Is American foreign policy ‘values driven’ or ‘interest driven’?
See today’s edition of ‘Dialogue Works’ with host Nima Alkhorshid Dr. Gilbert Doctorow: Middle East on Fire - Russia Preparing for the Worst-case Scenario
I am delighted that the dissonant note I sounded on air in two widely-viewed foreign policy online channels last week has reverberated and brought many different voices into the discussion both on the internet and at kitchen tables, so to speak.
The spark was my disparaging the notion that the Israel Lobby determines U.S. foreign policy on the Middle East today as the region approaches all-out war.
Alternative Media, which as a group stands up against what the general herd believing the Washington narrative is saying has within it the same very human weakness of behaving in a herd manner itself and resenting any challenges to what the best known experts and talking heads in its midst are saying.
So be it, but neither Truth nor understanding emerges from thundering herds.
In what follows, I intend to go beyond the simple argument over whether the dog (USA) wags the tail (Israel) in the unfolding murderous rampage of the Jewish State in its neighborhood, or whether the tail is wagging the dog.
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In the past several days I have received numerous comments on my web platforms and in emails directed to my yahoo address providing substantive support for my assertion that the Americans are in fact using Israel to fight a proxy war against Iran and its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas in the Middle East, in a manner very similar to the way that Washington is using Ukraine to wage war at one distance and in deniable fashion with nuclear armed Russia.
One writer pointed me to a 2007 study by a subsidiary of The Brookings Institution, the highest think tank of the Democratic Party. This long document looked into what the policy options could be for further relations with Iran. The most tantalizing of these was set out on page 89 and following, explaining how and why Israel should be the tool used to destroy the Iranian nuclear installations. Perhaps Donald Trump had been reading up on these pages before making his recommendations on the very same subject a day ago.
Another writer pointed me to an appearance on ‘Dialogue Works’ last week by Michael Hudson, who had served as an assistant in the 1970s to Herman Kahn, the author of Thinking about the Unthinkable, a book suggesting that a nuclear war could be won. Kahn was said to be the model for Dr Strangelove in the movie of the same name. He circulated very high in U.S. policy deliberations and Hudson was by his side.
In this interview, Hudson explained how the decision to use proxies to fight its wars was taken by top U.S. decision makers as a result of lessons from the failed Vietnam War: reversals on the battleground had resulted in political destabilization at home, forcing Lyndon Johnson to abandon his re-election bid. A second decision taken in the same period but not mentioned in this interview was to abandon the draft in favor of a smaller ‘professional army.’ The net result of such proposed policies would become apparent as from 1991 when the collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States with free hands to remake the world and it entered upon wars without end that cost the American citizenry nothing in blood, since proxy wars would be fought by our allies, and nothing in treasure, since they would be paid for by Treasury notes bought up by the Chinese and other foreigners.
Still another commentator suggested that I watch an interview given last week by Colonel Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson circulated at the top levels of the federal government involved in foreign and military policy. When asked what he thought of my suggestion the United States is using Israel as its proxy rather than being led around by Israel, Wilkerson said that this view does not characterize the whole federal government but that such views do exist within it, particularly in the circle of Neocons formerly headed by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. He went on to say that many such Neocons remain at positions of responsibility to this day.
This authoritative comment that partially vindicated my argument set me to thinking, and in the end I have come to agree that there are at least two major factions at the decision-making level of the government today with respect to foreign and military policy. Let us put aside the ‘Neoliberal’ or ‘Neoconservative’ labels because they can be confusing and inconsistent. Instead let us speak in terms that most everyone will instantly recognize distinctly: those advocating a ‘values driven’ foreign policy versus those advocating an ‘interests driven’ foreign policy. The former are usually identified by academics as Wilsonian Idealists, the latter as ‘Realists’ or ‘Realpolitik’ practitioners. The former today are Tony Blinken and the other State Department and security spokespersons who daily feed disinformation to the press. The latter are hidden away in their offices where they pull the levers of power.
This bifurcation of Idealists and Realists can be traced back to the Founders of the Republic, but evolved substantially over time before reaching the forms we see today. In American universities, I think that the Wilsonian Idealists vastly outnumber the Realists, who hold only a very few bastions, of which the most notable is the University of Chicago. That is where Hans Morgenthau held forth for many decades after WWII and where Professor John Mearsheimer holds forth today.
The take-over of the field by the Wilsonian Idealists has had a tragic impact on the preparation of a generation of American journalists and diplomats. This is because the underlying principle of the Idealist school is that people are the same everywhere and there is no particular reason to study the languages or history of different countries. This has led to a depreciation of the curriculum for area studies at the major U.S. universities like Harvard and Columbia, where the country specific knowledge is replaced with quantitative skills that will be better appreciated by employers in the banking industry or international NGOs where the students may go after graduation.
Incidentally, the notion that people are essentially the same everywhere and that cultural factors can be erased or ignored fits very well into the End of History thinking so cleverly set out by Francis Fukuyama as a seminal thinker of Neoconservatives at the start of the 1990s.f
On the other side of the equation, the Realists all too often do not really take possession of factual knowledge about the regions of the world about which they talk so glibly. Though it is impossible to be a true expert on all the world’s different regions with the vast number of different languages, that does not stop professors of international relations from holding forth on any of the countries in the news today.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024