COLUMNS : A Non-interventionist American Foreign Policy
on 2007/10/12 13:10:00 (149 reads)
Paris, October 12, 2007 – It’s been five years since the U.S Congress authorized George Bush to invade Iraq. The editor of The Nation magazine has marked the anniversary with an article deploring a policy debate that offers “no coherent alternative to George Bush’s disastrous foreign policies.”
This is not true. There has always been a coherent alternative, its origins deep in the American nation’s historical experience, articulated after the second world war by policy thinkers then described as non-interventionist, and attacked as “neo-isolationist,” ignored by a government and political community that early in the cold war decided that the U.S. was engaged in a “struggle for the world” with the Soviet Union, and have since rewritten that model to suit every rival that has come along, right down to Osama bin Laden in his cave.
This rested on the assumption that Washington has universal responsibility for the world’s affairs. There is a liberal as well as right-wing version of this, expressed by The Nation’s editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, in calling for a new security strategy that would “address all threats to human life whether they stem from terrorism, disease, environmental degradation, natural disasters or global poverty.”
That is very generous, but has nothing to do with foreign policy. The policy issue is to withdraw the United States from the course of continuing intervention and war that lies ahead, with potentially disastrous consequences.
There is a non-interventionist alternative. It is to expeditiously withdraw from Iraq, as the British are successfully withdrawing from Basra, and leave Iraq to the Iraqis. This would require renouncing military bases there, and special claims on Iraqi oil. We would post a schedule and just go, one would hope in good order.
Increased violence might follow, but might not; there has, thus far, been less violence in Basra. That, in any case, is the Iraqis’ choice.
About Iran: According to the official Defense Department formulation, the two main American objectives with respect to Iran are to replace the present theocratic government with a democracy, and to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
The first is impossible for the American government, requiring a fundamental transformation of Iranian religious culture. As a policy goal, it is preposterous. The second is possible through persuasion -- or through violence, at the cost of unforeseeable human and national costs to Iranians, Americans, and others.
But why does Iran want nuclear weapons (assuming that it does, which is reasonable)? Chiefly to deter American military intervention to prevent it from having nuclear weapons, and to destroy its theocracy. A new American policy would renounce intervention.
Iran well might still want the weapons for reasons of regional power advantage. Because of American (and Israeli) deterrence power, as well as Iranian technological limitations, these weapons could scarcely threaten the United States. Neighboring states would have to respond as they saw fit. With the United States military gone from the scene, one would presume vastly reduced tension, and vastly increased prudence, on the part of the region’s governments.
A new American policy would require a painful and extremely difficult, but ultimately liberating, decision to advise Israel that it can no longer expect systematic and unquestioning American support for its expanding colonization of the Palestinian territories, and that it must now resume its legal responsibilities towards the people of those territories, where in international law its standing is that of military occupier.
If Israel were to conclude a settlement with the Palestinians on the terms now all but universally recognized as inevitable – two states, with frontiers resembling those of 1967 but concessions by both sides, a common capital in Jerusalem, and only symbolic Palestinian refugee return, the principal source of Middle Eastern tension since 1967 would be removed.
What would follow? An increased threat of Iranian or Arab attack on Israel? Hardly, given the changed situation and Israel’s immense superiority in conventional and nuclear arms.
Would peace and reconciliation break out? Certainly not. There are permanent problems not only concerning Israel but Shia-Sunni rivalry, whose religious and geopolitical balance the United States has blunderingly destroyed. The 1639 demarcation of the land boundary between the two Islamic communities, and the Ottoman and Persian Empires, the Treaty of Qasr-i-Shirin, has fecklessly been destroyed by an American intervention giving the Shia predominant power in Iraq.
The Shia will undoubtedly dominate the Gulf in the future and jeopardize Sunni rule in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province – where most of Saudi oil is located. Shia influence in Lebanon via Hezbollah, and among the Palestinians, has increased. There is little the United States can do to affect this, nor should it try.
What about oil? Alan Greenspan recently assured us, in his new book, that oil is what Iraq was all about. Now, thanks the invasion, not much oil will come from Iraq for quite a while. That which does, like the oil from Iran and the Gulf, will – surprise! – be sold on the international market, just as before. The American drive to control the sources of oil does not concern geopolitics, but the profits of the companies that extract oil.
What I have said here (and said at greater length in The New York Review of Books last February 15), may make me sound like a member of the “old blame-America” crowd. I am actually a member of the much older “why don’t we mind our own affairs, and leave it to others to mind theirs” crowd. I think the serious danger to America is its pseudo-Marxist ideology of aggressive world security hegemony, held by the Bush government and most of the Democratic presidential candidates. But please, Katrina vanden Heuvel, there is an alternative.
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