HOMEEU POLITICSMarshall Auerback, James Carden - The Rotten Alliance of
Liberals and Neocons Will Likely Shape U.S. Foreign Policy for Years to Come
Marshall Auerback, James Carden - The Rotten Alliance of Liberals and
Neocons Will Likely Shape U.S. Foreign Policy for Years to Come
September 1, 2020 EU politics, National Politics
Trump's rise has led to unity in the ranks opposing his foreign policy.
Marshall Auerback is a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard
College, a fellow of Economists for Peace and Security
James Carden is a contributing writer on foreign affairs at the Nation. He
served as a policy adviser on Russia in the U.S. State Department under
President Obama.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent
Media Institute
Entry of radical Islamist forces into northern Syria is disturbing,'
ex-Israeli intelligence official says
The emergence in recent weeks of a coalition of neocon Republicans and
former national security officials who have thrown their support behind the
candidacy of Joe Biden is an ominous development to those who believe U.S.
foreign policy should be guided by the principles of realism and military
restraint, rather than perpetual wars of choice.
In early June, a group of former officials from the George W. Bush
administration launched a PAC in support of Joe Biden's candidacy. The
group, 43 Alumni for Biden, boasts nearly 300 former Bush officials and is
seeking to mobilize disaffected Republicans nationwide.
The mobilization appears to be having an impact: More recently, "more than
100 former staff of [recently deceased Senator John] McCain's congressional
offices and campaigns also endorsed Biden for president," according to NBC
News, as well as dozens of former staffers from Senator Mitt Romney's 2012
presidential campaign.
That GOP support comes in addition to the more than 70 former U.S. national
security officials, who teamed up and issued a statement urging Biden's
election in November. Citing what they believe is the grave damage Trump has
done to U.S. national security, the group does include some mainstream
Republicans like Richard Armitage and Chuck Hagel, but also features notable
neocon hardliners like Eliot Cohen, John Negroponte and David Kramer, who,
perhaps not incidentally, played a leading role in disseminating the utterly
discredited Steele dossier prior to Trump's inauguration.
These are not merely grifters or desperate bids for attention by
unscrupulous and avaricious Beltway swamp creatures. Though there are those
too: the so-called Lincoln Project, helmed by neocon operative Rick Wilson,
which is an outside group of Republicans (including former RNC Chair Michael
Steele) devoted to defeating Trump in November.
As the historian David Sessions recently tweeted, "Basically nobody in
liberal circles is taking seriously the consequences of the fact that the
exiled cadre of the Republican Party are building a massive power base in
the Democratic Party."
The merger between Democrats and neocons is not merely confined to the world
of electoral politics; it is already affecting policy as well. Over the
summer, in response to the New York Times' dubious "Russia bounty" story,
Democratic Congressman Jason Crow teamed up with Republican Congresswoman
Liz Cheney (daughter of the former vice president) to prohibit the president
from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. Republicans and Democrats in the
Senate and the House Armed Services Committee also collaborated to pass an
amendment that imposed restrictions on Trump's plan to withdraw troops from
Germany, showing, if nothing else, that the bipartisan commitment to the new
cold war is alive and well.
It is noteworthy that while there has been considerable pushback to economic
neoliberalism within the Democratic Party in recent years, thanks, mainly,
to the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the advocacy of reformers like Elizabeth
Warren and the increasing popularity of economists like Stephanie Kelton,
the same cannot be said for foreign policy. Democratic presidential nominee
Joe Biden has evinced an openness to being "pushed left" on social and
economic policies, but on external affairs he still largely operates within
the standard Washington foreign policy playbook.
If anything, on foreign policy Democrats have moved rightward in recent
years, having fallen not only under the spell of "Russiagate" but also
increasingly under the influence of neocons and other former Bush officials
who have pushed that discredited narrative for their own ends. The Democrats
have also displayed a rather supine obeisance in regard to the country's
intelligence community, in spite of a multiplicity of well-documented lies
or half-truths that would at the very least justify some scepticism about
their claims or motivations.
Nobody should be surprised.
The neocons had been signaling their intention to flee the GOP as early as
2016 when it was widely reported that Robert Kagan had decided to endorse
Hillary Clinton and speak at a Washington, D.C., fundraiser alongside other
national security fixtures worried about the alleged isolationist drift
within the Republican Party. Indeed, the Democrats welcomed the likes of
Kagan and fellow neocon extremist Max Boot with open arms, setting the stage
for where we are today: A Democratic nominee running to the right of the
Republican nominee on foreign policy.
Missing: Whither the Progressives?
Over the past few election cycles, progressive Democrats have increasingly
challenged the party's prevailing neoliberal bias on domestic economic
policy. Equally striking, however, is that they have been delinquent in
failing to provide an alternative to the hegemonic influence of militarists
and interventionists growing within their party regarding foreign policy.
As it stands today, the so-called progressive foreign policy alternative is
really no alternative at all. To the contrary, it evokes Giuseppe Tomasi di
Lampedusa's seminal work, The Leopard, whose main character, Tancredi,
sagely observes to his uncle, "If we want things to stay as they are, things
will have to change." So it is with much of what passes for a genuine
foreign policy alternative: the rhetoric slightly changes, the personnel
certainly change, but in substance, the policy status quo largely remains.
Consider a recent interview with the socialist Jacobin magazine, featuring
Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. Duss, who
seeks to articulate the foundations of a new "progressive" foreign policy,
told the Quincy Institute's Daniel Bessner that:
"We have neither the right nor the ability to transform other countries, but
we should do what we can to protect and expand the political space in these
countries for local people to do that work. We can also provide funding or
resources for American civil society actors to work in solidarity with their
international counterparts." [emphasis ours]
That sounds anodyne enough, but in reality, it is nothing but a form of
liberal imperialism. Historically, seemingly benign initiatives conducted
under the aegis of local people backed by so-called democracy-building
programs have often planted the seeds for more malign military intervention
later. Who makes the decision as to which local people to support? How does
one (purportedly) protect and expand that political space? We have seen how
well that worked out in Afghanistan, Iraq, or, indeed, in the mounting human
tragedy that is Syria today.
Comments like that of Matt Duss amount to this: "We don't have the right to
transform other countries. but we're going to try anyway." Forswearing
preemptive military action (wars of choice) isn't enough. Change will only
come about when U.S. foreign policy adheres to the principles of the UN
Charter, and above all, the ancient Westphalian principle of
non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. American
policymakers need to learn that less is more.
That used to be a guiding principle of Democrats, for example, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt's "good neighbor policy" that repudiated intervention in
the domestic affairs of Latin America. Of course, as subsequent events such
as World War II illustrated, there may be a point at which external
assistance/intervention in other parts of the world might become necessary;
but the United States should not perpetually arrogate to itself the role of
sole judge and jury in determining when that line should be crossed, no
matter how benign its intentions might appear.
The broader point is that explicating a foreign policy somewhat less hawkish
and merely paying lip service to international law that transcend the norms
established by the Bush-Cheney neocons isn't enough. That is the foreign
policy equivalent of the GOP lite economic agenda embraced by "New
Democrats" such as Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, Barack Obama, and Timothy
Geithner, whereby the Democrats internalize the GOP's market fundamentalist
paradigm, but simply promise to implement it more fairly, rather than do
away with it altogether.
That appears unlikely to change under a future Biden administration: As
American Conservative editor Kelley Beaucar Vlahos has noted, "Democratic
interventionists and Blob careerists now [sit] at the right hand of [Biden].
like [Antony] Blinken, Nicholas Burns, Susan Rice, Samantha Power and
Michele Flournoy, who has been touted as a possible Secretary of Defense.
They would sooner drag the country back into Syria, as well as position
aggressively against China if the military pushed hard enough and there was
a humanitarian reason to justify it." Nowhere in Biden's foreign policy
ambit do we find mainstream figures warning about the dangers of a new cold
war with Russia or China, nor to the broader problems posed by America's
overall propensity toward militarism. In fact, Biden does just the opposite.
The Shape of Things to Come?
With the notable (and noble) exceptions of a few anti-war Democrats like
Barbara Lee, Tulsi Gabbard, Ro Khanna and Jeff Merkley, the opposition party
has spent much of the Trump era turning themselves into the party of war.
Meanwhile, one could envision a future where the GOP, under the influence of
"national conservatives" such as Josh Hawley, Rand Paul, or even Trump
advisers such as Colonel (Ret.) Douglas Macgregor (recently nominated to be
U.S. ambassador to Germany), becomes the party of realism and restraint
abroad.
To the limited extent that President Trump has been guided by any kind of
restraint (which has been capricious at best), it has paid dividends for the
United States. In the Middle East, for example, given that the United States
is now largely energy-self-sufficient, it no longer needs to play policeman
in that part of the world. That fact, writes David Goldman, has induced "the
Gulf states to act responsibly as a matter of self-preservation. As long as
the Gulf States remained de facto US protectorates, they could claim that
the 'Arab Street' stood in the way of relations with Israel. Now that they
have to take responsibility for their own defence, they look to Israel for
help." As Goldman concludes, this consideration played a key role in the
United Arab Emirates' recent "agreement to normalize relations with the
State of Israel, almost certainly the first of several Arab states [likely]
to make such agreements."
Likewise, there is little to be gained via aggressive American intrusion
into the affairs of countries that have historically been in the domain of
Russia. That mistake was made in Ukraine in 2014, when prominent members of
U.S. officialdom-from the State Department, Congress, and the Obama
administration-publicly and privately urged the removal of Viktor
Yanukovych, even though he was the constitutionally elected president. As
Professor Stephen Cohen has persuasively documented, that ill-advised
intervention contributed to Crimea's annexation by Russia and to the still
ongoing U.S.-Russian proxy war in eastern Ukraine. It is also worth noting
that Ukraine's largely IMF-funded economy continues to fail.
In Belarus, the same predictable pattern has reasserted itself. Even though
much of the evidence points to the falsification of the country's August 9
election result, there is little to be gained by replicating the Ukraine
formula: advocating mass uprising is unlikely to engender a stable,
democratic post-Lukashenko government. What is required is U.S. policy
cooperation with Russia, which becomes problematic when leading Democrats,
such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, mindlessly persist in perpetuating
Russophobia: "All roads lead to Putin." Working with Putin, rather than
instinctively attacking him for sustaining an authoritarian regime, is more
likely to ensure a relatively stable transition to a new government,
especially if it continues to avoid the economic shock therapy treatment
that destabilized so many post-Soviet regimes. To his credit, Belarussian
President Lukashenko has at least avoided inflicting that particular form of
misery on his people.
In external affairs, Donald Trump's erratic conduct makes profound change in
U.S. foreign policy unlikely in the near term. The attempted normalization
of the neocon Bush/Cheney administration is a sign that for many, the old
normal (which was largely a failed normal) will be enough. Unfortunately,
this reassessment obscures the fact that Trump's shattering of many existing
shibboleths in foreign policy helped get him elected in the first place.
These policies should be separated from the man himself, and force a
long-overdue discussion of the country's increasingly costly international
engagements.
The more modest aspirations that used to characterize U.S. foreign policy
realism appear to have gone AWOL. There may indeed be times when
international engagement and a corresponding reliance on international
institutions, such as the United Nations, is wise. However, it is worth
recalling that a vibrant nation-state with robust democratic checks and
balances provides the best defence against unnecessary foreign policy
expansionism. Constitutional brakes have been increasingly undermined
(through the acquiescence of both parties), and an imperial presidency has
taken hold. It is the very hollowing out of many of those traditional checks
and balances that has sustained and expanded America's increasingly
militaristic foreign policy, in spite of ample evidence that domestic
opposition to such policies is growing. In their eagerness to defeat Trump,
the Democrats seem to have overlooked that fact, as they enthusiastically
embrace their newfound neocon allies (whose past policy failures should
preclude their return to government, let alone allow for any kind of
influence).
Being one of the victors of World War II does not give the United States
carte blanche to be the world's global cop in perpetuity. The American
foreign policy establishment needs to respect the boundaries set by national
sovereignty, both at home and abroad. Endless interventionist efforts aimed
at reshaping other nations as America sees fit give us a world of chaos and
blowback, not peace and stability.
