U.S. foreign policy: time for a clear alternative

Iraq, Haiti, Israel-Palestine, the world… Everywhere, the failure of the Bush team’s foreign-policy approach is quite evident.
Now, the Democratic Party has a candidate. But it is not enough for John Kerry simply to criticize Bush’s foreign-policy approach. Strikes me that to be fully persuasive Kerry also needs to get out there and promulgate a clear alternative to the Bushies’ approach.
For example:
Where the Bushies advocate untrammeled U.S. unilateralism, Kerry should advocate a thoughtful attempt not just to re-engage seriously with international institutions, but beyond that, a commitment to making those institutions inclusive and accountable to the peoples of the world– and to making them effective in resolving the problems of the world.
Where the Bushies advocate military solutions to almost every problem overseas–including those that evidently require a completely different set of tools– Kerry should advocate a robust commitment not just to pursuing non-military means to address the world’s problems, but also to building up the U.S.’s and the world’s “arsenal” of such non-military means.
A change in mindset like this would have many implications at the level of concrete policies. (We can discuss that more, later.) But what I am afraid of is that, instead of getting out there and proposing a bold and clear alternative to the Bushies’ approach, Kerry might end up just suggesting nips and tucks around the edges of the existing policies. That would, I feel, concede far too much validity to the arrogant, U.S.-uber-alles worldview that the Bushies seem to take as a given.
Yes, the U.S. is fine country, with many millions of fine people and some fine institutions and ideals. But no, imho, it is not the single pinnacle of human achievement at this point in human history. It has imperfections. On a number of important scores, other countries do a lot better. We can learn from them. We in the U.S. can gain a lot through being willing to engage in active and respectful cooperation with people from other countries, people from other cultures…


Can Kerry get out there and start saying all this in a persuasive way to the American people? I hope so! For starters, he does have a fair bit of multi-culturalism right there in his own intimate family: a Jewish grandfather, French cousins, a Latina wife. But it’s not just about personal biography. It’s about vision. And the kind of vision I’m talking about really means taking on quite a lot of the shibboleths of American culture that are generally far too little examined…
Like the obsessive belief in unconstrained individualism, whether at the level of persons or of nations. Like the alleged “value” to the nation of our bloated military forces and equally bloated defense industries. (Just imagine if 80 percent of those well-trained people and government resources had been put into building national and running elements of national infrastructure like roads, schools, and hospitals, instead. What would our economy and our society have looked like now?)
You think these are tough arguments to make? And a tough time to try to make them?
I’m not so sure about that. Look at the victory the British Labour Party won–against Winston Churchill— in the elections of 1945. The British Tommies who had gone over into Europe, suffering huge losses and hardships as they advanced, had along the way learned advanced lessons in power, politics, and what it is that makes the world work. Across the board, their horizons had been stretched; they had met people from different cultures, and from parts of the UK itself that they might never have visited before. They knew, better than anyone, who had done the real hard work of winning the war. And it wasn’t Wuinston Churchill, sitting in his famous bunker in Whitehall…
So they came home and voted in droves against Churchill, and for Labour– the party that offered them a credible hope for a better future. One key aspect of that alternative vision: the promise of Britain’s first-ever National Health Service, an institution that I grew up with in the 1950s and that I still revere as an essential part of my “British-ness”.
(Even Maggie Thatcher, during the height of her anti-government rampages of the 1980s and early 1990s, never dared to touch the core of the NHS!)
Have the US soldiers now cycling their way back from Iraq been undergoing any similar kind of political epiphany? I don’t know the big picture. But there’s much evidence that for many individual service members and their families, a kind of rapid lesson in the falsity of the neo-cons’ promises has certainly been getting underway…
That’s why we need Kerry, the man who at a young age understood in his gut the arrogance, stuipdity, and sheer human cost involved in any attempt to impose America’s will on another country seems to me to be an ideal person to put forward an alternative vision that does not rely on such a bullying approach in international affairs.
What about it, John?

29 thoughts on “U.S. foreign policy: time for a clear alternative”

  1. I don’t share many of Churchill’s views on how nations should be run in peacetime–I’m an enthusiast of women’s suffrage, for example–and my own website is dedicated to anti-imperialism as a patriotic ideal; but Churchill was an extremely great leader for the circumstances he dealt with.
    That said, I think the real reason Labour won so big in ’45 was there was an urgent issue of post-War priorities, and the Conservatives wanted to focus on Britain’s great power status. IOW, Britons, having endured grave privation from Depression and War, were offered a clear choice between a costly bid to retain/restore the Empire, and the alternative, to use the powers of the state inwardly to rebuild their own shattered lives. This is the choice I would like to make as an American.
    If I wanted to make a comparison between US history now and some comparable period in UK history, it would be with 1902. What happened then? Not an awful lot, but at the time the UK was still in a phase of “splendid isolation,” which sounds more unlike NATO and ANZUS than it really was; it had completed a relatively minor, but hugely costly and unpopular war with the SA republics (Boer War, 1899-1902); it had drifted well behind other nations in terms of public social institutions; it had a chronic trade deficit which was financed by capital transfers (albeit of a different character than ours); and the era of rapidly expanding international trade that the UK had helped promote, was now coming to an end.
    Was the 1906 election a revolution for Britain? (Lib. PM Campbell-Bannerman–emphatically antiwar–had been appointed PM by King Edward VII after Balfour’s gov’t split, and in the ’06 elections the Tories were stomped.) No, but the evolution of the civil state inside the UK accelerated in earnest afterwards. It’s my opinion that change over the next decade, if it is favorable, will be maddeningly slow.

  2. Helena
    Is it really necessary to use the expression ‘U.S. -uber – alles’? Do you even realise how offensive that is to Americans? to Germans? to Jews?
    You have responded in a hyper-sensitive way whenever I use strong language in response to yours. May I have the temerity to suggest that if you don’t like Bush’s policies, there are more mature and responsible approaches than comparing him to Hitler.
    Since you have failed to answer any of my counter-arguments on the Israel-Palestine situation, let me put that to one side for the moment. On Iraq, the major criticism is that the US acted ‘unilaterally’ together with 45 other countries. On Haiti, it is acting ‘multilaterally’ with the blessing of the UN.
    Are both approaches wrong? What would you have the US do? For that matter, is the US obligated to do any more than, say, China or Indonesia in respect of Haiti and, if so, why?
    You suggest that there is a non-military solution to the problems Haiti. What would you suggest that might be? Should we be talking to the armed gangs to understand their root causes?
    Is it even possible that the ouster of Aristide (who was forceably kept in power by Clinton) might have been a good thing, particularly in light of the mess that he left the country in? Do you agree that Aristide committed major electoral fraud in 2000 and has ruled his country with an iron fist?
    Should the US have spent the $3 billion that it has spent on Haiti since 1994 when many of its own people could be better off with that money?
    Are you sure that Kerry is not a unilateralist, given his recent comments on Haiti? See http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/169039p-147637c.html
    Do you agree that it can be hard to ascertain Kerry’s position on many fundamental issues, because he appears to change positions on a regular basis?
    Do you agree that his recent voting record seems to indicate that he chose not to vote on important issues? See http://www.congressmerge.com/onlinedb/cgi-bin/membervotes.cgi?&lang=&member=MAJR&site=congressmerge&address=&city=&state=&zipcode=&plusfour=&fullvotes=1
    Would this suggest a fear of committing to a position?
    I’d be interested in your thoughts.
    Cheers,
    Lewis

  3. Great post, Helena. You put into words my concerns about Kerry’s candidacy – indeed, of the candidacy of any “mainstream” US candidate. Somebody needs to break with the discourse that takes for granted the overwhelming and unique virtues of the US. If we don’t become more circumspect about who we really are and what we can do then the world will force that awareness upon us. That is something I do not look forward to at all.

  4. Lewis, you seem to have gotten ahold of the wrong end of the stick here. Helena is not out campaigning for Kerry.

  5. The comparisons between America, as it is under “The Bush Regime”, and a fascist state like Nazi Germany is an interesting topic amongst many of MY Jewish colleagues and myself. Our conversations are not for everyone, true, but they do seem particularly interested in the parallels. Which to me seems rightly so! So whether or not their are “more mature and responsible ways..” is not really the question, but rather: are their any other comparisons more relevant and accurate? Maybe.
    The bulk of your posts, Lewis, tend to express hostility towards the person who is hosting this forum. In fact, I’m not sure if you’re here to have discussions at all but rather- well, create conflicts with Helena. Perhaps you would be better suited to have these “heated debates” not via a keyboard?

  6. I’m going to have to agree with Lewis, at least in part. I think Helena is basically a reasonable and humane person, but she often uses sarcasm and hyperbole as rhetorical devices with respect to both the I-P conflict and other areas. The line between sarcasm and contempt (especially on the Internet) is very fine. There have been a few times when I’ve substantially agreed with something Helena said but still wanted to throw a brick through my computer screen because of her offhand use of words like “apartheid,” “herrenvolk” or “uber alles.” Yeah, it’s one way to make a point, but the equivalence implied by such terms can be highly offensive.

  7. georges – interesting that you suggest that I am not here to have discussions, given that every time you or ‘No Preference’ has challenged my arguments in a civil way I have responded in kind.
    To the extent that I have any hostility towards Helena, it is only because of her postings and her condescending approach to me (rather than dealing properly with any of the points that I raise, she would prefer to dismiss them as the rantings of an ‘ultra-Zionist’).
    The original post to which I responded was ‘Palestinian Refugee Issues’.
    I never dissected properly why that article made me so upset, so here it goes:
    – Her suggestion that the Palestinian refugee issue is hard to discuss in the US, suggest a stifling of opposing opinions by ‘the hardest of hard-line Israelis’. This turn of phrase is conspiratorial and factually incorrect. There is no homogeneous or monolithic ‘Jewish lobby’ that is out there preventing Helena from speaking. People just don’t accept her arguments.
    – Her response is to create ‘straw men’ versions of most of the counter-arguments, and instead of responding to them, she dismisses them as ‘mendacious’. A quick look in any dictionary would suggest that she is implying that these are dishonest arguments fabricated by Zionists. This is a particularly antagonising comment given prevalent stereotypes of Jews as ‘Shylocks’ or ‘Fagans’. Just in case you didn’t get it, she uses the word ‘canard’, which connotes ‘deliberately misleading’.
    – The suggestions that the Zionist arguments have ‘just been accepted at face value’ suggests not only that the arguments are wrong, but that anyone accepting the arguments was too stupid to question them. Let me assure you that there are plenty of serious scholars who accept some of the arguments that Helena prefers to caricature and dismiss out of hand.
    – If you have any doubts as to who the dishonest purveyors of these deliberate lies are, Helena tells us in the next paragraph – of course, it is the ‘combative’, ‘ultra-sensitive’, ‘ultra-Zionist’ Jews (‘ultra’ of course connoting an extremist or fundamentalist position)
    Helena then gives a few suggestions as to why the Palestinian refugee claims might be perceived as a problem, without even properly addressing main reasons. … and then by talking about ‘historical bells’, she is once again comparing the Palestinian situation with the lot of Holocaust refugees (ie Israel=Nazi Germany).
    Apart from the inaccuracies of such suggestions, can you even start to see it from my perspective. In the one article, as a Zionist, I am suddenly be accused of being a dishonest, lying, ignorant, superficial, aggressive, hyper-sensative, racist, fundamentalist Nazi.
    If my response was not particularly friendly, there was ample justification.
    As for my ‘more mature and responsible ways’, my choice of wording was deliberate. I would have said the same to anyone who might have suggested that Kerry is like Stalin. The Bush=Hitler type name-calling is IMHO as immature and irresponsible as calling him Mr Poopypants.
    We do need to learn from history and historical parallels, but that does not necessitate name-calling. Besides, IMHO, if parallels are needed, there are far more parallels that can be made between Saddam Hussain or Arafat and Hitler, than between Bush and Hitler. Bush is not killing civillians of his own country in cold blood for a start, he doesn’t control the press and he isn’t a dictator (note, he is running for re-election at present).
    To avoid anyone retorting that Arafat is the democratically elected leader of the Palestinian people as a result of that ‘legitimate’ election he ran against a no-name grandmother in 1996, may I ask ‘which other democracy has 8+ year terms’?

  8. I’ve thought quite a bit about Lewis’s and Jonathan’s criticisms of me using the reference “US-uber-alles”. And you know what, I certainly claim the right to make this comparison. It is not only–as Lewis for some inexplicable reason implies– Americans(?), Germans (??) and Jews who have a right to use or not use such allusions to Nazi ideology. I grew up in England, where my family and community had a very vivid experience of just what Hitler had in mind.
    There is a reason I don’t have any uncles, and it is him.
    In addition, my mother lived through the blitz in London while pregnant, and my father signed up in the military to fight against Nazi Germany even though he was ways over the required age.
    So I don’t cede to Lewis or Jonathan or anyone else the right to tell me that a reference to the ultra-chauvinistic “Deutschland-uber-alles” mindsetis inappropriate in any particular case.
    Yes, it is for now self-evidently (I would hope) an exaggeration for anyone to make a direct comparison between the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policies and those of Adolph Hitler. But an allusion to it, of the form I made? Personally, I consider it quite appropriate at a time when the Bushies feel quite comfortable going round the world encouraging regime change wherever they want and almost regardless of the consequences.
    As for Jonathan’s objections to my making analogies between Israel and the apartheid regime in S. Africa, I would just note the following:
    (1) Many Jewish Israelis themselves make this analogy. Are non-Jews somehow required to abide to a different code?
    (2) When I traveled in occupied Palestine with a black South African friend, her main observation was that the situation of the Palestinians there seemed to her far worse than that her people had lived through in the apartheid-era “Bantustans”. I wonder if anyone has heard of any Black South Africans who have also had experience of the situation in occupied Palestine who have urged rejection of the “apartheid” analogy?
    (3) Actually, for me, the South African analogy is in some ways a hopeful one. The Afrikaaners did–after inflicting hundreds of thousands of needless deaths through their pursuit of the “Total Strategy”–come to their senses and realize that recognizing the essential co-humanity of their Black and Colored compatriots was a far better strategy for assuring their own survival as a culture and as a people… Yes, even such deep ideological change as that is possible. What a great thing to reflect on.

  9. I don’t really want to sidetrack this thread with the Israel-apartheid issue (which is discussed in some detail here), but suffice it to say that the term “apartheid” in both legal and common usage implies an ideology of racial supremacy. The Israeli occupation of the WB and Gaza may be worse than apartheid, it may be better or it may be just as bad, but it’s an apples-oranges comparison because the reason for it is counterinsurgency rather than racial subjugation. I don’t mean in any way to excuse Israeli human rights violations, but use of the word “apartheid” is both an exercise in demonization and an inaccurate description of the conflict. Same thing with “herrenvolk.”
    I know that Israeli Jews sometimes use the apartheid analogy, and I think they’re wrong to use it. I would object to it from them just as I do from you. (Note that I don’t object to subsidiary terms such as “bantustan” to describe a cantonized WB, as such terms are more functional than political.)

  11. Jonathan–
    I think I understand and appreciate the distinction you’re trying to draw here: I know that Israeli Jews sometimes use the apartheid analogy, and I think they’re wrong to use it. I would object to it from them just as I do from you. (Note that I don’t object to subsidiary terms such as “bantustan” to describe a cantonized WB, as such terms are more functional than political.)
    I’ll certainly bear that distinction in mind, and may well be more likely to use the latter term–which has a direct applicability, as you note–rather than the former.
    The Bantustans were of course a direct outgrowth of the policy and mindset of the authors of apartheid. There were other horrific consequences, as you know, like the horrors of the “Total Strategy” visited on so many neighboring countries. But it probably is a good idea to keep the use of the word “apartheid” as precise as possible.
    How, then, can we describe the wall?
    (Oops, I think we disagree over the purpose and foreseeable effects of the wall.)

  12. How, then, can we describe the wall?
    As “the wall,” possibly with the prefix of “separation” (which, if you think about it, is what “apartheid” means, albeit without the inapplicable-to-Israel connotations of racial supremacy).
    One more observation and then I’ll shut up: It’s natural for a black South African to compare the occupation of the WB and Gaza to apartheid, because that’s her point of reference. An East Timorese who visited the WB would compare Israel to Indonesia, a Bosnian would compare it to Serbia or Croatia and a resident of northern Ireland would compare it to Britain. None of these would necessarily improve an outside observer’s understanding of why Israel does what it does.

  13. Helena – No-one is taking away your right to say that Bush=Hitler. It is ensconced in the First Amendment. If you want to say that Cheney is Genghis Khan or Rumsfeld is Satan, you can say that too. You could even suggest that Rice is Ashurnasirpal if that feels good.
    The criticism was one of appropriateness.
    My first point is that I never suggested that Jews have any special right to allude to Hitler or to Nazism. I am often upset that some Jewish groups seem to call almost anything ‘Nazi-like’. Having said that, I do see plenty of parallels between Nazism and the stated goals of a number of Palestinian groups. Read, for example, Articles 7 and 28 of the Hamas charter: http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/documents/charter.html
    You often seem to suggest in your responses that ‘if some Israeli Jews can do it than so can I’, as if a wrong act somehow becomes right just because someone else does it.
    Some kapos killed and tortured Jews during the Holocaust. Does that mean that you can do it too? There have been self-hating Jews since time immemorial – Tiberius, Johannes Pfefferkorn, Petrus Alfonsi, Arthur Trebitsch, Nicholas Donin, Pablo Christiani, Avner de Burgos, Guglielmo Moncada, Alessandro Franceschi, etc. etc.
    No prizes for guessing whom I would regard as some of the more prominent self-hating Jews today.
    The point as to appropriateness largely rests on the whole issue of the true evil of Nazism. By alluding to everything that you don’t like as being ‘like the Nazis’ or ‘like Hitler’, you diminish the Holocaust and the Nazis.
    If Bush turned around tomorrow and started putting all muslims, their wives and children into the ovens, what would you say then? Would you suggest that he is acting ‘like Hitler’? Would that phrase contain any import given how you have suggested that the vast majority of what he does is Nazi-esque?
    Don’t you agree that it is important to differentiate between degrees of human rights abuses?
    My criticism first and foremost is that you are crying wolf.
    As for your point about your uncle, I am sorry that your uncle is dead, but that does not bolster your argument any more than a white person whose relative might have died fighting the south in the US civil war and who now purports to speak authoritatively on black rights on that basis.

  14. Dear Lewis,
    You appear to be unaware of the fact that it is the Government of Israel that has systematically prevented new Palestinian elections. No time right now to go into detail, but in brief, there are certain basic elements without which free and fair elections are impossible. For example, without freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, the availability of free and open communication, the means and freedom to publish and distribute election materials, it is simply not possible to have free and fair elections.
    It is Israel’s destruction and/or curtailment of virtually every element necessary to holding free and fair elections that caused planned Palestinian elections to be cancelled recently. There was, at that time, a very strong will on the part of the Palestinians to have these elections, but it seems the GOI, for whatever reasons, did not see Palestinian elections as being in its interest.

  15. I nowhere said that Bush=Hitler. Lewis is as so often exaggerating in the way that he deliberately mischaracterizes what I write. It wd get pretty tedious to issue denials of everything that he alleges I say (that I condone terrorism, etc etc etc.) I just invite everyone, but perhaps particularly Lewis, to give a careful read to what it is that I do write rather than to put words into my mouth.
    A U.S,-uber-alles mindset, Lewis, is one wherein people who for the moment are running the US think they have the right to tell all other countries what to do, how to behave; and they arrogate to themselves the right to effect regime change wherever folks don’t toe their particular line.
    That is what “uber alles” means. It is, certainly, an allusion to one facet of Hitler’s worldview (the facet in which he tried to effect “regime change” in Britain in 1940, as in so many other places.) It does not equate Bush totally with Hitler with regard to other facets of his rule like, for example, the Shoah. If I’d wanted to do that I would have called Bush “Hitlerian”, or something like that.
    But I did not do that. Why don’t you just do some careful textual reading, Lewis, eh?

  17. The whole point of ‘uber alles’ was predicated not only on a Germany-first nationalism, but on a doctrine of Aryan supremacy. What you did was precisely what I accused you of doing.
    Shirin – It is very easy to blame the ‘GOI’ for everything that goes wrong with the PA. However, I would be fascinated if you could adduce any evidence that the PA seriously attempted to hold any elections. As for the ‘freedom to publish’, they don’t seem to have too much trouble when it comes to anti-Israel incitement.

  18. Is it even possible that the ouster of Aristide (who was forceably kept in power by Clinton) might have been a good thing, particularly in light of the mess that he left the country in? Do you agree that Aristide committed major electoral fraud in 2000 and has ruled his country with an iron fist?
    Should the US have spent the $3 billion that it has spent on Haiti since 1994 when many of its own people could be better off with that money?
    Lewis, if you’re going to hijack threads and simper about language, why don’t you refrain from trashy lies like this? Aristide was ousted in two CIA coups–the ’91 coup is common knowledge, and no, Lewis, the CIA-Helms creation FRAPH was much worse than the mess that Aristide had failed to magically transform into Switzerland after six months in office. There is a reason why there was mass exodus of refugees, and this exodus was a major headache.
    After three years of democide, in which the junta resorted to methods of keeping order that included imolating hundreds in slums, the Clinton administration RESTORED the elected president. Good Lord, Lewis, is your fanatical loathing of anyone to the left of Tsar Nicholas I so thick you cannot see this obvious fact? The USG was humiliated. It was in a quandary. Aristide’s term in office was over just about a year after his restoration, and Haiti was under foreign occupation. The “chimere” which the Western media says is Aristide’s creation, was left intact by the US/UN forces. But somehow Aristide is supposed to dissolve them? What the hill would you have done, Lewis?
    Lewis, get it through your ideological blinkers that the USG has one another coup, this time through the IRI. This was unilateral. It was wrong. And if you think that Aristide “left his country in a mess” you really need to learn the first thing about Haiti. Seriously. Because very obviously you DO NOT.

  19. James – Was that your attempt at an insult? Perhaps if you answer the questions that I actually posed, I might bother responding to your rant.

  20. Was that your attempt at an insult?
    No Lewis, it’s not an insult. But ranting at Helena about hurting your feelings, then joining in the chorus of self-exculpatory Western lies about the Aristide administration, strikes me as a singularly obnoxious way to behave. The original phrase–“America uber alles”–is actually a fitting description of the Bush Administration’s policies, much as it stings. If the shoe fits, then it has to be worn.
    I don’t blame you for repeating oft-repeated, internally inchoate, tales of “Aristide the Thug, Messer-Up of Haiti.” If your only source is pro-FRAPH exiles or the mainstream media, then what else could you think? But you’re as wrong as it’s possible to be, and it’s self-evident it’s because your fictive version of reality flatters your role in it.

  21. I’m going to close this board now. I think we’ve had a useful discussin of terminology, and a little bit of a good one about Haiti.

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