ME and Asia. ..."
I agree that aggressors should be made to pay the consequences, but Iraq has not aggressed anyone for several years, and it ill behooves us to run around punishing countries for the past indiscretions of their leaders. Most of the advanced world agrees with me on this.
Re: "It means fully supporting those states which are trying to become modern."
If a state is starving, we should give it seed grain and instructions to plant it. If they are having trouble figuring out how to make a legal system work, we should offer them experts from our universities. If they are unhappy with the level of work accidents in their factories, then we should arrange for their equivalent of OSHA to receive education in the US. And we should do all these things quietly so that we don't rub it in their face that we are superior, but instead just that we want to see their citizens well fed, treated justly, or safe in their jobs.
We have done this in the past and earned huge amounts of goodwill. In parts of Africa, certain types of grain is called "Reagan" because it was seed grain supplied by the US under that administration. And we're still doing it, but as usual, we only do this in countries where the leaders (who are only a tiny fraction of the population) are on our side. For a wonderful way of winning hearts and minds, see #reply-18195225.
Besides that, we need to lower our import duties so that their primitive factories can employ their unhappy and underemployed (and therefore more easily influenced against us) workers.
What is difficult for us to recognize, is that we need to do all the above to countries that hate us, and whose regimes act directly against our interests. We don't need to supply seed corn to Australia, we need to give it to the countries where the locals danced in the street on September 11th.
This is very difficult for us to do, politically, because the human tendency to revenge is very strong. But it is the fastest way to good relations.
I don't mean to say that we should turn the other cheek to regimes that have directly attacked us, in this we have no choice. But in even the worst country, the one with the government that hates us the most, and where the people almost uniformly despise us, there nevertheless live people who love the United States, who have relatives who have moved here, or who are sympathetic to both our own goals and to the advancement of their own countries.
Just recently we finished a long Cold War against Communism. The basic concept of Communism was "collectivism", which implied that people should be treated as "classes" instead of individuals. Communism lost because it was ineffective at rewarding individual people for their efforts, or even at punishing them for their lack of effort. We must not make the "collectivist" mistake when applying punishment to foreign nations. People have to be punished as individuals.
I don't mean to say that we should never use war or trade embargoes as a tool. But my emphasis on using these is as a "tool", not as a "punishment". If by threatening a trade embargo we can get, for an arbitrary example, China to treat its citizens better, than we should use that tool. But tools have side effects, and one of those side effects is that the citizens of the society we use a tool against will come to resent us for that use. So if our embargo doesn't make China change, then our "tool" is not in fact a "tool", but instead is simply a blunt instrument of punishment for all the inhabitants of China.
Our long time trade embargoes with Cuba and Iraq are good examples of tools that have degraded into becoming only collective punishment. The embargo with Cuba was always ineffective due to the rest of the world ignoring it, and the various restrictions on Iraq are slowly drifting in a similar direction. If our objective was to free the Cuban people, we failed miserably. If our objective was to ensure that Cuba wouldn't compete with us economically, I suppose we succeeded.
Our pursuit of friendly helpful relations with countries through assistance, is still only a "collective" reward, but at least that reward goes toward making the citizens there less likely to attack us. And friendship is a very effective and inexpensive technique for winning friends. Who in this country failed to feel warmth in his heart after reading of the outpouring of sympathy for this country after last year's terror attack? Look at Greece and Turkey, the reason they no longer seem to be enemies is not because one of them threatened the other with military defeat, but instead because of their mutual sympathy and assistance for the other in the face of earth quakes.
Re: "It means supporting in a very real way with security and money those muslim elements who don't accept the Wahabist/Deobandist message and can provide it with competition."
If the Chinese give money and assistance to the Democrats, will that make the American people more or less likely to vote Democratic? I hope you answered "less", LOL. Well, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If the US government announces that the British should vote for Labour, will that make the British people more or less likely to vote for Labour? I say "less", and this is with an example of a country that is more or less a friend to ours. It is a very simple fact of human life that political manipulations from foreign lands are almost always resisted. This is a universal fact of human life.
I suppose that if the Arabs, for example, were inclined towards a docile servility, then we could simply give money and support to the ones that we liked, but the sad fact is that the Arabs are humans just like the whole rest of the planet. If we provide security and money to an element of one of these societies, all we will be doing is providing easier recruitment for the elements we don't like.
No, the way to assist those "muslim elements" that agree with us is to provide simple (i.e. not tied to the return of some favor in the future) assistance for the country as a whole. By doing this, the opinion of the people in that country will turn towards us. If we make our assistance conditional on their behavior, they will act the same way that humans always act in that circumstance, and try to minimax it as a game. If we try to make winners with money, all we'll do is destroy their credibility with their own people. Do I have to link in the articles that came out in the US when it was discovered that China was making donations to our politicians?
The way to get these countries to assist us is by assisting them. (I want to write "the old fashioned way", LOL.)
Re: "It means tracking down and killing those terrorists who are operating a program of trans-national murder as part of the islamofascist program. It means getting European politicians to take the islamofascists as seriously as their security services do."
I agree.
-- Carl |
