See Part 1 here
The following was
written on April 18, 2013. Some of the details discussed below may be incorrect
as news is still unfolding.
On April 15, 2013 there was a wave of bombings
in Iraq—20 carbombs and a handful of roadside explosives—that claimed that
lives of 31 people and injured more than 200. On the other side of the world
that same day two small IEDs (improvised explosive devices) exploded at the
finish line of the Boston
Marathon; three people were killed and over 100 were injured.
Innately, the survivors of these tragedies are more
concerned with their own victims than they are of the other’s. This is the inevitable
shortcoming of a state’s foreign policy: the often insular and arbitrary nature
of tribalism that exists in human societies today is the primary obstacle to
what we might hope to call a just foreign policy. Most often this tribalism
realized by competing forms of nationalism, but other such tribes are
recognized as sectarian, ethnic, and economic groups.
How does a tribe formulate a policy of interaction with
another based on mutual respect and interest? Why would any tribe be interested
in the just treatment and wellbeing of another? The ethical consistently yields
to the advantageous. A tribe of any kind is an inherently exclusive outfit
prone to the binary classification of humanity into “us” and “them.” In
modernity tribes are empowered to abhorrent extremes with bomber aircrafts,
tank squadrons, and weapons of mass destruction. It is long past time that
these tribal affiliations be recalculated if not entirely obliterated.
Most models of societal organization require some sort of
arbitrary underpinning of identity and often entail the mediation and
marshalling of intra-societal relations, often for the purpose of resource
management. This is directly contrasted with the monopoly on the inter-societal
relations that the political elite tend to wield. In some societies this power
may be diffused over a group; in others it may boil down to a single
individual. However—especially in state structures—foreign relations are
typically not the concern of the people, that is, until it is a matter of
security.
State structures, in fact, have a vested interest in keeping
their constituents focused inward, unable to see over the walls of localism.
This empowers the political elite with the ability to easily manipulate the
public into war, more often than not packaged within a framework of threats to
security. In order to determine the truth value of claims of communist
influence in Vietnam, weapons of destruction in Iraq, or Israel’s utility as a
strategic asset, Americans often do not have a frame of reference beyond
immediate events reported by the media and state or corporate propaganda. This
vacuum of knowledge—combined with the existential imperative of production
imposed by capitalism—assists the state in conducting a foreign policy
unimpeded by such notions as “values” championed by naïve masses or radical
fringe opposition. It takes only a glance at polls
of voter priorities to see that even at the height of the Bush
administration’s “War on Terror,” only 40% of the electorate prioritized
foreign policy when calculating their choice of representative in 2007; in 2012—a
more typical year—this number had shrunk to 9%.
It is a natural phenomenon that people are drawn to concern
themselves only with their immediate surroundings, and it is difficult indeed to
contemplate the importance of an earthquake a million miles away, particularly
when you are told that the victims of said calamity are your
enemies. But is ambivalence toward suffering so different from the
exploitation thereof? America’s tawdry relationship with Saudi Arabia—perhaps
the most odious regime of our time, save North Korea—is evidence enough that we
are perfectly comfortable enjoining our so-called national interest to
alliances that compromise our most basic values of liberty,
justice,
and equality.
However, I do not think this is a choice, and if it is, it
is certainly not one made consciously. Americans who go to their local gas
stations do not think of the geopolitical
maneuvering, underhanded
politics, and economic
exploitation that go into delivering their fuel. Even if they did, in most
cases it would be difficult to make an alternative choice. The one million
Americans that are employed in the American defense sector cannot be
assumed to support every terrible regime that utilizes their products or every
military operation the United States executes. So long as the majority of
Americans remain disinterested in these events, the power of influence will
remain in the hands of those few whose profit margins are built on structures
of human despair. It is the political and economic elite that created this
system and continue to desperately maintain it. An informed populace legitimizes
the failures of American foreign policy by reproducing popular conceptions of
American moral superiority and purity of arms that still manage to survive in spite
of the catastrophic war in Iraq, the inexcusable support for the crushing of
popular, nonviolent resistance in Bahrain, and the steadfast championing of
conquest and occupation in Palestine.
The enormity of American power is too vast to be trusted to
the elite few, while the many remain concerned with their local world to serve
as a democratic check on how that power is used. It is this shortcoming that
prevents America from attaining a foreign policy prioritizing the best of
American values over the hungry cannibalism of imperial power and economic greed.
