U.S. Foreign Policy: Too Much Captain Kirk--and William Shatner
Fire those phasers, America!
W.J. Astore
Much of our foreign policy is driven by fear–fear that if we don’t act, whether in the Middle East or Africa or elsewhere–the bad people there will thrive, after which they’ll come for us in the good old USA. Most of us will recall George W. Bush’s saying, “We’ll fight them over there so that we don’t have to fight them here.” But what if constantly fighting them “over there” is a guarantee of blowback right here in Homeland USA?
As one of my conservative friends (Yes – I have them!) says, “If they (the enemy) stay over there, I’ll airlift knives, forks, and condiments to them.”
Well, we’ll never know unless we try. Call the cavalry home, America. Send in the cutlery and condiments. And let’s see what happens.
OK, call me an isolationist. All these American machinations in and deployments to the Middle East and Africa – paraphrasing Otto von Bismarck, to me they aren't worth the bones of a single Pennsylvanian grenadier. Isn’t the Middle East of today roughly the equivalent to the Balkans of c.1910? Except for the oil, why bother with Iraq and Iran? Radical Islam is no picnic, but a direct threat to the USA? Come on. If we leave, my bet is radical Islam will burn itself out.
Our constant interventions in the Middle East merely fan the flames of radicalism there, except when we throw fuel on the fire by sending lots of weapons or burning a Koran or wiping out (accidently, of course) another convoy of civilians with Hellfire missiles. If we’re the enemy’s “Great Satan,” let’s leave and see how they do in a paradise without the US serpent in it.
The problem is that our foreign policy “experts” are subservient to national and international (corporate and financial) interests (among others), and those interests, along with their own hubris, make it impossible for them to order strategic withdrawals, much less imagine them.
Put briefly, our experts see the world as a stage (or as a staging area for military forces), upon which the USA must play the leading role. They believe that if we don't occupy that stage, and dominate it, some other country will, e.g. China will take over Africa.
The US military, meanwhile, favors "proactive," forward-leaning, can-do, spirit. The mentality is: We must act, or someone else will. And our way of acting is necessarily a military way, since that is what our nation favors--and funds.
For my fellow “Star Trek” fans, the U.S. government is like the aggressive, action-driven Captain Kirk (even better: the bombastic, scene-hogging William Shatner), but without Mr. Spock or Dr. McCoy at his side to provide cool logic or warm compassion. So all we get is warp drive and phasers (or lots of histrionic overacting and scene-stealing, a la Shatner).
We can do better, America. Let’s start by calling the cavalry home. Cutlery and condiments to the fore!