Why are we so awful at foreign policy?

In his New York Times column, “Stumbling Around the World”, Nicholas Kristof begs an answer to the question: Why are we so awful at foreign policy? Before I attempt to answer this question, I would like to cite two examples provided by Mr. Kristof:

Iraq is the example of the moment. We invaded, thinking that we would get a pro-American bulwark, cheap oil, long-term military bases and the gratitude of liberated Iraqis. Instead, we fought Iraq, and Iran won.

Speaking of which, look at Iran. In 1953, we helped overthrow the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, to achieve a more pro-Western government. That created tensions that led to the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the rise of mullahs with nuclear dreams. If it weren’t for our own policies, Iran might well now have a pro-American government.

Not surprisingly, since World War II, a linkage can be established between America’s preemptive wars/wars of choice and their desired outcomes: they have invariably failed and set back U.S. foreign policy for decades. In fact, if the target country had just two of its three defining national characteristics – language, religion, and form of government – differ widely from that of the western world, then invariably U.S. political objectives in a lengthy preemptive war (i.e. a war of choice) were never met.

In fact, even the short, CIA-supported, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba failed to overthrow Fidel Castro and helped further solidify Cuba's relationship with the Soviet Union. Forty five years later Castro is still around and Cuba remains standing as one of the last vestiges of the communist dominoes.

Over fifty years after the Korean Armistice and thirty odd years after our ignominious withdrawal from Saigon – North Korea and Vietnam remain as the other glaring examples of communist dominoes that our failed foreign policy ventures have left standing.

President Bush is now trying hard to prevent yet another U.S. foreign policy domino theory – the Bush Doctrine, which calls for pre-emptive action against states that pursue WMD programs and/or support terrorism in the name of religion – from failing in Iraq and spreading undesirable outcomes throughout the Middle East. If we fail in Iraq, the Bush Administration is concerned that Iran and Syria will be the next dominoes to fall – in that, they will acquire WMD and more overtly support terrorist acts against western interests around the world.

My answer to Mr. Kristof’s question can be found in a letter of mine that was published in The Wall Street Journal on October 6, 2006:

We continue to talk about the "root cause of terrorism," but there seems to be a basic disconnect between the Judeo-Christian and Muslim worlds' reasoning on this issue. Muslim dictators use their convenient line that "Palestine is the core issue," while Western leaders seem to have coalesced on "freedom and democracy" as being their core issue in the post-9/11 era.
The U.S. could make serious progress with this reasoning if it showed some consistency in the application of its core values to its foreign policy. This would necessarily imply that we make no exceptions of convenience even in the short-term: Musharraf, Mubarak, Nazarbayev, Abdallah, et al. We insult the intelligence of the common Muslim populace with these exceptions of convenience -- this is the core issue, it seems to me.

The bottom line is that we are so awful at foreign policy because it is not consistent, it does not reflect our core values, and we make too many exceptions of convenience.

The Clock Is Ticking On Iraq

Pundits have compared President Bush's escalation of the Iraq war to President Nixon's April 1970 decision to invade Cambodia as a means to a successful withdrawal from Vietnam. Five years later we were fleeing from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon – a lesson that our current president seems to have forgotten.

The key difference between Vietnam and Iraq is quite stark. An ethnically homogeneous Vietnam had been split into a communist North and democratic South as a reflection of larger Cold War rivalries. After the fall of Saigon, the reintegration of Vietnam was traumatic but successful. By contrast, Iraq as a nation was created by the British from three ethnically diverse regions – a largely Shia south, a primarily Kurdish north, and a mostly Sunni west – that have historically been at odds. Any wonder then that a Baathist dictator – not surprisingly, secular in his outlook – held the country together for almost three decades by brute force?

The sectarian strife in Iraq reached a tipping point almost a year ago, when Shiite Islam's holiest shrine in Samarra was destroyed by Sunni insurgents. Then the recent retaliatory and ham-handed execution of Saddam Hussein by a vengeful Shiite government more or less ensured that Iraqis had reached a point of no return in their attempts at keeping a united Iraq. So it has become almost impossible now for any western nation to try and secure Iraq in the short term.

NBC's Tim Russert was absolutely right when he called President Bush's proposal a "double or nothing" gambit, which is sure to, as the New York Times put it, "run out the clock and leave his mess for the next one." Unfortunately, the real disaster would be inherited by the next president who, in attempting to sort out President Bush's mess, will likely be doomed to one term. It therefore makes sense for Democrats and Republicans alike to coalesce around the May 2006 Biden-Gelb plan and ensure its success by involving all of Iraq's six neighbors in immediate discussions to fine tune and implement it. We need to act post-haste before the clock runs out on the only workable option for Iraq – a return to pre-British historical boundaries that had evolved naturally and co-existed in the pre-colonial era.

A True Council for Real Security

For "Saturday Night Live" fans, it shouldn't be hard to recall an emotion made famous by comedian Mike Myers in the late eighties. So readers will understand when I suggest that an ineffective UN Security Council has been making me "vaklempt" for quite some time now. With apologies to Mr. Myers, I'd actually express my feelings this way:

"Hi, this is Linda Richman. I'm vaklempt! Excuse me… talk amongst yourselves! Here, let me give you a topic: The Security Council is neither making the world really secure these days, nor is it a truly representative council of today's world. Discuss."

On December 23rd a tepid Security Council unanimously passed a watered-down sanctions resolution against Iran. Do these resolutions mean anything anymore – unless they are required as some sort of justification prior to military action against a condemned country? And, what's with this need for unanimity – which is invariably inversely proportional to the efficacy of the resolution being passed. Besides, unanimity in democratic forums is almost oxymoronic. In any case, Russia and China got western nations to so dilute the sanctions against Iran that they might as well have not passed any resolution – because it resolves nothing, nada, zip, zero…

In 2006 alone, the Security Council has passed eight different resolutions on the "Situation in the Middle East" – has this made the Middle East even appear any more secure than it was last year? The Security Council also seems to have passed a resolution for every country on the African continent in 2006 – but do we see any improvements in Darfur or Somalia? What is the point in a world body that seems to spend countless hours talking up a storm, but ends up effectively doing nothing?

President Bush appointed John Bolton as our Permanent U.S. Representative to the United Nations with the hope that Ambassador Bolton would shake things up from its foundation as opposed to its top ten stories that he had once joked were irrelevant. But alas, the UN bureaucracy is too deep-rooted for even a straight-talking US Ambassador to loosen up in a couple of years. We need to approach this step-by-step and my first step would be to abolish the UN General Assembly. But knowing that this body of perpetually dissatisfied and largely third world dilettantes is going nowhere real fast, I would rather tackle reforming the UN Security Council on a priority basis.

It should be apparent to any rational person that the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council represent a world that existed in 1945. In the six decades since, the economic and geo-political realities of the world have substantially changed, but these have not been reflected in the make up of the Security Council. The first thing we all need to agree upon is that the veto-wielding membership needs to be raised from five to eight. The second thing that we can all easily agree upon is that France no longer deserves to be a veto-wielding member. Au Revoir, Mon Ami. No hard feelings, but Germany is now certainly more representative of the European Union than vous.

So the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Russia, and China will become the five veto-wielding members of the new Security Council. With Asia and the Far East making up nearly half of the world's population, it's a no-brainer that they should get at least four of the eight veto-wielding seats in the new Security Council. If Russia and China take up two of these four Asia/Far East slots, it's apparent that India (with its one-sixth of humanity and an exploding economy) and Japan (the world's second largest economy) qualify for the other two Asia/Far East positions. Finally, it is rather obvious that Brazil should get to represent South America as a veto-wielding member of the new Security Council.

After this new Security Council has been in place for a decade, we might want to consider raising the veto-wielding membership to ten by adding a member each from Africa and Eastern Europe. However, for now, it would make sense for the incoming UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon, to take the necessary steps to immediately increase the veto-wielding membership of the UN Security Council to eight nations as follows: United States of America, United Kingdom, Russia, China, Germany, India, Japan, and Brazil.

With this new Security Council in place in early 2007, we can look forward to seating a body that is truly representative of the world and thus making hopes for a real peace all the more plausible.