We seem to be in conflict everywhere, with no
end in sight. Do we need a fundamental re-think
of our foreign policy priorities?
By Matt Taibbi
August 17/18, 2023 -
Information Clearing House
- " On June 1,
Harpers put out a
cover story titled, “Why are we in Ukraine?”
The authors were professor Christopher Layne,
the Robert Gates chair of National Security at
Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government, and
Benjamin Schwarz, a onetime national and
literary editor of The Atlantic and
former analyst for the RAND Corporation. Both at
times have been critical of the projection of
American power, but both also have strong bona
fides from within the world of American national
security policy.
The authors didn’t excuse Vladimir Putin or
his invasion of Ukraine, writing that “even if
Moscow’s avowals are taken at face value,” the
country’s actions could be “condemned as those
of an aggressive and illegitimate state.”
Much of the rest of the article, however, is
a blistering history of how the United States
constructed a radical new foreign policy posture
after communism’s fall, obliterating “normal
diplomacy among great powers” and replacing it
with rapid NATO expansion in all directions, in
service of something like a global Monroe
Doctrine. The justification for this new
unipolar ideal, which was characterized by a
cascading series of diplomatic ultimatums and
“regime change” invasions for resisters, was
best articulated in 1994 by former Senator
Richard Lugar, who said, “there can be no
lasting security at the center without security
at the periphery.”
The Harpers piece doesn’t blame the
United States for war in Ukraine, but does tell
a story about a foreign policy establishment
that wriggled free of our more conflict-averse
late seventies and eighties, and created a new
expansionism that eschews diplomacy and
generates military confrontation almost by
design. “Far from making the world safer by
setting it in order,” the authors write, “we
have made it all the more dangerous.”
There was a time when avoiding war was a
chief priority of American liberalism, which
would have taken a story like the Harpers
piece as a rallying cry. The issue
containing the Layne-Schwarz story reportedly
did brisk sales, but generated little discussion
in media, beyond a tweet from Ann Coulter:
No offense to Coulter, but where are the
antiwar liberals? They were numerous once.
Recent polls about war and military spending
show the same bizarre pattern of neatly reversed
partisan attitudes we’ve seen with civil
liberties and support of spy agencies.
A just-released
CNN survey shows 55% of Americans opposed to
more funding for Ukraine, including 71% of
Republicans — but 61% of Democrats say we should
“do more.” This comes as Joe Biden asked for
another $24 billion in spending for Ukraine,
and the White House has seemed peeved at
questions about declining support.
“We have we have seen throughout this war
solid support from the American people,” said
National Security spokesperson John Kirby,
adding: “We’re going to stay focused on
that.”
It’s likely many who opposed the Iraq War
would say Ukraine is very different, with the
United States supplying arms to the innocent
victim of a war of aggression, as opposed to
being the country doing the senseless attacking.
That’s a true statement. But the Harpers
story persuasively argues Ukraine is part
of a larger pattern of predictable disasters,
caused by a policy change putting us on course
for almost certain collision with Russia, China,
and any other country disinclined to bend the
knee.
Schwarz was at RAND during a key period in
the nineties when plans for NATO expansion were
being conceived. As he explains it, he was there
when the old Sovietologists, whom he described
as basically “pro-détente liberals,”
were replaced with a younger new crew of
“liberal interventionists,” some of whom would
go on to have important positions in Bill
Clinton’s administration, people like future
Deputy National Security Director
James Steinberg.
The old pragmatists were averse to
re-provoking the Eastern foe, but the newer
group seemed more worried about voices
questioning NATO’s existence after the end of
the Cold War, and RAND became the “intellectual
heart of NATO expansion.” Schwarz watched with
alarm as the idea gained traction.
“When they started talking about this,” he
says, “I thought, Are you crazy? I
couldn't believe it.”
Schwarz put his thoughts on paper, publishing
“NATO
at the Crossroads: Reexamining America’s Role in
Europe” in 1994. The text has a
not-insignificant Nostradamus factor:
How, for instance, would an alliance
with obligations to Ukraine respond if the
discontented Russian minority declared its
independence and sought annexation by
Russia, and this was in turn followed by
Ukraine’s forceful efforts to reassert
control over its Russian minority? Who would
be the aggressor? What borders should be
defended? Moreover, in such situations,
members may have divergent interests…
expansion could well lead to situations that
would so exacerbate tensions and suspicions
within NATO that the alliance would, in
fact, crumble.
This wasn’t an exact prediction, but Schwarz
did anticipate the innumerable complications
that would arise from any effort to bring
Ukraine into the American security umbrella.
Assuming responsibility for Western Europe alone
already amounted to what Schwarz in 1994 called
“taking the wolf by the ears: When could America
let go?” Expanding that arrangement throughout
the rest of Europe, he said, would require an
“an expensive — and eternal — commitment.”
America’s new view of foreign policy ushered
in a new take-it-or-leave-it script for any
country resisting American influence. Instead of
relations between “great powers,” we’d construct
a series of feudal arrangements that would be
like the Hindu myth of infinite regression, i.e.
“turtles
all the way down,” except in our case it was
“vassal states all the way out.” The plan was to
push NATO out so far to eliminate potential
resistance that Lugar couldn’t see the nearest
threat with a spyglass.
The problem was this plan of continually
pacifying and expanding the “periphery” would
inevitably run into nuclear-armed Russia and
“restore the atmosphere of the cold war to
East-West relations,” as diplomat and historian
George Kennan put it. This, Kennan said, was
“the most fateful error of American policy in
the entire post-cold-war era.” The U.S. wasn’t
provoking Russia specifically, but every country
generally, broadcasting through its embrace of
its “unipolar moment” that it would “no longer
be bound by the norms implicit in great power
politics,” as Harpers put it.
In the early eighties, the idea of the United
States engaging in military action was so exotic
and remote that Hollywood was forced to make
Clint Eastwood movies
about the invasion of Grenada, which
probably could have been conquered in an hour by
a couple of Crip sets from Compton. The notion
that presidents needed congressional (read: the
population’s) permission to go to war was so
unquestioned that the major Washington scandal
of the decade involved an attempt to secretly
divert funds from arms sales to “freedom
fighters” in Nicaragua.
Contrast that with our current experience.
The average American has no idea where America
is sending arms or troops. As Schwarz and Layne
point out, “NATO started training roughly ten
thousand Ukrainian troops annually” in 2014. Did
you know? I didn’t. Many Americans don’t know
where we have troops in battle these days.
Remember the
La David Johnson fiasco, when a huge fuss
was made over Donald Trump reportedly calling a
slain soldier’s family and telling a grieving
widow, “He knew what he was signing up for, but
I guess it hurts anyway”? An amazing part of
that story was multiple U.S. Senators admitting
unawareness that American troops were fighting
in Niger, where Johnson was killed. “I didn’t
know there was [sic] 1000 troops in Niger,”
said Senator Lindsey Graham, with John
McCain and Democratic counterpart Chuck Schumer
also expressing surprise.
Since the collapse of communism, the U.S. has
pursued engagements all over the world, often
following the same script. The public is told at
least a half-lie to justify the commencement of
hostilities, and only later do we find out the
target country was effectively told to surrender
in advance.
There were serious
human rights abuses in Serbia ahead of the
NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. However, the
Rambouillet “peace” agreement — presented to
American audiences as a friendly arrangement
belligerently rebuffed, as in the Washington
Post headline, “Milosevic
Says No to Peace Force” — was a deal no
leader could accept, forcing Belgrade to
“relinquish sovereignty over the province of
Kosovo and allow free reign to NATO forces
throughout Yugoslavia,” as Harpers puts
it.
From there we’ve had one lie-spun war after
another. The real reason the United States under
Bush wanted to invade Iraq was to effect regime
change, but the public was told tall tales about
WMDs. The British Chilcot report revealed Tony
Blair
saying later that “obviously,” if the U.S.
and U.K. hadn’t come with WMDs, “you would have
had to use and deploy different arguments.”
Ahead of
NATO bombings in Libya that led to the
deposing of Muammar al-Qaddafi, we
spread porkies about Qaddafi forces being
given Viagra to aid in using rape as a weapon.
In Syria, we even used the
2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force,
which was supposed to be limited to permitting
war operations against those responsible for
9/11, as legal
justification for military actions against
groups that didn’t even exist when the towers
fell. We changed the excuses for our presence in
Afghanistan and adjusted supposed goals there so
many times that by the time we left in 2021,
most Americans weren’t even sure why were there,
if they remembered we were there at all.
There’s been much eye-rolling in media of
late about Republicans
complaining about Ukraine aid after
wildfires in Maui or the
train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio,
and maybe those complaints are just partisan
potshots. But there’s a real conversation about
distribution of resources that’s been dropped
ever since Bill Clinton
abandoned the idea of spending a “Peace Dividend”
at home, as institutional Washington pressed for
more funding for Pax Americana instead.
Schwarz, who’s written about this subject
numerous
times, talks about how keeping national
security spending high was a crucial policy goal
after the collapse of communism. “Although there
was some hopeful talk among the few remaining
‘Come home, America’-type progressives,” he
says, “it was soon very clear that, even without
a Soviet enemy, the bipartisan foreign policy
establishment thought the main contours of US
national security strategy had to remain
intact.”
As a result, we have vast new Departments
like Homeland Security and annual monster
defense expenditures, but still no Department of
Just Got Foreclosed On, or a Central Still
Living With Your Parents at 40 Agency, or even a
National You Can Clearly See I Can’t Afford a
Dentist Service. But we’re securing the hell out
of the “periphery.”
A week ago, snippy Kremlin spokesman Dmitry
Peskov said America has “a lot of talented
journalists,” but “since
they unleashed this war against us, they
absolutely live in a state of military
censorship.” This prompted an immediate fact
check from Voice of America over which
country really is living under military
censorship (I would have fact-checked the “lot
of talented journalists” part). Of course it
isn’t true that we’re living under literal
military rule, in a state built for permanent
war.
Still, look at our public conversation and
our position around the world, and ask yourself:
what would be different if we were?
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
Registration is not necessary to post comments.
We ask only that you do not use obscene or offensive
language. Please be respectful of others.
