US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption
Jeffrey D. Sachs | December 26, 2023 | Common Dreams
US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one
disastrous war after another -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya,
Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in
its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians,
voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire
backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by
just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world
population.
In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has
failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of
Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s
President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a
CIA effort to overthrow him.
Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission
overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by
Russia in 2023 after the US secretly
scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.
Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other,
the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign
policy for decades, including Joe Biden,
Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton.
What gives?
The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not
at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the
interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign
contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family
members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money.
As a result, the American people are losing big. The failed wars since 2000 have cost them around
$5 trillion in direct outlays,
or around $40,000 per household. Another $2 trillion or so will be
spent in the coming decades on veterans’ care. Beyond the costs directly
incurred by Americans, we should also recognize the horrendously high
costs suffered abroad, in millions of lives lost and trillions of
dollars of destruction to property and nature in the war zones.
The costs continue to mount. US Military-linked outlays in 2024 will
come to around $1.5 trillion, or roughly $12,000 per household, if we
add the direct Pentagon spending, the budgets of the CIA and other
intelligence agencies, the budget of the Veteran’s Administration, the
Department of Energy nuclear weapons program, the State Department’s
military-linked “foreign aid” (such as to Israel), and other
security-related budget lines. Hundreds of billions of dollars are money
down the drain, squandered in useless wars, overseas military bases,
and a wholly unnecessary arms build-up that brings the world closer to
WWIII.
Yet to describe these gargantuan costs is also to explain the twisted
“rationality” of US foreign policy. The $1.5 trillion in military
outlays is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial
complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and
endangers America and the world.
To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal
government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders.
The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health
Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human
Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of
Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the
White House, Pentagon and CIA.
Each division uses public power for private gain through insider
dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying
outlays. Interestingly, the Health Industry division rivals the Foreign
Policy division as a remarkable financial scam. America’s health outlays
totaled an astounding $4.5 trillion in 2022, or roughly $36,000 per
household, by far the highest health costs in the world, while America
ranked
roughly 40th in the world among nations in life expectancy.
A failed health policy translates into very big bucks for the health
industry, just as a failed foreign policy translates into mega-revenues
of the military-industrial complex.
The Foreign Policy division is run by a small, secretive and tight-knit
coterie, including the top brass of the White House, the CIA, the State
Department, the Pentagon, the Armed Services Committees of the House and
Senate, and the major military firms including Boeing, Lockheed Martin,
General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. There are perhaps a
thousand key individuals involved in setting policy. The public interest
plays little role.
The key foreign policy makers run the operations of 800 US overseas
military bases, hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts,
and the war operations where the equipment is deployed. The more wars,
of course, the more business. The privatization of foreign policy has
been greatly amplified by the
privatization of the war business itself,
as more and more “core” military functions are handed out to the arms
manufacturers and to contractors such as Haliburton, Booz Allen
Hamilton, and CACI.
In addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars of military
contracts, there are important business spillovers from the military and
CIA operations. With military bases in 80 countries around the world,
and CIA operations in many more, the US plays a large, though mostly
covert role, in determining who rules in those countries, and thereby on
policies that shape lucrative deals involving minerals, hydrocarbons,
pipelines, and farm and forest land. The US has aimed to overthrow at
least 80 governments since 1947, typically led by the CIA through the
instigation of coups, assassinations, insurrections, civil unrest,
election tampering, economic sanctions, and overt wars. (For a superb
study of US regime-change operations from 1947 to 1989, see Lindsey
O’Rourke’s
Covert Regime Change, 2018).
In addition to business interests, there are of course ideologues who
truly believe in America’s right to rule the world. The
ever-warmongering
Kagan family is
the most famous case, though their financial interests are also deeply
intertwined with the war industry. The point about ideology is this. The
ideologists have been wrong on nearly every occasion and long ago would
have lost their bully pulpits in Washington but for their usefulness as
warmongers. Wittingly or not, they serve as paid performers for the
military-industrial complex.
There is one persistent inconvenience for this ongoing business scam. In
theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American
people, though the opposite is the truth. (A similar contradiction of
course applies to overpriced healthcare, government bailouts of Wall
Street, oil-industry perks, and other scams). The American people rarely
support the machinations of US foreign policy when they occasionally
hear the truth. America’s wars are not waged by popular demand but by
decisions from on high. Special measures are needed to keep the people
away from decision making.
The first such measure is unrelenting propaganda. George Orwell nailed it in
1984 when
“the Party” suddenly switched the foreign enemy from Eurasia to
Eastasia without a word of explanation. The US essentially does the
same. Who is the US gravest enemy? Take your pick, according to the
season. Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hugo Chavez, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS,
al-Qaeda, Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, Hamas, have all played the role of
“Hitler” in US propaganda. White House spokesman John Kirby delivers the
propaganda with a smirk on his face, signaling that he too knows that
what he is saying is ludicrous, albeit mildly entertaining.
The propaganda is amplified by the Washington think tanks that live off
of donations by military contractors and occasionally foreign
governments that are part of the US scam operations. Think of the
Atlantic Council, CSIS, and of course the ever-popular Institute for the
Study of War, brought to you by the major military contractors.
The second is to hide the costs of the foreign policy operations. In the
1960s, the US Government made the mistake of forcing the American
people to bear the costs of the military-industrial complex by drafting
young people to fight in Vietnam and by raising taxes to pay for the
war. The public erupted in opposition.
>From the 1970s onward the government has been far more clever. The
government ended the draft, and made military service a job for hire
rather than a public service, backed by Pentagon outlays to recruit
soldiers from lower economic strata. It also abandoned the quaint idea
that government outlays should be funded by taxes, and instead shifted
the military budget to deficit spending which protects it from popular
opposition that would be triggered if it were tax-funded.
It has also suckered client states such as Ukraine to fight America’s
wars on the ground, so that no American body bags would spoil the US
propaganda machine. Needless to say, US masters of war such as Sullivan,
Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, and McConnell remain thousands of miles away
from the frontlines. The dying is reserved for Ukrainians. Sen. Richard
Blumenthal (D-Conn.) defended American military aid to Ukraine as money
well spent because it is “
without a single American service woman or man injured or lost,”
somehow not dawning on the good Senator to spare the lives of
Ukrainians, who have died by the hundreds of thousands in a US-provoked
war over NATO enlargement.
This system is underpinned by the complete subordination of the U.S.
Congress to the war business, to avoid any questioning of the
over-the-top Pentagon budgets and the wars instigated by the Executive
Branch. The subordination of Congress works as follows. First, the
Congressional oversight of war and peace is largely assigned to the
House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which largely frame the
overall Congressional policy (and the Pentagon budget). Second, the
military industry (Boeing, Raytheon, and the rest) funds the campaigns
of the Armed Services Committee members of both parties. The military
industries also spend vast sums on lobbying in order to provide
lucrative salaries to retiring members of Congress, their staffs, and
families, either directly in military businesses or in Washington
lobbying firms.
The hacking of Congressional foreign policy is not only by the US
military-industrial complex. The Israel lobby long ago mastered the art
of buying the Congress. America’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid state
and war crimes in Gaza makes no sense for US national security and
diplomacy, not to speak of human decency. They are the fruits of Israel
lobby investments that reached
$30 million in campaign contributions in 2022, and that will vastly top that in 2024.
When Congress reassembles in January, Biden, Kirby, Sullivan, Blinken,
Nuland, Schumer, McConnell, Blumenthal and their ilk will tell us that
we absolutely must fund the losing, cruel, and deceitful war in Ukraine
and the ongoing massacre and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, lest we and
Europe and the free world, and perhaps the solar system itself, succumb
to the Russian bear, the Iranian mullahs, and the Chinese Communist
Party. The purveyors of foreign policy disasters are not being
irrational in this fear-mongering. They are being deceitful and
extraordinarily greedy, pursuing narrow interests over those of the
American people.
It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign
policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying
the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear
Armageddon. This overhaul should start in 2024 by rejecting any more
funding for the disastrous Ukraine War and Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.
Peacemaking, and diplomacy, not military spending, is the path to a US
foreign policy in the public interest.
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/corruption-of-us-foreign-policy