“We are only 6% of the world population. We cannot impose our will on the other 94%. We cannot right every wrong, reverse each adversity…We cannot be the American solution to every world problem.” —John F. Kennedy
“We have no commission from God to police the world.”—Benjamin Harrison
By Isaac Yetiv
LA JOLLA, California — “In foreign affairs,” De Gaulle once exclaimed, “there are no friends and foes, allies and enemies; there are only interests.”This cynical view never appealed to US presidents and their administrations, whether Democrat or Republican. In fact, at least in the last century, US foreign policy has been oscillating like a pendulum between the two poles of “national interest” and our cherished “ideals” of freedom, human rights, and justice. Sometimes, however unfrequently, the poles coincided for a time but in general, they are incompatible and most often mutually exlusive, and the political leadership faces cruel and painful dilemmas leading to paralysis or to fatal blunders.
Never has this dilemma assumed so vast a proportion, been so consequential with so high stakes, and demanded immediate decisions without the usual delays and tergiversations, as in the present explosion in the Arab world in what is called, wrongly in my opinion, “the Arab Spring.” In the Middle East, no one can be bold enough to predict the outcome of the “earthquake.” The “Spring” might still become a dark “winter” as many signs show in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and even in Egypt.
History has shown that “Revolutions are started by intellectuals, carried out by fanatics, and the fruits harvested by rogues.”
In the past, the “national interests” view prevailed: The foreign policy of America seemed to emulate the slogan of the Romans, from Cato to Cicero, that oderint dum metuant! [Let them hate us as long as they fear us!] We could make friends with ruthless dictators who oppressed their peoples, and could get away with it. This De Gaullian practice was summed up by a high American official in the early 1950s who said, talking about the Korean leader Sygman Rhee, “he is a son of a bitch but our son of a bitch.” No one would dare repeat that today. In fact, the pendulum has recently swung in the opposite direction; we became bribers and appeasers to the sponsors and promoters of terrorism. President Clinton made a deal with the North Koreans that cost us a few billions for their “pledge” to dismantle their nuclear program. They took the money and produced the bomb. The US and the Europeans made sweet offers to Iran, very costly, if they abandoned their nuclear developments, which never happened. The US and the EU did it, of course, “for the sake of peace,” but, as Harold Bloom wrote in his book, The Lucifer Principle, when some cult elevates violence to virtue, the dream of peace can be fatal.” As we have seen in North Korea , a rogue nation like Iran will be intractable , and very dangerous, the day it completes its first bomb. The whole geopolitical and strategic situation in the Middle-East and beyond will be turned on its head.
I once heard a pundit say half-jokingly: ” What do you call a dictator who possesses a nuclear device? The answer is: I call him sir! “
When the pendulum was on ” national interests,” we helped in a plot to kill Diem in Vietman; we engineered the murder of Allende in Chile; the CIA plotted the demise of Mossadeq in Iran in 1953; we went to war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 1991 to protect the oil fields in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and their precious black gold which has become, through our fault, our “national interest” par excellence that demands protection at all costs. (We continue today to import about two thirds of the oil we consume at the cost of $2.6 billion a day, and we deploy and maintain a huge military to protect its sources and the unsavory potentates.)
Sometimes the US “loses its compass,” in the words of Victor Hanson, “when it leans heavily on its friends and allies and placates and appeases its foes,” as the Obama administration is doing now by pressuring Israel to make vital concessions while demanding nothing from the Palestinians, and as it did to topple our friend Mubarak while saying nothing against the Syrian dictator who has already
killed 750 of his own people, and doing nothing against Iran and North Korea.
But not all our interventions were motivated by our national interests, rightly or wrongly. We also intervened as world policeman in conflicts that present “no vital national interests.” We crossed the Atlantic twice in the last century to defend Europe and liberate it from its oppressors. More recently, while the free Europeans were reticent, even reluctant to interfere in Bosnia and protect its Muslim population from the Yugoslav dictator and his ethnic cleansing campaign, it was American air power that put an end to the massacre. There was no American interest, vital or not, to explain this intervention; it was pure idealism, altruistic and dis-interested, anchored in our basic values of freedom and justice.
Whether we are driven by interest or idealism, we have really become the self-appointed policeman of the world. According to Chalmers Johnson (in Sorrows of Empire) “the US has a military presence in 153 countries, a very large presence in 25 of them, more than 725 (!) military bases with a total of about half-a-million persons.” And Secretary of State Clinton just recently talked about
“extending the defense umbrella over the region (the Middle-East)” to defend against a menacing Iran, tacitly admitting the failure of the US to prevent Iran’s nuclear weaponization.
Most of the world, including the Europeans, hate this American omnipresence and meddling in other peoples’ affairs. They accuse us of imperialism and world hegemony, of using gun diplomacy and cowboy Rambo savage behavior, but this does not prevent them from calling for our help to do their battles, and we always oblige. As mentioned above, we came from far to save Bosnia from genocide; the Arab League, led by the Saudis, begged our intervention to use force against one of their own, Muammar Qaddafi and we responded present; the demonstrators in Cairo Tahrir Square and in Benghazi carried signs asking America to topple their dictators , Mubarak and Qaddafi respectively. The Palestinians, who danced and celebrated on nine-eleven, rely on the American president to “deliver Israel,” as they say, and force it to deliver a state on a silver platter without any effort or concession from them.
I remember a few years ago, when the Bush administration just “thought” about closing military bases in Germany, it was Chancellor Merkel who objected strongly because it would hurt their economy. They like our presence because they like our dollars. And we (borrow and) pay, even if the services are deemed no longer necessary.
We got into this situation because, since the demise of the Soviet Union, we kept repeating that “we are the only superpower…” and, noblesse oblige, we became responsible for the world; and the world took us up on it, and used flattery when they needed our “help.”
Let us just show humility and admit to ourselves, and to the world, that we are still a power, not a superpower, and certainly not the only one. How can we be the policeman of the world if our national debt is, today, $ 14.4 trillion, more than 40% of our budget is borrowed money, our unemployment rate is 9%, we are stuck in two wars and inching toward the third, and we are heavily dependent on foreign oil and stupidly refusing to exploit our domestic energy resources?
This is not “isolationism,” but just selective interventionism , only when our vital interests, and those of our real friends and allies are in danger.
In the biblical “Song of Songs,” the girl who is “sick with love” laments: ” They made me the keeper of the vineyard; but my own vineyard I have not kept.” The American people, in these hard times, are urging their political leaders ” to keep our vineyard” and cease to be “the policeman of the world.”*
Yetiv is a freelance writer based in La Jolla. He may be contacted at isaac.yetiv@sdjewishworld.com
Yetiv is a freelance writer based in La Jolla. He may be contacted at isaac.yetiv@sdjewishworld.com