If Only This Could Be Published In The US...

The two notable exceptions are North Korea, which suspended its nuclear-weapons program when the Bush administration finally abandoned sabre rattling for the bilateral talks Pyongyang had sought all along. And Northern Ireland where, in another triumph of old-fashioned diplomacy, then-U.S. president Bill Clinton played a peripheral but useful role in helping broker the Good Friday accords that finally brought an end to the decades-old Troubles. Thus the familiar U.S. foreign policy of seeking to protect America's interests by controlling world events – with military force, covert insurrections, coercive trade practices, or threat of sanctions – is bankrupt. It was bankrupt before Bush debilitated the U.S. Armed Forces in Iraq, and found no takers for his so-called "freedom agenda," articulated in Bush's second inaugural, by which he dedicated America to bringing not stability but democracy to the four corners of the Earth. That Bush is not alone in the U.S. foreign-policy establishment in failing to grasp that stability – domestic tranquility – is a precondition to freedom, democracy, the rule of law and a market economy indicates that the deep thinkers in Washington have missed Iraq's most important lesson. ... Without the crutch of unqualified American support, Israel, for instance, would have to think harder about the consequences of its settlements policy. The European Union's emerging military prowess, which the U.S. has long discouraged, would relieve America of the burden of coping with emergencies in Europe's backyard, such as civil war in the Balkans. And Japan could be empowered to assume responsibility as a guarantor of stability in the Pacific Rim. With apologies to Wordsworth, America is too much with us, laying waste its powers. Its global ubiquity has bred regional resentment toward the U.S.. It too often has yielded unsatisfactory outcomes. And it is an increasingly perilous burden on the American people. The U.S. tab for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan is officially placed between $2.4 trillion (U.S.) and $3.5 trillion (U.S.), depending on the duration of those obligations. To put that in perspective, as recently as 2000 the national debt accumulated during the entire history of the republic was about $5 trillion (U.S.). In a well-reasoned essay titled "The Case for Restraint" in the November-December edition of The American Interest, U.S. political scientist Barry Posen grades America's persistent attempts to impose its vision on the world. "Since the end of the Cold War 16 years ago, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have been running an experiment with U.S. grand strategy," writes Posen, the Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The theory to be tested has been this: Very good intentions, plus very great power, plus action can transform both international politics and the domestic politics of other states in ways that are advantageous to the United States, and at costs it can afford. The evidence is in: The experiment has failed. Transformation is unachievable, and costs are high." Posen's treatise (available at the-american-interest.com) is an obvious counterpoint to the cri de coeur of the Project for the New American Century. That 1997 neo-con manifesto–signed by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Norman Podhoretz, and 20 kindred spirits–urged the creation of what William Kristol, then-chair of the Project for the New American Century, would later describe in a piece co-authored with Robert Kagan in Foreign Affairs magazine as a "benevolent global hegemony." That meant maintaining America's unrivalled influence against emerging rival superpowers, China in particular. It was the neo-cons' misfortune to put aside misgivings about Bush (Kristol's The Weekly Standard endorsed John McCain in 2000) and see their designs on regime change in Baghdad and Tehran taken up by one of the least competent administrations in memory. Yet Democrats are more complicit in the notion of American exceptionalism than Republicans. The early neo-cons were inspired by Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democratic U.S. senator and Vietnam-War hawk, and contemporary neo-cons modelled their fantastical vision for Americanizing the Middle East on another interventionist Democrat: the World War I-era president Woodrow Wilson. It was John F. Kennedy who committed the U.S. to paying any price and bearing any burden to assure the global embrace of American values, and his vice-president who transformed Vietnam into a quagmire. And it was Clinton, in his 1997 State of the Union Address, who declared America to be "the indispensable nation." Alistair Cooke – the 20th-century successor to Alexis de Tocqueville in examining the American character for the benefit of a foreign audience – said in a 1968 Letter from America radio broadcast that JFK's invocation of Pax Americana on the day of his inaugural in 1961 was "magnificent as rhetoric, appalling as policy." By then a permanent U.S. resident, Cooke sadly concluded, "Vietnam, I fear, is the price of the Kennedy inaugural." So is Iraq. All of the Democratic frontrunners for the presidency pledge a continuing U.S. military role in the Middle East, where America's very presence is arguably the greatest obstacle to resolving the multitude of animosities in the region. Hillary Clinton – who joined a majority of fellow Democratic U.S. senators in 2002 in authorizing Bush to wage war in Iraq – recently voted for a Senate resolution that gained overwhelming passage and brands Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. The poorly understood RGC, an adjunct to Iran's regular army, is a hybrid of armed forces and business managers who run many of Iran's major industries and essential services. ... A U.S. foreign-policy renaissance is inevitable. The U.S. is a nuclear superpower, but the same can't be said of its conventional military forces. With the bulk of them tied down for years by a mere insurgency in a fourth-rate power, their global ambit has been shown to be surprisingly limited. By mid-century, five power blocs – the U.S., China, India, Russia and the E.U. – will vie for global influence. Unilateral action on major issues by any one of them will be impossible, and cooperation among them of mutual necessity. Because of its role in helping save the world from fascism and staring down the Soviet Union in the 20th century, America retains enough residual goodwill to be greeted warmly as a housebroken member of the community of nations. The alternative, a status quo that George W. Bush has shown to be obsolete, was described by Alistair Cooke in a 1946 broadcast that accurately predicted the next half-century of American foreign policy. "If it should happen that America, in its new period of world power, comes to do what every other world power has done, if Americans should have to govern large numbers of foreigners, you must expect that Americans will be well hated before they are admired for themselves." http://www.thestar.com/article/279581

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