As President Trump shuffles his foreign policy team, bringing in the extremist right wingers John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to replace James McMaster as national security adviser and Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, fears of a major conflict on the Korean Peninsula, in Syria, or with Iran have increased substantially.
Within days after becoming Secretary of State, Pompeo flew off to Brussels, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Jordan in an effort to strengthen regional and international positions against Iran. He was reported to have told NATO leaders, the Saudis and the Israelis that the U.S. would pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), if it was not improved. Meanwhile, during the latter stages of Pompeo’s trip, Israel further heightened tensions by launching air strikes on Syrian and Iranian missile bases in Syria.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu followed up those actions Monday by announcing that his country had seized a massive trove of documents and computer files about the Iranian nuclear program, claiming that the documents proved Iran had covered up a nuclear weapons program that had existed some years ago. Nuclear weapons experts and former diplomats interviewed by the Washington Post largely agreed that the documents essentially confirmed what they knew all along. But President Trump claimed the documents showed that “Iran has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program, that it has tried and failed to hide from the world and its own people.”
After making such a claim, it will be that much more difficult for Trump to walk back his position and stay in the JCPOA. As the deadline nears for that U.S. decision, tensions in and around Syria have increased. The Iranians vowed to retaliate against Israel for airstrikes some weeks ago but refrained from doing so. Israel may be calculating that the Iranians will again hold back in order to remain in international good graces as the U.S. decision approaches.
But given the complexity of the Syrian war and the existence of several outside forces in close proximity, a deadly miscalculation could easily occur, setting off a wider conflict. For John Bolton, this could be the opportunity he’s been waiting for as he has repeatedly called for regime change in Iran. We are not at the brink yet with Iran, but in the past week, the U.S. with Israeli and Saudi support has taken a couple of big steps in that direction.
This building crisis comes in the context of a more assertive national security posture as the Pentagon, under the supposedly more pragmatic leadership of James Mattis, is drawing up plans to (again) massively increase military spending as well as U.S. commitments globally. These plans build on military proposals developed at the end of the Obama presidency to spend upwards of a trillion additional dollars over the next three decades to modernize U.S. nuclear forces.
At present there appears to be nearly “wall to wall” support for U.S. military commitments and the massive spending needed to sustain them in public opinion and the mainstream media. Meanwhile, Congress continues to abdicate its responsibility to provide oversight of the military and the numerous wars the U.S. is engaged in, from West Africa, through Syria and Iraq, to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
At this perilous juncture, it is imperative for progressives to do the hard work of articulating a different approach to the world, one that is less conflict-oriented and furthers progressive values internationally. If this is not done, argues Aziz Rana in “The Left’s Missing Foreign Policy,” when the next Democratic president is elected, “we will inevitably replay one of the critical outcomes of the Iraq war, where the antiwar Democratic candidate simply turned foreign policy over to the very people his victory was meant to repudiate.” And without a progressive transformation of foreign policy, the U.S.will plunge into a new cold war with Russia and heighten tensions in many potential conflict zones.
In the short run, if Bolton and Pompeo manage to involve the U.S. in a major war – Iran is now the most likely scenario – the political scene at home could be reshuffled. A progressive “blue wave” in the 2018 midterm elections may fail to materialize and the U.S. could, under the worst circumstances, be faced with six more years of President Trump.
Rana’s piece offers an important systematic critique of the assumptions of U.S. foreign policy as well as recommendations for how progressives can advocate for and create a different approach. But before getting into all that, it’s important to understand the increasingly dangerous trajectory U.S. national security policy has been taking in the past few years, largely driven by the Defense Department's strategic planning assumptions and budget requests.
Writing in The Nation, Michael Klare offers an overview of the Pentagon’s emerging strategic directions. Having fought the “long war” against “international terrorism” starting in 2001 – a set of wars that have been anything but conclusive – U.S. war planners are proposing to shift direction and embark on a “permanent campaign to contain Russia and China.” In the January budget request to Congress, the Department of Defense comptroller said: “Great power competition, not terrorism, has emerged as the central challenge to United States security and prosperity.” He further stated that “[it] is increasingly apparent that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian values and, in the process, replace the free and open order that has enabled global security and prosperity since World War II.”
In response to this purported threat, U.S. military leaders have sketched out what Klare calls a “containment line” that runs from Scandinavia in the north of Europe, down through former Soviet territories in Central and Eastern Europe, across the Middle East and South Asia, and finally up the eastern Pacific to the Korean Peninsula. All along this “line,” the U.S. would station troops and weaponry as well as arm and protect allies and surrogates in, as Klare describes it, “a grandiose scheme to block hypothetical advances of Chinese and Russian influence that, in its global reach, should stagger the imagination.”
In addition to being extremely expensive, necessitating further large increases in defense spending, this strategy will bring U.S. forces into close proximity with rivals and potential rivals across a line of confrontation thousands of miles long. It’s a prescription for endless conflict and massive new expenditures on weapons and personnel.
To date, there has been very little public discussion about the spending commitments and the potential dangers of this new strategic direction or its simplistic assumptions that recycle Cold War propaganda about the Soviets, with the Chinese at their side, wanting to take over the world. There is little recognition that, in the current era, the Russian federation is much weaker than the old USSR and has no ideology that could hope to inspire ordinary people in developing countries or other places to join in the fight against the U.S.
Moreover, the idea that the Russians and Chinese are working jointly to impose a new international order is preposterous on its face and similar to the Bush-Cheney infatuation with the “axis of evil” that grouped Iraq, Iran and North Korea in an alliance that endangered the world. Neither Russia nor China has any particular antipathy to the prevailing global capitalist order. To the extent that a “free and open” international order exists, Russia and China are full and willing participants in it.
Rana argues that in order to head off this escalation of foreign policy aims and spending, we urgently need a “fully developed non-imperial articulation of American foreign policy – one that would challenge the Democratic Party establishment in the same way that Sanders’s call for ‘Medicare for All’ has done.”
That party leadership has bought into the Cold War and post-Cold War assumptions of the national security establishment for some time. Even after the debacle of the Bush-Cheney invasion and occupation of Iraq, a large number of Democrats and like-minded public figures limited their criticism of the adventure to whether it was the “right decision” or how it was prosecuted, saying little about its dubious strategic and moral foundations from the start.
Even Obama, who ran as the anti-war candidate in 2007 and 2008, populated his administration with mainstream pro-war figures who had supported the Iraq invasion, including Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Samantha Power. And once in power, he expanded the drone war exponentially and saw fit to overthrow the Qaddafi regime in Libya. This hawkish approach had real political costs in isolating military skeptics. Rana observes that “after eight years of Obama’s wars, the only policy positions in the Democratic Party continue to be those presented by the same national security establishment that acquiesced to the Iraq invasion."
Fortunately, Rana writes, the post-war consensus about the rightfulness of U.S. power and the need to support the global order using military force when needed (and it’s almost always needed, apparently), has “cracked.” Trump – at least during the campaign – questioned many assumptions about U.S. foreign policy, including support for the NATO alliance and U.S. military adventures in the Middle East. And progressive groups are, in Rana’s words, starting to “question both capitalism and empire.”
Rana’s view of a progressive foreign policy rests on several principles. First, it would reject the use of the American military as a global police force along with the associated and presumed right to intervene wherever and whenever the U.S. national security establishment sees fit.
Second, a progressive foreign policy would support social democracy internationally instead of unfettered global capitalism. It would reject the austerity and other neoliberal policies imposed on countries like Greece by the European Union along with trade agreements that work to the advantage of corporations over workers and sovereign governments. In other words, a progressive foreign policy should go hand-in-hand with progressive internal economic and social policies.
Third, a progressive foreign policy would push strongly for demilitarization. Instead of expanding NATO up to Russia’s revised borders after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and its NATO allies should have worked to create new and inclusive multilateral security arrangements that could have led to more relaxed relations on the Euro-Asian land mass and made many more resources available for social and economic development, education and climate change. It will be difficult to reverse the NATO expansion, but by working in an international framework, it might be possible to create alternate security structures that can reduce tensions and begin to replace NATO’s role as the security guarantor in Europe.
Fourth, Rana states that a progressive foreign policy should be based on the principle of “do no harm.” When crises emerge, foreign policy leaders, whether in the U.S. or elsewhere, need to have options other than the use or non-use of military force. Right now, the U.S. default position is to apply, or threaten to apply, force, which usually only generates more conflict and opposition, leading to further military escalation.
A “non-imperial approach,” on the other hand, would default to extreme skepticism about applying military force, asking what the likely effects and dangers would be. “Do no harm” also means holding government actors accountable for their disastrous and often illegal decisions.
Fifth, and finally, a progressive foreign policy requires significant institutional supports that can take on the Pentagon, the national security establishment more broadly, mainstream foreign policy proponents in Congress, and the large ecosystem of supportive think tanks.
By institutional supports, Rana is referring to the intellectual institutions – think tanks, universities, unions, and churches, among others – that could participate in working out an alternate foreign policy approach and provide the intellectual heft to support it in public. While many such organizations already exist, their influence and resources lag far behind mainstream and right-wing organizations.
This institutional weakness of the “social democratic” approach to foreign policy means that even if progressives were to win and control important foreign policy seats in Congress and the executive branch, it is not clear who would fill such positions. This is a crucial point that Rana raised in a recent discussion with Daniel Denvir on Jacobin’s The Dig podcast.
There is no progressive “bench” in the realm of national security and foreign policy although there are some bright spots here and there. Therefore, the hard work of developing the vision for a progressive foreign policy must include creating policy expertise and experience across many issue areas and geographies. Personnel equals policy, as the saying goes. Institutions like universities and progressive think tanks need to grow and proliferate. Unions and progressive churches need to step up their game too.
There is obviously a long way to go, even as the dangers of an increasingly expansive and aggressive foreign policy rapidly mount. But the potential for a major change may also be increasing as progressive organizing and mobilization accelerate in the lead up to the 2018 and 2020 elections. Progressives are now fully engaged in working to bring about major transformations in economic and social policies. It is vital that they also realize that developing a non-militaristic foreign policy is a cornerstone to creating progressive transformation at home, and therefore needs the same concerted attention that is being paid to economic and social justice, restoring democracy, and transforming into a low-carbon economy. If we do not change our foreign policy, the potential of the progressive agenda will be severely limited. And if we cannot mobilize to head off military adventures in the short-term, the progressive agenda could be set back for years.
