In last night’s vice presidential debate, Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin were each asked to qualify the relative dangers of a nuclear Iran and an unstable Pakistan. In their responses, neither offered to declare war on, send troops to, enact sanctions against, or make demands of those countries. However, both candidates answered the question in words that legitimized US concern about developments in Iran and Pakistan. Without pause two Americans handed down judgment on the affairs of two sovereign foreign nations.
Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, America’s outlook on foreign affairs has changed dramatically. Prior to 9/11, our forays into international disputes were tentative and sporadic. Yes, the United States has supported dictators or political parties via economic backing, but rarely has our military engaged in foreign conflict unless in response to some specific targeted aggression against our country. The attacks perpetrated by Al Qaeda have given the United States a pretense for premature, unilateral military engagements. Risky, indefensible, gratuitous actions are now sold to the American public as necessary for the maintenance of homeland security. The fear embodied by Brennan’s Terrorist monster has blinded people to such an extent that they no longer question the validity of privacy-limiting bills such as the Patriot Act, or foreign initiatives like the war in Iraq. Any country revealing so much as a tendency toward disapproval of American policies is immediately blacklisted, even if such nations are the traditional allies of the United States (as in the case of France and the laughably petty replacement of “french fries” with “freedom fries”). Thus we continue to stretch our troops beyond discretion in order to quell anti-American sentiment abroad. Not since the Cold War era has America so arbitrarily invaded, manipulated, or interfered with other states.
Historically, the United States has established a tradition of reacting to real or perceived threats by attempting to suppress any group harboring hostility toward our country.
Brennan argues that America’s fear of the Terrorist has lead to a decline in the freedom and independence which we see as separating us from the extremists who have launched attacks on our soil. I would contend that not only has our fear of the Terrorist affected our right to privacy, but it has opened the gates for a flood of imperialistic foreign policy. Our modern imperialism has been pursued in Afghanistan and Iraq, and discussed in reference to Iran, Korea, and Pakistan. We send our army to conquer factions who disagree with American policies or values and instill our own beliefs in those we profess to save; this disrespect for the sovereignty and rights of other states, in turn, breeds further international disapproval of the extreme overreaction of the United States government. Is this what we can expect for America in the future? Are we justified in violating the rights of other nations in order to spread our own values of democracy?
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America wants to take over nations with opposing views because they see these countries as a threat to our existence, our values and our way of life. From 9/11 and other terrorist attacks Americans gather that people who don't agree with us are dangerous. Because of this we have to make sure they are weak and don't have the opportunity to gain enough power to attack. America feels insecure and so needs to supress everyone else to stay ontop. But by doing this we only make our problems worse. People don't like us because we are arrogant, pushy, and controlling, so to continue to act like that seems absurd to me. It sounds like a fine way to make more enemies.
Instead of trying to kill off all our enemies (which is impossible), Americans need to ask why people don't like us and then we need to change our attitude and foreign policy to better appease and get along with the rest of the world.
Most probably though, the American attitude is not going to change any time soon, for fear that it will be seen as a sign of weakness to step down which will then promote more attacks.
Before we question what the United States has in store for the future, I think it is necessary to evaluate how we have defined "democracy" historically and what we accept as "traditional" or "liberating" in our modern perspective.
While most attribute our values of democracy and freedom to those stated by our most reputable founding fathers, there is danger in limiting the idea of "democracy" to a revolutionary concept of human equality. Over the course of history, our western values of "democracy" have been the validation for corruption and dominance. Perfect examples of this occurred during the Cold War when the US overthrew leaders such as President Arbenz of Guatemala, Mossadeq of Iran, and Nasser of Egypt, and replaced them with "liberators" who essentially enslaved the native people under distorted "western" markets and governments. While such leaders may have not subscribed to the word "democracy" or all the values we assume to "liberate" a people, they were favored by large majorities of their countries, and were greatly missed when the US intervened. The debilitating mark of such " democratic liberation" still exists in the countries today.
From just several historical examples, we can see that the US concept of "democratic liberation" is not unprecedented; what is unprecedented is the extremism that exploded after September 11th and the numbing effect it has had on a nation who sits blinded by a television set and apathetic to our foreign policy.
Change is only possible is if the we can become globally conscious and take an educated stance on the actions of our" shining beacon of hope." Thus, I don't believe the question we should be asking is "what does this mean for our future" or "are we justified in violating the rights of other countries?” It’s appalling that we even ask ourselves these questions. We are so inherently ethnocentric and elitist. When will we be able to see that our values are not the motivating force for most of our foreign policy and in using them as a mask for deception we distort them beyond belief. I don’t believe we will ever truly understand until we are the victims of violation. Wait, but haven't we been? Perhaps we just will never understand, and when we do, it might just be too late.
The United States does indeed use its army to tame countries that have gotten out of control. However, the international community and the United Nations have, historically, agreed with this policy. The Korean War, Operation Ajax, the first Gulf War, and (to a lesser extent) the Vietnam War all boasted the support, sometimes tacit, of the international community at large. The vast disapproval of the Iraq War almost across the board is something new. One of the great tragedies of the Bush administration has been this widespread condemnation of America as a malevolent imperialist power. Whether this condemnation is a result of the new international scene or the totally misguided nature of the War on Terror is difficult to determine.
I disagree with the statement in the initial provocation that America's foreign policy forays before 9/11 were "sporadic." There were major ventures such as the Korean War,the Vietnam War, 1979's Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan, as well as extensive meddling in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, and Panama during the 1980s. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was foreign involvement in Kuwait, Somalia, Sudan, and Bosnia. It is true that Bill Clinton scaled back the peacekeeping, democracy-encouraging missions, but this was not universally lauded as a good thing. Clinton even apologized to Rwanda for failing to intervene in that country to stop the genocide.
The Iraq war was a miserable foreign policy failure. But this should not sully the entirety of American foreign policy, either present or historic. We can certainly expect, and should indeed hope for, future military action to discipline extremely rogue countries. While America cannot expect to police the entire globe on its own, there are responsibilities that exist when you are the most influential country in the world, and these responsibilities exist whether you go in alone or with NATO or the UN. America has rarely failed to follow through on these responsibilities, with the notable exceptions of Rwanda and Afghanistan during the 1990s. A single, albeit huge, debacle will likely not deter America from its time-tested foreign policy.
Obviously 9/11 changed the way America handles our foreign policy. 9/11 showed us a weakness and our government tried to fix it by going to war. I was led to believe we were going to war to stop terrorism, which is a good thing. I didn't think we were going to war to enslave a country and force our own policies on it.
I do think America should intervene in global issues like genocide. Genocide is something most people agree is wrong and should be stopped. Waging war on a country so we can control and change it to the way we want it to be is wrong. It's not a global issue. If it was a global concern then we would have been supported by many other nations to go to war, but we weren't supported and as a result have gained a horrible reputation. This reputation will probably never change in our lifetime and that is very sad.
I think that America enters any country that poses any kind of threat to it. I also think that it is true that we assume that any people without democracy, wants it. It is in these kinds of situations in which we use force to “free” a group of people, not always sure of what the people want, and what our presence in this country does to its people. In many situations, America is just advocating is power and the assertion that it is the most powerful nation on earth. This is also related to why Americans feels the need to impose their values on other nations, in the belief that the set of values in place in this country are wholly superior to the ones in place in the nation.
I agree with Jess and some of the other comments about how America tries to impose her will on other countries. There is definitely a sense of insecurity with America that has led to the theory that any country who is different, and does not embrace democracy and our way of life as we do is a threat. Removing Saddam's Iraq from the middle east has only upset the power balance and created more trouble.
America has too many things going on. Instead of trying to impose the American way of life onto others, Americans must consider why others do not agree with us and adjust our foreign policies accordingly. America must also concentrate on more defined and clear goals. The War on Terror is not in Iraq; it is in Afghanistan. Furthermore, with all the spending on military overseas, America has neglected her own economy and home, creating even more problems.
America is constantly changing and with a new president coming in, we will be seeing even greater change. Hopefully the change will be one that shifts drastically from the American attitude and arrogance that has turned many countries against us.
This is what the world as a whole has come to expect of America, Americans included. And expectations are often the reality. As long as the general consensus that democracy=awesome exists amongst the leaders of our nation, then we will continue to spread awesome to other nations, willing or otherwise. This is unfortunately the view most of the world has passively accepted as it has not yet directly affected them. However there are the few nations directly affected the the spread of awesome (or closely related to the aforementioned affected nations) the respond with hatred and more violence. This ends up creating a vicious, self-sustaining cycle of violence and anti-Americanism where we continue to jettison awesome and nations or sectors continue to lash out in response.
There is no better Satire of this than the movie Team America World Police. The movie is beyond accurate in its portrayal of what America needs to change about its foreign policy. A primary example is the opening scene where Team America stops a handful of terrorists in Paris, France but in doing so, destroys the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower.
Basically in trying to fix the world we damage it further, because our way does not work everywhere. If that were the case, all civilizations would have developed in the same way. So instead we must pull our awesome stick out of the nations we have bludgeoned and let everyone take a breather.
I think it is rather important to differentiate between what we "think" America is doing in those countries which are inherently threatening to our National Security and what we "know" America is doing in said countries. What must be understood about our operation abroad, in both Iraq and Afghanistan is not as you say "to conquer factions who disagree with American policies or values" or "instill our own beliefs in those we profess to save" but rather to remove from power that which undermines freedom and democracy around the world, not only in the US. What most individuals fail to address when attacking the Bush Administration's policies over the last eight years is the success our invasion in Iraq had in removing one of the worst human rights violators in human history from power. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons not only on Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War but also on his own people, Kurdish ethnics in Northern Iraq. Yes, we could discuss how our operations in Iraq created a larger humanitarian crisis back in 2003 till 2006 , but that was the failure of the bureaucratic hierarchy in Washington, not the Armed Forces that further complicated our mission there. In addition, in no way is the United States justifying its operations abroad as a means of removing individuals or governments who "disagree" with our policies. Conversely, the U.S. supports the advent of democracy and freedom in all nations, so that people can choose freely who will lead and guide them. We see the successes in Afghanistan; with the retraining and newly formed Afghan National Army, a stable democracy that has had free and open elections since our arrival there, as well as the combating of Islamic extremists who only work to undermine religious and secular freedoms. All in all I think it ignorant and frankly insulting to believe that the United States, one of the greatest and innovative countries in the world, is some "big democratic bully" who only works to exert power and authority over smaller, weaker nations who "might not agree" with our national interest.
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