Polk Report
How to Evolve an Exit Strategy From America’s Foreign Policy Shambles
by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY and WILLIAM R. POLK
Attached beneath my introductory comment is an essay by the American historian William R. Polk. His subject is the American predilection for non-learning in foreign policy. My comment is intended to set the stage by summarizing the dangerous shambles that now passes for foreign policy in the United States.
Introductory Comment
In a nutshell, recent events in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Ukraine show there is no grand-strategic focus to America’s increasingly militarized foreign policy. A German officer in the old imperial army might say, nicht schwerpunckt!
What we call foreign policy and grand strategy in the 21st Century — i.e., that ‘you are either with us or with the terrorists’* — has devolved into a self-righteous welter of bluster, threats, arms transfers, puny demonstrations (e.g., deployments of two or three B-2s), proxy wars, and bombing (especially, targeted liquidations with drones from a safe distance instead of a bullet in the back of the head), all aimed ad hoc in reaction to any crisis du jour. The pattern is more like a giant whack-a-mole game than a sensible grand strategy aimed at ending conflicts on favorable terms, while paying due regard to strengthening our bonds at home and with our allies, undermining the cohesion of our adversaries, and coping efficiently with the internal constraints limiting our actions.
Consider, please, the following: Last month President Obama announced we would extend our stay in Afghanistan — a war we have clearly lost — until the end of 2016. Last week, Mr. Obama, after months of procrastination, said he was considering sending weapons to the Syrian Sunni insurgents fighting President Assad. The most effective of these insurgents are the ISIS Jihadis who are fighting and defeating, as well as stealing or buying weapons, from the other insurgents. This week Mr. Obama opened the door to the possibility of bombing ISIS Jihadis in Iraq to support the floundering Shi’ite government we installed. Yet, as Patrick Cockburn** of the Independent has reported, the ISIS Jihadis in Syria and Iraq are coalescing into one proto-caliphate in their common Sunni areas (see map below). This raises the real possibility that we could end up arming and bombing the same Jihadis. Such a development would increase the potential of unknowable blowbacks throughout the entire region, especially for the Kurdish ethnic groups in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran, as well as the state of Turkey itself ( see here). It is obvious that Obama’s prevarications and reactiveness are, at least in part, reflective of a need to cope with the welter of domestic attacks by his pro-war opponents at home. And there is more.
Credit: Wikimedia
Consider Libya: Since we fomented the violent downfall and liquidation of Qadaffy by leading “from behind” in Libya in the name of preventing a massacre, that country has become less a nation than a region of murderous tribal warlords, whose predilections for killing people are spilling over into nations to the south like Mali as well as exporting arms and Jihadis to Syria. The United States supported the return of a military authoritarian government to Egypt that took power by overthrowing and imprisoning the leaders of a duly elected democratic Islamic government. Israel just turned the American-led peace process with the Palestinians into a sick joke. And the octopus-like tentacles of AFRICOM are spreading thoughout Africa.
In the Ukraine, Obama’s State Department colluded with a western-leaning cabal that included neo-fascist elements to overthrow a duly elected, if corrupt, government. Afterwards, the Ukrainian elections in May simply rearranged the seating arrangements of some of the same corrupt oligarchs. Moreover, in response to the Ukraine crisis, the United States is making militarily inconsequential but provocative “show of force” deployments to Eastern Europe and the Black Sea. There is also talk of increasing aid and expanding NATO or its influence to Ukraine, Georgia, and even Moldova and Azerbaijan. Instead of promoting strategic neutrality among the eastern European countries between Russia and the West, we are seeking alliances with distant countries (about which we know very little) in a transparent effort to undermine the historic centerpiece of Russian security since Napoleonic times — strategic depth in the West. Together, these actions have opened up the possibility of starting a new and totally unnecessary cold war with Russia. And these examples by no means exhaust the list of the 1000 cuts slicing US foreign policy into disconnected pieces, say for example, those in the South China Sea or Iran.
Yet at home, poll after poll says the American people are tired of perpetual war and the accompanying politics of fear (see my essay, The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War). Moreover, the US economy supporting these adventures is in trouble: recovery from 2008 meltdown has been sluggish, to put it charitably; the banks that created the 2008 meltdown are even bigger and more vulnerable today than when the government bailed them out of their follies; income and wealth inequality have risen to obscene levels, and the American middle class is fast becoming a historical curiosity (see Thomas Piketty’s path breaking work summarized here and here ); the tax base has deteriorated and the private debt to GDP ratio remains at a dangerously high level; and powerful domestic factions with vested interests in staying the course, like the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex, the Banksters, and Big Pharma, effectively own Congress and are using their oligarchal political influence (thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions to equate money to free speech) to purchase legislation that ensures their factional welfare remains protected at the expense of the people’s welfare.
In short, the ‘chickens’ of our self-referencing “you are either with us or against us” grand strategy are coming home to roost. At the same time, the domestic will and capacity to correct matters is dangerously atrophying. This is a problem that should concern all Americans, but our dysfunctional domestic politics are keeping the masses distracted and political decision makers and media elites are focused inward in playing ‘gotcha’ with each other — the current hoohrah surrounding the Bowe Bergdahl POW swap being a case in point.
So what should be done?
My good friend Bill Polk, a historian of American politics and diplomacy, with a concentration on the Middle East, is writing a book on the history of America’s interventionist warmongering. Based on that effort, he has written the attached essay examining our predilection for non-learning the lessons of past follies. While Bill’s focus is on our dysfunctional foreign policy as opposed to the factional domestic interests fueling America’s march to folly, all of his recommendations are aimed at exorcising some of the deepest domestic roots of America’s predilection for perpetual war.
I urge you to read Polk’s essay; he has put his finger on the central problem — ignorance and passivity at home, but this problem’s generality and intractability is scary. His recommendations go to the heart of the matter, but they are quite general. Indeed, they go to the heart of the American ideal by recalling James Madison’s famous 4 August 1822 letter to W.T. Barry. Madison opened that letter by stating the importance of popular education to public accountability by saying, “A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
Polk is correct: We need to create a popular government with popular information to displace the politics of “The Post Information Era,” a phrase coined by the the Pentagon Reformers to describe bureaucratic decision making in the last decades of the 20th Century How to do that without another American revolution remains an open question.
Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. He be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com |
