By Steve Hynd
This week, I've been involved in a couple of fun discussions with the likes of Josh Mull, Bernard Finel, Joshua Foust and Alex Lobov about the perennial question of what a "Progressive/Liberal/Post-Multi-Polar-Second-World-Whateverthefuckyouwannacallit Foreign Policy vision" - as one friend put it - should look like.
For my money, one of the best places to begin is with Robert Wright, and his important work on what he calls "progressive realism". But I also come at such a vision from a very Satre-like viewpoint on the utter importance of personal responsibility for one's own actions and intentions, a utilitarian approach to ethics in general and a Wittgensteiniwn paradigm that "the limits of our language are the limits of our world" so if we don't agree first on what words like "good and "evil" mean in a foreign policy context then we'll all just be talking past each other.
Anyways, that part is about meta-thinking the subject. However, in an email the other day I set out some of what I think needs to be specifically said in such a foreign policy vision:
1) Disable the prevalent concept of American exceptionalism, on pragmatic grounds, by arguing that in a closed and inter-connected system such exceptionalism is always self-defeating. If you're going to be the world's cop, you need to be an honest cop. A cop which applies the law unevenly, takes bibes, lets friends off with stuff, is a corrupt cop - no-one, even those who are his friends, respects a corrupt cop enough to allow him to do his job properly should he somehow manage to find a situation where he even wants to.
2) Allow for self-defense on a purely Utilitarian basis - i.e. the corollary of the Golden Rule is "Do not allow others to do unto you as you would not do unto them" - but point out that such doesn't allow for colonialist nation-building adventures (since the Golden Rule and it's corollary also argues strongly for local self-determination).
2a) Defuse the neoliberal reliance on Powell's Pottery Barn Rule by reference to these utilitarian principles. The real Pottery Barn Rule is: "you broke it, pay up and get the fuck out of our store; it's none of your business whether we fix things up or burn the store down around our own ears."
2b) Point out that, therefore, COIN in a foreign land is not actually COIN, it's colonial pacification ops. Lots of opportunity to argue that COIN in foreign lands is essentially a mystery religion designed to give a spurious but beguiling "yes, we can" answer to the Beltway question post-Iraq of "Can we invade places whenever we feel like it?" It's actually no better at doing that than conventional military action, because it too is primarily governed by the negatives of exceptionalist intervention.
3) Argue, vis-a-vis America's national security establishment specifically, that the perfect budget predator - the military/industrial complex - has successfully used COIN to suck up all the available food supply in the government ecosystem (i.e. budget dollars), to the detriment of every other area of government but especially to the detriment of State, which should be the main arm of American foreign policy enactment but has ceased to be that after the military has successfully co-opted the budget and command cycles designed to put civilian boots on the ground. A massive redress of balance (political primacy, manpower and budget) to re-empower civilian engagement at every level of foreign policy outreach is thus needed. That's my wide-as-hell view anyway.
I'm throwing the floor open. What would you include?
Finel, Foust, Lobov, Hynd. That is one hell of a think tank! We can not be stopped. ;)
ReplyDeleteThe real Pottery Barn Rule is: "you broke it, pay up and get the fuck out of our store; it's none of your business whether we fix things up or burn the store down around our own ears."This would be a huge step for a country that continues to think it has to fix every goddamn thing it can find...
ReplyDeleteProbably due to that "exceptionalism" idea.
That being said, excellent post!
...if we don't agree first on what words like "good and "evil" mean in a foreign policy context then we'll all just be talking past each other.
ReplyDeleteThis is a succinct description of the contradictions at the core not only of foreign policy but of all we do. In the aftermath of conflicts the survivors advance the argument they were fighting to defeat evil. At the same time they turn a blind eye at evils committed by themselves along the way, from soiled reputations to genocide and everything in between.
My personal filter is what Walter Wink has tagged the "myth of redemptive violence." It is a deceptively simple notion but not easily tackled in a comments thread.
The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known. Furthermore, its orientation toward evil is one into which virtually all modern children (boys especially) are socialized in the process of maturation. Children select this mythic structure because they have already been led, by culturally reinforced cues and role models, to resonate with its simplistic view of reality. It's presence everywhere is not the result of a conspiracy of Babylonian priests secretly buying up the mass media with Iraqi oil money, but a function of values endlessly reinforced by the Domination System. By making violence pleasurable, fascinating, and entertaining, the Powers are able to delude people into compliance with a system that is cheating them of their very lives.
Once children have been indoctrinated into the expectations of a dominator society, they may never outgrow the need to locate all evil outside themselves. Even as adults they tend to scapegoat others (the Commies, the Americans, the gays, the straights, the blacks, the whites, the liberals, the conservatives) for all that is wrong in the world. They continue to depend on group identification and the upholding of social norms for a sense of well-being.
In a period when attendance at Christian Sunday schools is dwindling, the myth of redemptive violence has won children's voluntary acquiescence to a regimen of religious indoctrination more extensive and effective than any in the history of religions. Estimates vary widely, but the average child is reported to log roughly 36,000 hours of television by age eighteen, viewing some 15,000 murders. What church or synagogue can even remotely keep pace with the myth of redemptive violence in hours spent teaching children or the quality of presentation? (Think of the typical "children's sermon"--how bland by comparison!)
This pernicious doctrine has poisoned our collective consciousness so thoroughly we continue to regard the positive results of pro-active non-violent conflict resolution as exceptions to what we cling to as immutable rules.
I see the affirmation of this paradigm in all directions, from the military/drug war/prison/Pharmaceutical/disease management/petroleum/whatever...Industrial Complexes to the plotlines of Avatar and the continuing tragedies unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We are conditioned to use evil as a tool in service of good.