The foreign policy debate: Wouldn’t it be nice if we had one?

I realize that the recent terrorist attack in San Bernardino may forbid rational discussion of any topic for the next six months, or even longer. Still, wouldn’t be nice to have foreign policy discussion that consisted of more than a choice between Tweedle-Dick and Tweedle-Hillary? I mean, I’m not asking for six degrees of separation, but two or three would be nice.

Barack Obama was elected in 2008 as the “peace candidate.” Since that time, he has attacked and overthrown the ruler of one country, Libya, a nation that was not in any manner a threat to the United States, and he has actively sought the overthrow of another, Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria. In the case of Libya, Obama followed the pattern established by Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam and both Bushes in Iraq of basically lying the country into war, claiming at first that a “no fly zone” was necessary to prevent “genocide”—a false claim in itself—before embarking on the campaign of regime change, which he had previously claimed was not his intention, and which has left Libya in a state of continuing anarchy. In the case of Syria, Obama made a variety of poorly considered, conflicting claims, ultimately embarking on a “covert” campaign against Assad that was spectacular in its futility.

Throughout the Obama Administration, all the thoughtful, “serious” chinstrokers within the Beltway have been bemoaning the prospect of soaring deficits in the coming years unless Uncle Sam gets his spending under control. At the same time, the Pentagon has been planning a $1 trillion, 30-year reboot of America’s nuclear “triad”—land-based missiles, missile-bearing submarines, and manned bombers—all aimed at an enemy that no longer exists, without a single voice being raised in dissent. Why the silence?

It’s an acknowledged fact—about which I’ve commented/moaned about on numerous occasions—that if you want to be taken seriously in Washington, you must never something that hasn’t already been said by someone important. The endless calls for “thinking outside the box” come from people so far inside the box they can’t see the sides, and count themselves kings bounded by infinite space while confined in a nutshell. But how did we get inside this nutshell?

The foreign policy establishment is really the common segment of three overlapping Venn circles—the military, the intelligence community, and the actual foreign policy “experts” in and outside of the State Department. The military dominates, having access to far more resources than the official foreign policy establishment can possibly muster, with the intelligence community second and the State Department a distant third. All three groups prospered enormously during the Cold War, of course, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it seemed that all three should have significantly reduced roles, defense and intelligence in particular. But in fact, the advent of peace has changed nothing.

The relationship between the three communities resembles the “balance of power” that exists within the Defense Department between the Army, Navy, and Air Force. It’s well known that Defense Department money is parceled out in roughly equal amounts, not because of any “strategic” considerations, but to keep bureaucratic peace. But the balance of power between the three larger communities is massively weighted in favor of defense, followed at a great distance by the intelligence community and at a greater distance by the diplomatic one. To make sure that no one is left out, every careerist in the diplomatic-defense-intelligence complex has every reason to recommend a “forward”–that is to say, “aggressive”–policy anywhere and everywhere in the world. To suggest anything else would trigger a massive struggle for resources—shrinking slices of a shrinking pie.

As long as the Cold War persisted, virtually the entire world was a chess board for U.S.-Soviet competition, but the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–surely the greatest geo-political victory in the history of the world–did not so much change the game as eliminate it. The defense and intelligence communities in particular suddenly found themselves in the role of solutions in search of a problem. Those wonderful ever-expanding budgets of the past suddenly flatlined, with the once-unimaginable prospect of actual cuts suddenly becoming frighteningly real.

For both the defense and intelligence communities, the end of the Cold War was a major challenge. For the Left, it was an utter disaster. Capitalism, whose demise had been confidently predicted for more than a century, was suddenly more triumphant than ever before, literally the only game in town. Democrats in Congress who had attacked the Reagan Administration’s foreign policy from the left found their positions utterly washed away. They talked about peace; the Reagan Administration delivered it, beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.¹

During the first Bush administration, liberals went into a defensive crouch, basically ceding all control of foreign policy to the president, a “strategy” that has been pursued ever since, regardless of which party controls either Congress or the presidency. Bush consciously revived gunboat diplomacy—or, rather, “smart bomb” diplomacy—to re-establish Americans’ appetite for blood, and his crushing victory in the first Gulf war seemed to open the door to similar triumphs in the future.

In fact, as I’ve previously written on a variety of occasions, the first Gulf war was a stunning exercise in hypocrisy. Saddam Hussein, our former near-ally, was rewritten as the “worst since Hitler,” whom we deliberately kept in power after driving him out of Kuwait, and politely stood by as he slaughtered the rebels that we had encouraged to rise up against him. The press, goaded into a chauvinistic frenzy, ignored all of this, and instead turned out reams of worshipful copy devoted to our all-conquering generals, Powell and Schwarzkopf.

The repeated foreign policy triumphs of the Republicans drove the Democrats to capitulation. The once famous/infamous Democratic Leadership Council worked to eliminate the anti-war left from the party, replacing them with pro-defense neo-Wilsonians who would support “smart” use of American power abroad for moral purposes. The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 was a vindication of this strategy.

Conservative ideas were triumphant, but conservatives themselves were in despair. Their very successes seemed to have taken foreign policy issues off the table as far as the American people were concerned. Henceforth, elections would be decided exclusively on domestic issues, issues about which Cold War conservatives had almost no interest, other than perhaps a dull hostility to anything “liberal”. Clearly, a new menace was needed.

In 1990, Saddam Hussein had threatened to destroy half of Israel with chemical weapons in the event of war. In fact, poison gas, while a surpassingly ugly weapon, is no more, and no less, lethal than conventional explosives. With his gross and grotesque exaggeration, Saddam had given the right wing a weapon they would use against him forever after, the notion that chemical weapons are in fact “weapons of mass destruction”, equal in destructive power to nuclear warheads, a myth that, in the U.S., at least, goes almost unchallenged today.²

To sell this new menace, the neo-cons looked back to the circumstances of the movement’s birth. It was Richard Nixon’s innovative policy of détente that provoked what would become the neo-con movement. In 1976, President Ford buckled under right-wing pressure and allowed the creation of “Team B,” an ad hoc group of “experts” who challenged the CIA’s official determination of the Soviet Union’s capabilities and intentions with a lurid report that was wrong in virtually every detail. But Team B’s unscrupulous lies helped Ronald Reagan to win first the Republican nomination and then the presidency. Lies for the sake of victory are seldom despised, and conservatives in the 1990s set out consciously to duplicate both the deceit and the triumphs of the previous decades, inventing the myth of weapons of mass destruction and insisting that the battered and beaten Saddam Hussein somehow constituted an “existential” threat to American security.

The Clinton Administration was deeply disinclined to challenge this right-wing hypocrisy and hyperbole. Clinton himself was famously uninterested in foreign policy but, determined not to let the Republicans get to his right, scrupulously following the DLC line, with the brief exception of his unwise attempt to allow homosexuals in the military³. Although the military despised and loathed Clinton even prior to his brief attack on their homoerotic obsession⁴, he bought their tolerance by not cutting a penny from their budget requests, even though the only justification for America’s gigantic military no longer existed.

Although it is now Republican dogma that the Clinton Administration represents a “holiday from history,” in fact the Clinton Administration was almost as aggressive as the prior Bush Administration, expanding NATO into Eastern Europe even as the alliance’s raison d'être vanished⁵ and continuing the intensive sanctioning and harassment of Saddam Hussain, with the explicit purpose of seeking to provoke his overthrow. This “militant Wilsonianism” was turned up a notch with the appointment of Madelaine Albright as secretary of state in 1997. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, Albright had every reason to resent the failure of the western democracies to defend the small nations and nationalities of eastern Europe prior to World War II. Unfortunately, the people she wanted to punish—Neville Chamberlain, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and even Franklin Roosevelt⁶—were all dead. For want of a better outlet, a nearly bankrupt Russia served as an emotional punching bag. Nobody seemed to think that Russia might someday recover some its former strength.⁷

Albright, with her incessant talk of the U.S. as the “indispensable nation” and her clear enthusiasm for occasional blood-lettings in the name of peace—for what is the point of having a military if you don’t kill people with it from time to time—was the perfect spokeswoman for the re-invented, post-Cold War military-industrial complex, which claimed almost as large a share of America’s resources without an enemy as it did with one. The new America, Albright promised, would be even more virtuous than the old America, because the new America wouldn’t have to cut any deals.

It’s fairly well known that George W. Bush, while running for president in 2000, promised a more “humble” foreign policy, although what the Republicans really had in mind was an America über alles foreign policy, one without sissy consultations with the UN or other nations. Conservatives wanted to believe that the combination of U.S. military and economic strength was so great that we could simply declare our will on any issue and the rest of the world would have no choice but to comply.

Bush was not at all humble in his attitude towards Saddam Hussein, whose continued persistence in power had become an obsession with Republicans. The Clinton Administration had been so aggressive in its harassment of Hussein that one can wonder if the Administration was being pushed to the right by the Republicans or the reverse, but nothing could satisfy the neo-cons, who loathed Clinton and all his works with a neurotic fury, nothing except an actual war. This fury would be released after 9/11, when the U.S. invaded an Iraq which had absolutely no responsibility in the attack and whose secular authoritarianism was the opposite of the reactionary religious fanaticism that fueled al Qaeda.

The Bush Administration’s real agenda was the goal of establishing Iraq as an American proxy through which the U.S. would dominate the Middle East, providing for the security of Israel and ensuring that the vast reservoirs of Gulf oil would reach the world market under American terms. We wouldn’t be stealing the oil; we would just ensure that it wasn’t used against us. Bush himself practically gave the game away when he admitted that he had no interest in catching the man actually responsible for the deaths of 2,700 Americans: “I don’t know where he [bin Laden] is. I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.”

Once Baghdad was taken, the Bush Administration set about building the largest embassy in the world, clearly intended to serve as “Pentagon East” in a fifty-year struggle against “evil” that would mimic the first Cold War both in length and political potency. Unfortunately, the Republicans forgot that, while the Europeans wanted us to protect them against the Soviets, the Muslim states of the Middle East had no desire to be protected against themselves. What they wanted was to be protected against the U.S.

The Bush Administration’s windy denunciations of “evil” were intended to conceal, and did conceal, the real cause of 9/11—the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia following the first Gulf War.⁸ All resistance to American policies was labeled as mindless terrorism. Why do they hate us? Because we’re so good!

The spectacular failure of the Bush Administration’s policies in the Middle East brought the Democrats to power, but President Obama was just as anxious to avoid getting to the left of the Republicans on foreign policy as President Clinton had been. Obama promised to end “a war”, not “the war”—that is, he would end the “bad war” in Iraq while winning the “good war” in Afghanistan, largely, I think, to ensure that Robert Gates, a “moderate” Republican, would stay on as secretary of defense. Gates was deeply committed to the war in Afghanistan, and Obama later ingeniously defused the threat of Gen. Petraeus becoming the Republican nominee in 2012 by placing him in charge of the Afghan war. The thousands of Americans, and the tens of thousands of Afghans, who died during “Obama’s War” were largely martyrs to the ego of Robert Gates and the political exigencies of Beltway politics.⁹

Throughout his administration, Obama appointed secretaries of defense and CIA directors who either went native or were native to begin with, who talked ceaselessly of dangers at every turn, who fought every hint of budgetary discipline as total disarmament. Naturally, that was never enough for the Republicans, whose entire political world is more and more defined by their hatred of whatever it is the Democrats are doing. Yet despite this, Democrats are largely unwilling to make a stand against them, preferring to exclaim “Me too” to those who despise them. There are several reasons for this.

With the end of the Cold War, the public lost interest in foreign affairs, and most liberals were happy to stop thinking about issues that had cost them three straight presidential elections. The ending of the draft under Richard Nixon meant the fewer and fewer liberals had any military experience at all—most could not tell a sergeant-major from a major general. Congressional expertise in defense matters was largely confined to southern Democrats, and political realignment set in motion by the Republican triumph in 1994 soon eliminated them. The liberals who were left—the real liberals—ignored foreign policy issues entirely, surrendering all power to the Wilsonians.

With the Cold War over, the defense budget, already highly politicized, became even more so. Once the Republicans captured Congress in 1994, domestic spending became more and more closely scrutinized. Defense spending, on the other hand, remained exempt. Defense spending was particularly valued because purchases of massive, high-end military helped create the “good” manufacturing jobs Democrats prize so highly. And with the actual Soviet threat gone from the scene, the equipment didn’t even have to work. As I’ve frequently complained, both the B-1 and B-2 bombers were flying frauds, built as make-work projects, but no one cared. The B-3 bomber, now in the spawning stages, will be an even bigger fraud. The B-3 is a part—a very small part—of a $1 trillion make-work reboot of the U.S. nuclear “triad” directed against a Soviet Union that no longer exists—but, as before, no one cares, least of all the Democrats.

In fact, as spending has grown increasingly tight in the last years of the Obama Administration, Democrats have become even more enamored of defense spending, both in its own right and as a bargaining chip with Republicans. You want more for defense? Fine! Just give us more for domestic spending! Since many Republicans desire increased defense spending as a virtual end in itself, it’s a ploy that rarely fails.

Notoriously, liberals did remain responsive to the one political pressure group that cared particularly about foreign policy, the American-Israeli Political Action Committee, which virtually guaranteed that complaints about U.S. conduct from Muslim nations would receive short shrift in Washington. But there was one exception to this rule: the “Saudi lobby” may operate far less openly than AIPAC, but it’s almost as effective, perhaps because the Saudis, unlike Israel, have the cash, and the oil, to buy influence. The fact that the U.S. is in bed with both the Jewish state and the world’s greatest funder of anti-Semitic propaganda—and the fact that this stunning instance of cognitive dissonance can never be publicly acknowledged—contributes not a little to the corruption of the foreign policy debate.

Before the recent terrorist attacks, both liberal voters and liberal politicians were free to ignore foreign policy issues and were happy to do so. Although Bernie Sanders could, and did, criticize Hillary Clinton’s grossly interventionist record “from the left”, he rarely did so. That’s not what his followers wanted to hear, and that’s not what he wanted to talk about. The only foreign policy issue Sanders cares about is “global capitalism,” which has lifted billions out of poverty, unlike his socialist fantasies. To the extent that he has a plan, Sanders seems to want to go back the manufacturing heaven that supposedly existed in the U.S. circa 1970, the America that turned Bernie into a revolutionary in the first place.

Now that the terrorist murders in Paris and San Bernardino have brought foreign policy issues to the fore once more, there is no voice on the left to challenge Hillary Clinton’s. One can wonder if anything other than the “logic of events”—i.e., future disasters—will educate our leaders.