Much of our foreign and defense policy has been hidden from us since 9/11. This decision to render our strategic goals and tactical choices opaque to the American people is inexcusable in a representative system and has not made us safer.
After 9/11, we were encouraged to keep faith with the government in order to protect ourselves from another mass casualty terror attack. Since that time our trust has been eaten away by one revelation after another: Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction or an association with Al Qaeda, we ran torture facilities in Iraq and several other countries, we mass-surveilled the American public, we executed people worldwide using drone strikes, we replaced Qaddafi in Libya with chaos, we armed and equipped multiple parties in the Syrian civil war, one of which was Al Qaeda, before placing our own troops on the ground.
We’ve been told that we are operating to protect our country from terrorism ostensibly executed by Islamic extremists. In over 17 years of operations we’ve caused the number of terror attacks worldwide to skyrocket, collapsed several Middle Eastern regimes, armed and equipped allied terrorists, supported a genocidal war in Yemen and helped create a wave of migrants flooding into Europe, destabilizing out closest allies.
I know I’m not alone in asking “What the fuck are we doing?”
If we’re there to build representative government with first amendment protections and some level of human rights we are failing miserably. If we’re there to block construction of energy pipelines through Afghanistan and Syria in the latest geo-political version of The Great Game, we’re succeeding. The fact is we don’t know, as none of our leadership has explicitly laid out our goals other than a murky nod towards stability, which seems to produce greater instability with each passing year.
Each of our “allies” in the region (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan) have their own agenda quite different from ours, none of which is geared towards “stability”. We also have an intermingling of private interests and money going back to the start of this fiasco thanks to Bush/Cheney’s decision to privatize the war to fatten up corporations they owned a stake in. Add to this mix a media that more or less performs P.R. for corporations and the government and it’s no shock we have a voting public that understands less of what we’re doing around the world than our strategic competitors. Flynn, Russia, MBS, Netanyahu and the incoming administration apparently took advantage of this opacity to try and create a grand bargain to personally enrich themselves two years ago.
The horrific mess continues to play out with millions of lives at stake and no clear strategic goals other than attriting an endless supply of terrorists or spreading the conflagration to perhaps Iran or the Bekaa Valley.
We don’t know where our foreign policy is leading us because we’re not in charge of it. Instead, decision-making is done on the fly by an executive branch beholden to the whims of our “allies”. Turkey’s Erdogan wishes to supplant Saudi Arabia as leader of the Sunni world and get a share of the oil and gas money from the Middle East and Cyprus. He claims to have proof tying the leader of Saudi Arabia to the murder of a U.S. journalist and the implied receipts of the Trump administration’s forewarning of the event. Israel’s Netanyahu wants to expand settlements and choke off the remaining Arab population while pushing back Iranian influence in the Levant. He is about to be indicted for corruption and his former intelligence agents meddled in the U.S. 2016 election. Saudi Arabia’s MBS, in the midst of annihilating his domestic enemies and the Houthis next door, balances using the U.S. to push back Iran in the Gulf while teaming up with Israel to entice the Russians into putting a block on Turkey and ignoring their actions against Tehran. MBS has financial relationships with the President and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. I won’t even go into the separate Kurdish factions with their myriad funders, regional alliances, smuggling and land claims on four neighboring states.
And that’s just our allies. Meanwhile, Russia seems to own a significant portion of our executive and legislative branch with kompromat while waging self-proclaimed cyberwar war against us. China reinforces its supply and military bases along the route to its newest acquisition, Africa, as we damage our own economy and alliances with trade tariffs. We let citizens of both these countries run around unimpeded throughout the United States, able to operate organized crime rings that threaten our citizens as well as infiltrate and steal from our institutions.
Our European allies, the ones Trump dumps all over at every opportunity, can see all of this along with our enemies. The only people in the dark about it are a significant proportion of the American public, who maintain faith in a government that treats them like suckers.
We should not be constructing an ad-hoc foreign policy in the dark. I understand the necessity of tactical and technical secrecy but in a democracy, strategy and goals shouldn’t fall under that umbrella. We need frank and honest discussion of our nation’s actions and intent abroad, otherwise we cannot make informed decisions as voters.
Hydrocarbon energy supplies and the terrorism funded by them are at the heart of our entanglements in the Middle East. We are currently lead to believe that militarily controlling these supplies will make us more secure because we are always presented with the hard power option – military force.
This may come as a shock to many people, but the United States used to have something called soft power, cultural and economic power, with which it accomplished goals in the world. Rock and roll, freedom of expression, blue jeans and human rights had more sway in the outcome of the Cold War than M1 tanks or SDI. Rather than bumble around the Middle East like a blind, rampaging beast guided by our Lilliputian, scheming “allies”, we should be focusing on the root of the problem – hydrocarbon energy.
In a world which was just warned by the IPCC that it has only twelve years to ween itself off hydrocarbons or die, it seems obvious that the way to fix the problem is to render oil and gas obsolete.
Our NATO, Australian, Japanese and South Korean alliances have served all parties well as we have shared democratic and legal norms. Most of the members, while viewing China and Russia as strategic threats that can be deterred, see climate change as the greatest threat to their well-being. The Pentagon has also warned us for years about the threat posed by anthropomorphic climate change. Why not adapt a foreign policy pushing for decarbonizing our economies, which would dry up the rationale and funding for this geo-political strife?
This strategic alternative is not addressed in the U.S. because vast sums of money are opaquely poured into our political machine by oil interests. I wasn’t the only person in America who noticed our Secretary of State was the head of Exxon Mobile. The more corporate power and foreign money have opportunities to determine our foreign policy behind closed doors, the more out of whack it becomes with our national security and general welfare.
We need a foreign policy that is realistic and conducted in the open that the American people can understand and support.
Wes Clark Jr. 