Another Century of War?
by GABRIEL KOLKO
complete article hereA foreign policy that is both immoral and unsuccessful is not simply stupid, it is increasingly dangerous to those who practice or favor it. That is the predicament that the United States now confronts.
Communism no longer exists,
American military power has never been greater, but the U.S. has never been so insecure and its people more vulnerable. After fifty years of interventions in the affairs of dozens of nations on every continent, interventions that varied from training police and armies to supplying them with lethal equipment and advisers to teach them how to use it, after two major wars involving its own manpower for years, America's sustained, intense, and costly efforts have only culminated in greater risks to itself. There is more instability and violence in the world than ever, and now it has finally reached its own shores--and its political leaders have declared it will continue.
By any criterion, above all the security of its own citizens, the U.S.' international policies, whether military or political, have produced consummate failures. It is neither realistic nor ethical. It is a shambles of confusions and contradictions, pious, superficial morality combined with cynical adventurism, all of which has undermined, not strengthened, the safety of the American people and left a world more dangerous than ever.
<snip>
The United States can no longer afford procrastination or to commit more errors, much less pursue the ad hoc, immoral opportunism, confusion, and loss of priorities that has guided Washington for a half-century.
It cannot throw money at the Pentagon as if more weapons solve rather than aggravate political problems. It has been adrift for decades and refused to admit that its interventions have failed to resolve--and usually exacerbated-- most, if not all, of the challenges Washington justified for almost fifty years to send men, machines, or money and equipment to every corner of the world. Its readiness to pursue activist military and foreign policies has, if anything, intensified most of the world's problems by encouraging--and giving the essential material means--to tyrants and officers who satisfy America's definitions of its own interests. They comprise those who resist essential social and economic changes and those whose adventurism had much better be discouraged. We see today in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan how such ambitions have failed, probably catastrophically, but on a smaller scale there are countless other places where U.S. intervention has left festering problems that are returning to haunt and endanger it.
<snip>
But the way America's leaders are running the nation's foreign policy is not creating peace or security at home or stability abroad. The reverse is the case: its interventions have been counterproductive.
Everyone--Americans and those people who are the objects of their efforts--would be far better off if the U.S. did nothing, closed its bases overseas and withdrew its fleets everywhere, and allowed the rest of world to find its own way without American weapons and troops. Communism is dead, and Europe and Japan are powerful and can take care of their own affairs as they think best. There is every reason for the U.S. to adapt to these facts, but to continue as it has over the past half-century is to admit it has the vainglorious but irrational ambition to run the world.
It cannot. It has failed in the past and it will fail in this century, and attempting to do so will inflict wars and turmoil on many nations as well as on its own people.
<added emphasis is mine>
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