The Indirect Approach to American Foreign Policy

The Indirect Approach to American Foreign Policy

American foreign policy has been dominated by the question of preventing attacks on the Continental United States such as those that occurred on 9-11. I would have to argue that on balance the terrorist acts do not justify the response which has devastated two countries and has no end in sight, despite two declared ends to the Second Iraq War and an occupation of Afghanistan that has gone on longer than the Soviet intervention in the same country. The resolution to the current international tensions present in the world is that the United States should stop supporting covert operations in which the right hand of the federal government does not know what the left hand is doing, and stay out of regions in which is has no actual national interest like the Ukraine. Leaving aside the aforementioned crisis in Ukraine and the sequel to the Cold War which the human race can only hope will get stuck in development hell, the primary conflict the United States is engaged in is called the War on Terrorism. Terrorism, legally speaking is only the threat of violence to accomplish objectives, and there exist criminal statues for dealing with the act, statutes which have been applied to countless everyday people in situations ranging from altercations to domestic disturbances. So the idea is so vast as to include ordinary people decidedly not Islamic, let alone foreign.

Then there is the question of method: BH Liddel Hart, a noted strategist, favors an indirect approach to warfare, and it stands in direct opposition to the hyper-power approach followed by the American government post September 11th. Often cited as the 'good war' by vast swathes of the political spectrum, World War 2 was far less interventionist than any war since. Indeed, during the lead up to the war, Americans did not assist Spain during the Spanish Civil War and American companies helped arm and fuel Franco through various mechanisms. That is, the United States did not intervene in Europe in some attempt to prevent the rise of Fascism like it did post Great War to attempt to strangle Bolshevism in its cradle.

The American response to the destruction of three buildings in the World Trade center complex can best be analogized with an example using hypothetical real people. Suppose a kid, who could be rightly called a punk, puts a brick through a man's window, who could be named 'Sam'. This punk causes some damage harms or kills members of Sam's family and runs. Sam is angry and finds where the punk is staying, and in this case, he is a guest in someone else's home. Sam goes, kills members of the family he is staying with, and lays claim to the damaged home. But the punk escapes. Rather than track him down, Sam attacks a neighboring home because they shared similar interests with the Punk, claiming that he never liked the shady nature of the residents in the second household anyway. This is what America did in launching two invasions, killing hundreds of thousands and rendering millions homeless in a hopeless act of retributive justice which has left the U.S. looking like a unipolar rogue state. The recent contradictions relating to Syria are grand. America armed Syrian rebels to destroy the sole remaining secular Arab regime that had cooperated with it against Sunni terrorists in the past, and now claims a faction of the people it armed are so great a threat that it will again re-enter Iraq and attack targets in Syria after the American population clearly rejected direct intervention against the Damascus government.

The opposition to the idea of not intervening abroad is sure to include the moralistic component that underlies American politics. Americans are as outraged at a beheading as Romans were at the accounts of the Wicker Man ceremony. There is the constant glorification of military service in popular culture, which is a far cry from what most military personnel experience when they learn to 'hurry up and wait'. Self sacrificial ideas are at the heart of Western Culture, which draws its obvious inspiration from Christianity. Terrorism is an asymmetrical response to the American 'hyperpower'. There is a fear of this force, which managed to hijack planes, get past NORAD and accomplish what the major empires in the 20^th Century never could: a strike on the American homeland. It was a strike against the financial and government centers. The fear of this, and desire to change the Middle East through military action is understandable. Why not maintain such a military presence as we do when there are such wide-ranging threats? The post World War 2 Red Army was scary, and the existence of the military industrial complex grew out of a desire to dominate the Soviets and prevent a Red Pearl Harbor. There is a certain wisdom in being afraid of people who hold the Salafist interpretation of Islam and who have no obvious fear of death despite obvious American superiority on all levels. Islam is not a simple weak faith. There is a history of conflict between Islam and every other religion it encounters, and a theocratic impulse towards establishing religion. The American Republic even fought wars early on against Barbary pirates.

Fear of Islam in general ignores the disparate interpretations of Islam. It also ignores the modern roots of the Salafist organizations which has root in the very interventionist approach that is supposed to solve it. Fighting this global movement with military force merely leads to the replacement of the destroyed terrorist network with that of another, ad infinitum. 9/11 would have been best prevented by following existing protocol, or perhaps not fermenting religious extremism in Afghanistan, nor of setting up the apparatus for a modern Jihadist movement to kick the Russians out of this country. Surprise attacks are not going to occur as a result of state actors, and if it remains the role of the U.S. Military to combat other nations, and not small non-state groups, it should not be forward deployed in the current manner.

What would a voluntary withdrawal from the world stage look like and how could it be accomplished? Bases in Europe are antiquated. NATO should have been dismantled post Cold War, its expansion is absurd. A treaty with Russia, of whatever form, is the best way to redress any grievances. Putin is not Stalin. Massive commitments in the middle east have destroyed two countries and dismantled one terrorist network, merely to see another rise on its ashes out of American desire to overthrow Bashar Al Asaad. These conflicts are not something America should be involved in. American commitment to Israel began in 1973, so the fact that this relationship is regarded as sacrosanct is odd. Syria and Iran are nations with whom we need to be negotiating. Our commitments in the pacific are likewise nonsensical. North Korea is so starved and poor that if it ever crossed the DMZ its soldiers would spend more time eating than fighting. South Korea is perfectly capable without the American presence of arming and defending itself. China is not some Maoist backwater, but now the second largest economy on earth. Japan was long ago capable of building a navy and air force to defend itself and the idea of such a country being under our 'defense umbrella' is insane. Afghanistan is a choice of occupying a country until the end of time in order to force its various groups to continue pretending to be a nation or to bring the troops home and let that country sort itself out.

Humans are capable of great iniquity to one another in the name of conflicting metaphysical values, and the world can be a scary place, especially when viewed through a media filter that is owned, operated, and held in place by a handful of companies. Sensationalist internet reports, cable news of whatever bent broken by commercials to convince you that you are undersexed, unhealthy, or otherwise flawed certainly causes the person watching such programming to become more insecure about themselves and the environment. But this ignores cold hard actuarial fact that Americans are far more likely to be killed by a black uniformed police officer than a terrorist. It ignores the fact that this exact kind of paranoia led to the world wide atrocity called the Cold War and the subsequent war against the Third World that has never stopped. It ignores the fact that if you act as an empire you will be subject to the deprivations of liberty inherent in imperial action. It ignores the destruction of rights, whether they be natural or simply invented that should form the rational basis for society. It ignores the militarization of the police which has recently led to near revolt in Missouri. It ignores the fact that men who hold ideas can be killed, but the ideas themselves do not die. 'No man, no problem' doesn't kill the meme of the person that you killed. There is no way to democratize the middle east, or the police borders drawn up in centuries long struggles that predated the United States. We cannot kill our way to world peace, nor is this the sole national responsibility of the paramount world power.