Tag: foreign policy

Debate Debacle: Our Bleak Foreign Policy Future

The first presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump presented a bleak picture of the future of U.S. foreign policy no matter who wins in November. On the most urgent and important foreign policy issue of the year, the war and genocide in Gaza, Harris repeated empty platitudes about a “two-state solution” and Trump fell back on tired “pro-Israel” rhetoric. Neither candidate offered voters any hope that there would be a meaningful change from Biden’s policy of unconditional support for the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians.

Trump absurdly said that Harris hates Israel, but aside from her perfunctory expression of support for Palestinian self-determination there was unfortunately very little to distinguish the two of them on this issue. Like Trump, Harris backs Israel to the hilt, and the main difference is that she pays lip service to Palestinian rights while doing nothing to protect them. She says some of the right things about the need for a ceasefire, but the Joe Biden administration isn’t willing to use its leverage to secure one and Harris refuses to call for the halt to U.S. arms transfers that U.S. law requires.

Harris has had many opportunities in the two months since Biden dropped out to separate herself from the president on this issue. She squandered them all by sticking to the official administration line. The vice president would rather tout her support from the likes of Dick Cheney than try to win the support of antiwar voters across the country. Harris has been catering mostly to hawks this summer, and she prefers attacking Trump for being “weak” instead of using his policy failures against him.

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American Interventionist Foreign Policy: One and a Quarter Century of Failure

When Theodore Roosevelt succeeded William McKinley as president in 1901, he realized the US was no longer just a continental republic; with the Spanish-American War of 1898, America now claimed Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines as territories, Cuba a protectorate and annexed Hawaii.

Roosevelt “believed it was the burden of ‘civilized’ nations to uplift ‘uncivilized’ nations,” says Michael Patrick Cullinane. He believed U.S. interests were global interests, and that it was actually good for “civilized” nations to intervene in other countries’ affairs.

Moreover, the 26th president made sure the U.S. played a larger role in international affairs by extending the Monroe doctrine through the Roosevelt Corollary – the United States, henceforth, would protect countries in the Americas from recolonization by European powers, and would intervene militarily if  necessary to do so. It was a foreign policy he described as “speak softly and carry a big stick.” US presidents since Roosevelt have pursued his “big stick” foreign policy agenda.

In the slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the U.S. government (directly or indirectly) has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America, alone, at least 41 times. That amounts to once every 28 months for an entire century. Overall, while the United States engaged in 46 military interventions from 1948–1991, from 1992–2017 that number increased fourfold to 188.

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US Foreign Policy: ‘No Daylight’ Is Where Peace Dies In Darkness

“Absent a directed, sustained, and articulated policy of no daylight between the United States and Israel,” Matthew Continetti wrote in the Washington Free Beacon on March 29, “the rift between America and her ally will widen and the world will grow more dangerous.”

Proof that Continetti had things completely bass-ackward arrived on April 1, when Israeli aircraft attacked an Iranian consulate building in Syria, killing 16 and boosting the already not insignificant prospect of a wider regional war. The US regime disclaimed prior knowledge of the Israeli strike, but couldn’t be bothered to actually condemn it.

While occasionally, softly, and grudgingly calling for “restraint” from all parties, Washington has continued its policy of supporting the Israeli regime no matter what it does, and blaming Israel’s adversaries for every Bad Thing that happens in the Middle East.

The US and Israeli regimes remain in a bear hug through which not so much as a single ray of daylight passes. And THAT makes the world more dangerous.

If the US left Israel to its own devices, or at the very least conditioned its billions of dollars in annual aid — not to mention its support in every argument — on good behavior, we might see some progress toward peace.

How many fights would Israel pick with Iran, Syria, and Lebanon if it didn’t have the US threatening to pound anyone who doesn’t comply with its every demand?

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Uncomfortable Truth: The US Is The World’s Most Prolific Sponsor Of Terrorism

Upon reading the title of this article many might reflexively click off, going straight to the comments section to voice their disapproval, to vitriolically chastise the perceived lack of patriotism and the insinuation that the United States of America is anything but the greatest bastion of freedom and liberty in the world. A beacon of light in the dark protecting democracy from the dregs of despotism.

It is a reaction that has been programmed into many of us, one that even among the “liberty community” many, including yours truly, espoused at one time or another. Since birth we are programmed via nationalistic propaganda to have such a worldview.

Every single day of our schooling for at least 12 years we are indoctrinated to place our hands over our hearts and pledge our allegiance to the nation, in other words our loyalty to the government, or more specifically — given the origins of the pledge itself — the ideologies of colonialism in honoring Christopher Columbus, Anglo-American ethno-nationalism, and later, a reinforcement of US political and religious moral superiority, that is itself inherent to the government and its systemic norms.

Denoting these sentiments under a negative connotation will as well likely spark the ire of many who still refuse to acknowledge the role of settler-colonialism in the American experiment, but we digress.

The point is, we as Americans have been institutionally inculcated our entire lives with sentiments of nationalism and American exceptionalism which have subsequently, with assistance in no small part from the heavily controlled corporate mainstream media and the centralized education system, blinded huge swaths of the population from the realities of the innumerable crimes committed by the American government. Both in the past, and the present day.

Chief among these misbehaviors would be the ways in which America would behave itself with regard to it’s foreign policy, both early in its existence as a burgeoning superpower and today as the leader of a globe spanning unipolar hegemon.

Beginning with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 wherein the US asserted itself as being the sole authority in the entirety of the Western Hemisphere, It would slowly go on to refine this doctrine as justification for intervention and expansionism, first in Latin America and expanding outward to the rest of the world.

As the US would continue to expand its power and influence over its global neighbors the destabilization of sovereign governments that Washington viewed as being at odds or potentially deleterious to its agendas of regional control became standard procedure.

We recently elaborated upon this briefly with regard to the century of US intervention in Haiti and the long history of US backed regime change.

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Blinken Receives Stern Warning From Azerbaijan To Stop Destabilizing The Caucasus

The Biden Administration is continuing it efforts to provoke conflicts around the world in a desperate effort to salvage its disastrous foreign policy. This time the target is the Caucasus. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken received a stern warning from the President of Azerbaijan to stop trying to undermine the security of the region.

The U.S. is scheduled to participate in a trilateral meeting on April 5, alongside representatives of the EU, with Armenian officials, sparking concern in Azerbaijan. In a call with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Blinken claimed that the main focus of the meeting would be economic development, but the real purpose seems to be providing armaments to Armenia.

President Ilham Aliyev stated that he received information that discussions will center around topics such as military support to Armenia, joint military exercises, the establishment of military infrastructure along border areas with Azerbaijan, and Armenia’s arming through the EU’s European Peace Facility, which is funded by the US budget.

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Sullivan to meet MBS to push Saudi side of Israel mega-deal

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan will travel to Saudi Arabia to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Thursday about a potential mega-deal that would include Saudi normalization with Israel.

Why it matters: With the war in Gaza ongoing and the U.S. presidential election just seven months away, White House officials admit there’s a slim chance they can pull off the historic peace agreement. Sullivan’s trip shows President Biden is still determined to pursue it.

Behind the scenes: The White House continues to work toward a draft U.S.-Saudi defense treaty and understandings related to U.S. support for a Saudi civilian nuclear program, according to four U.S. and Israeli officials.

  • U.S. officials hope to reach a bilateral agreement with the Saudis and then possibly present it to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose side of the deal would include committing to a path toward a two-state solution.
  • Netanyahu would then face a choice: If he agrees, he could broke a historic peace deal with Saudi Arabia. If he says no, he could be exposed as a rejectionist and lose whatever U.S. support he still has left.
  • The White House declined to comment. The Saudi embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

What they’re saying: “There has been lot of progress in the talks between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia about their draft defense treaty. They want to have their side of the deal ready and then put it on our table and say, ‘Take it or leave it,” a senior Israeli official told Axios.

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60 years since coup, Brazilians call on US to declassify its role

Today marks a solemn anniversary in Brazil: 60 years ago, the Brazilian military seized power from the government of João Goulart, marking the start of over two decades of military rule.

Brazil’s 2014 Truth Commission report is the country’s only formal investigation into this period of dictatorial rule. The commission’s 2,000-page report revealed some grisly details of the dictatorship’s human rights abuses, identified over 400 individuals killed by the military, and shed light on Brazil’s role in destabilizing other Latin American countries.

To assist with the Truth Commission, then-Vice President Joe Biden hand-delivered declassified State Department records to former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff — who herself had been imprisoned and tortured by the military regime. The records offered details about the dictatorship and Washington’s enabling of abuses, including a cable from former Ambassador to Brazil William Rountree arguing that condemning the regime’s human rights “excesses” would be “counterproductive.”

Biden’s delivery of the declassified records was symbolic, since the U.S. had supported the coup. The U.S. solidified its support for the putschists the year prior, drew up plans for a U.S. invasion if deemed necessary, and sent a naval task force to Brazil to support the military plotters. In the end, direct U.S. involvement wasn’t needed — Goulart fled to Uruguay by April 4. The coup was carried out by Brazil’s generals, but Washington celebrated it as a victory for its interests nonetheless.

On the one hand, U.S. support for the coup laid bare the hypocrisy of America’s supposed commitment to sovereignty and democracy. Gone was the Kennedy administration’s promise to reject a “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” The Cold War logic of siding with anti-communist dictators for the purpose of defeating the Soviet Union prevailed. Washington may have lost China, but it won Brazil — or so the thinking went.

However, even the most cynical arguments for aligning with undemocratic regimes for a strategic purpose often failed to bear fruit, given that many of these regimes departed from U.S. policy on key issues. Many historians of the U.S.-Brazil relationship contend that during this period their ties at times more closely resembled rivals rather than close partners. Rubens Ricupero, a former diplomat and minister of finance of Brazil, writes that, “Little by little, doubts turn[ed] into disappointment, and this le[d] to gradual disengagement in relation to the regime they had helped to create.”

When it first took power, Brazil’s military dictatorship closely followed Washington’s lead. Goulart was out, as was his “Independent Foreign Policy,” a non-alignment stance that emphasized self-determination, decolonization, and non-intervention, devised by the ousted president’s predecessor, Janio Quadros. In line with Washington’s desires, the dictatorship, which rotated through five different military general-presidents between 1964 and 1985, broke off relations with Cuba and even assisted the U.S. in its occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1965.

Washington also saw Brazil as a key ideological partner in destabilizing leftist regimes across Latin America. As one Brazilian general put it, the United States wanted Brazil “to do the dirty work.” And it did. Most prominently, the Brazilian regime played a critical role in the overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile,. even secretly bringing members of the Chilean military to Brazil to discuss the potential coup. Brazil under the generals also participated in Operation Condor, the secret cooperation of right-wing military dictatorships in much of Latin America to assassinate, or “disappear” perceived leftists and other dissidents during the 1970s.

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Niger Finds Itself Trapped in America’s Foreign Policy Roach Motel

Does even one American in hundred, make that one in a thousand, possibly one in a million, feel we must be involved militarily in Niger? I doubt it. But the U.S. military, from Commander In Chief Joe Biden on down, certainly do. He’s got 1,000 troops in Niger. The new Niger government wants them out.

US presence in Niger goes back to 2013. Authorized by President Obama, it has continued under both Trump and Biden. In 2015, 4 US troops were killed in an ambush. It made no dent in Obama’s foreign policy acquiescing in every cockamamie intervention the military demands.

Last July, a military group, the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (CNSP), seized power from a US friendly government. The new sheriff in town is demanding the US leave. When the US visited Niger recently to plead Uncle Sam’s case, they insulted Niger’s sovereignty by telling the CNSP to stop cozying up to Russia and Iran. The CNSP’s response? “Niger regrets the intention of the American delegation to deny the sovereign Nigerien people the right to choose their partners and types of partnerships capable of truly helping them fight against terrorism.”

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Refusing To Admit US Foreign Policy Blunders

A recurring defect in US foreign policy is a refusal by elites to concede when they made a serious policy mistake.  This is not a new problem, but it has grown decidedly worse in the past few decades.  It characterized the intervention in Vietnam years after it should have become evident that Washington’s approach was failing.

Even one of the few worthwhile lessons from the bruising Vietnam experience proved only to be temporary; The U.S. should not get involved in murky civil wars.  A generation later, the United States had embarked on forceable nation building missions in both the Balkans and the Middle East.  The subsequent interventions in Libya and Syria were even less defensible because Washington already had the Iraq fiasco as fresh evidence that the Vietnam failure was not unique.

One might have thought that the Vietnam experience would have inoculated US policymakers against a repetition in other parts of the world, however, even that benefit appeared to be temporary.  Not even the sacrifice of 58,000 American lives and approximately 1,000,000 Vietnamese lives caused US leaders to reconsider a policy of global interventionism.  Indeed, two decades later the United States was mired in another full-fledged civil war, this time in the Balkans.  Another decade later, US leaders once again attempted to forcibly execute a strategy that created a client both democratic and compliant in Iraq.  Such conduct strongly indicated that US officials might be incapable of learning appropriate foreign policy lessons.  The latest adventure of the U.S. and its NATO allies in Ukraine appears to be less rewarding and even more dangerous than the previous examples.

A new generation of policy makers replicated many of the same mistakes a generation later in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world.  Civilian and military officials in George W. Bush’s administration clung to failing policies even when it became obvious that the strategy being pursued was based on the illusion that Washington’s Iraq clients were winning the struggle.

And once again, the United States and its allies ignored multiple signs early on that the latest interventions would turn out badly.  The portrayal of conditions in Afghanistan, for example, had almost no resemblance of actual battlefield conditions.  Media accounts and congressional testimony bore little resemblance to the actual situation on the ground in that country.  In the real world, Taliban forces made steady advances.  Such spewing of fiction about an ultimate democratic victory continued during the Obama and Trump administrations.  And when Joe Biden’s administration finally withdrew U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the withdrawal turned into a fiasco.

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What the Ukraine War, Taiwan, and Gaza Have in Common

In confronting all three foreign policy dilemmas, Washington needs to incorporate an understanding and acknowledgment of the things the United States has done that contributed to them.

Washington is grappling with seemingly intractable foreign policy dilemmas involving the Russian war in Ukraine, percolating tensions across the Taiwan Strait, and the conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. In each case, the United States has failed or refused to wholly confront its own share of responsibility for creating the problem. This has profound implications for establishing a stable peace in these three hotspots.

In the case of Ukraine, much ink has been spilled in the debate over the extent to which NATO expansion in the decades after the Cold War fueled Putin’s decision to launch the war. Washington’s response to the invasion has largely treated that debate as irrelevant. Instead, it has essentially adopted the premise that Putin never got over the collapse of the Soviet Union and always intended to reincorporate Ukraine into Russia forcefully. This perspective has largely ignored evidence and historical logic that the invasion was not inevitable and was contingent on external variables, including U.S. actions.

In his seminal 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russian and Ukrainians,” Putin wrote that after the Soviet collapse, Moscow “recognized the new geopolitical realities and not only recognized but, indeed, did a lot for Ukraine to establish itself as an independent country.” This was because “many people in Russia and Ukraine sincerely believed and assumed that our close cultural, spiritual, and economic ties would certainly last. . . . However, events—at first gradually and then more rapidly—started to move in a different direction.” These “events” included Ukrainian political developments that led to closer ties between Kiev and the West. “Step by step,” Putin wrote, “Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia.” But the West deflected Moscow’s concerns about this trajectory.

In his recent interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson, Putin reiterated this narrative. He said Russia had “agreed, voluntarily and proactively, to the collapse of the Soviet Union” because it “believed that this would be understood . . . as an invitation for cooperation and associateship” with the West. This could have taken the form of “a new security system” that would include the United States, European countries, and Russia—rather than the enlargement of NATO, which (according to Putin) Washington promised would extend “not one inch” to the east. Instead, there were “five waves of expansion,” and “in 2008 suddenly the doors or gates to NATO were open” to Ukraine. However, Moscow “never agreed to NATO’s expansion, and we never agreed that Ukraine would be in NATO.” Putin went on to blame the subsequent war on what he characterized as the U.S.-backed, anti-Russian “Maidan Revolution” in Ukraine in 2014, the West’s embrace of Kiev at Russia’s expense, and Washington’s persistent disregard of Moscow’s security concerns.

It is easy to dismiss Putin’s narrative as self-serving, disingenuous propaganda. He is indeed a monstrous figure, as the recent death of imprisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny demonstrates. But that does not address—instead, it evades—the historical question of whether U.S. policies toward NATO expansion in general and Ukraine’s candidacy in particular contributed to Putin’s ultimate decision to invade Ukraine. 

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