Yeah, the conclusion (“In choosing and executing sound policy linked to realistic policy goals while working with allies and partners generally aligned with US values and interests, American statecraft can secure the homeland and our interests abroad.”) sadly highlights exactly what the USA has not shown itself capable of doing. Our policies have not been sound, our goals have not been realistic, and we have of late spurned our allies and jilted our partners, in addition to having some very odd conceptions of what our interests actually are. And “statecraft” is not something one associates with recent American diplomacy.
I periodically read something like this, typically by an academic or academic-adjacent, and think, “Huh, yeah, that all makes sense, if we wanted to solve X we should approach it like Y and so on”, and then have to come back to reality, where our foreign policy is decided by… idiots.
Well, a more precise way to say it would be that our foreign policy is not driven by professionals with a deep understanding rationally evaluating goals and tradeoffs, but by politicians with the goal of pandering to their supporters (or their supporters’ presumed emotions) while also being driven by their own inflated egos.
I’m not sure which phrasing makes me feel better.
Heh, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck…yeah, it’s still a duck.
Personally, I don’t think the average American really gives a fuck about Afghanistan or Iran or China, and to the extent that there is public support for antipathy towards those countries, it is created by the elites, not the proles. We have an aggressive posture against e.g. Iran because the foreign policy establishment wants it that way — we must have enemies to justify spending on defense — and the policy drives public opinion rather than the other way around.
or They could stop pissing away their nation’s inheritance on pointless wars propping up foreign countries that most citizens will never visit that do not prey on their students with student loans and modern slavery via debt and rigged scholarships. If you don’t play with balls and bitch (any form of sport to promote recruitment for the US military), you’re fucked there. Its all about keeping people down.
Agreed, and frankly, I’m ok with that. It is a lot of effort to reach the Wikipedia summary-level understanding that I and many of the people on P&R have. I don’t think it’s worth the average American’s time to try and learn the difference between the Sunnis and Shia. Much less the tortured history of Afghanistan, or Ethiopia.
I’m actually impressed with the knowledge level of most of the people I’ve seen on tv, or meet in person who’ve worked in the State Dept. Now, many of our ambassadors are a different story.
I wish the average American, understood the many benefits that occur because of the US’s leadership position. Everything from being able to travel pretty much anywhere in the world, and being able to use English to communicate and dollars. Being the reserve currency is a huge advantage to the Americans.
I’m deep into The Afghanistan Papers at this point, and I’m happy to say that it supports many of the points made in this thread.
It’s also a lot more damning than I would’ve dared to think.
I knew there were blind spots and bottlenecks, but I had no idea that dysfunction was so rampant within the US government, intelligence community and military. It reads more like an Armando Iannucci movie than anything you would seriously refer to as government.
It has me convinced that there’s no way the US government should ever have attempted a project on the scale of either Afghanistan or Iraq. No one was equipped for it. Not the politicians, not the civil service, not the intelligence community, not the military.
That they tried to do both at the same time is mindblowing.
Those are silly reasons, there’s a large majority of 85% that doesn’t travel abroad, international English has more to do with business and culture (and also allows easier social media manipulation, so hardly all roses), and Visa lets you spend whatever wherever.
Leaving aside that I don’t think you mean comfortable tourism is a good rationale for going around killing people all over the world with no accountability, but, oof, there was some whiplash in the context.
I do. I think it is a worthwhile project for us as a people to become less ignorant, less insular, and more worldly. There is a limit imposed by time/convenience/etc. obviously, but Sunni/Shia is too big to casually ignore. (I admit I don’t know much about it myself except for a vague analogy to Catholic/Protestant and mapping the sects onto different countries, but I feel that I should know more…)
It’s the “hold my beer” gene in action!
Genuinely. No strategy, just mindless optimism and infinite dollars.
This doesn’t really belong here, but I don’t know where else to put it. I’m sure there is a long-dead war on terror thread somewhere, but I don’t want to necro it.
This guy was waterboarded, sexually abused, anal raped, subjected to extreme temperatures; the whole toolbox. Still, to me, the hardest thing to understand is how no single person ever paid any civil or criminal price for these crimes. It’s…shocking, and a real eye-opener on how the law works and doesn’t work.
Some of it may well stem from Americans having zero historical or cultural memory of defeat and national humiliation,* coupled with a predominant culture that sees the USA as God’s real chosen people. When facing situations like 9/11 or other instances that show us as just as vulnerable as anyone else, we can’t process it. Just like some can’t process a pandemic affecting us, the idea of these others inflicting harm on us does not compute. As we can’t imagine bad things happening to us being anything other than as the result of some might as well be magical manifestation of cosmic evil, we can treat anyone who we deem as complicit not as humans but as, well, non-humans. Because we are the best humans, and no one can equal us, or harm us, except by definition non-human magical fairy people. Or devils. Same thing.
Or maybe many of us are just terrible people, spoiled and insulated from the real world. Could be both.
*With the possible exception of the South, which was definitely defeated and occupied, and which in its own mind at least was definitely humiliated. Unfortunately, this did not make southerners more humble. Instead it just made them resent everyone else forever.
I think it’s simpler: the rules are for other people, our own might makes right. That’s what every national doctrine has come down to, in the end. Manifest destiny, American excellence, etc: it just means we do what we want, we take what we want, and we are accountable to nobody. And that applies even more so for Americans who are actually somebody, like rich and powerful and famous people.
Pretty much; what I was rambling on about is more our own particular flavor of that. As in, our isolation from much of what other nations have gone through has made us even more likely to become abusers, etc.
Timex
1838
I dunno, Vietnam definitely had this effect on the American psyche, and I’d say that until the 80’s Americans definitely weren’t feeling like the chosen people.
That’s why things like the 80’s ice hockey win in the Olympics was such a big deal. We didn’t feel like the undisputed king of the hill back then.
Yes, that makes sense. It’s this sort of thing that really worries me about the future. It’s clear that the law will never be applied to high-profile elected officials and their enablers. Which means that the tendency to more and more abuse of power will be rewarded and reinforced. It’s a vicious circle.
Our leaders still felt it enough to embark on a criminal conspiracy to use an illegal arms deal with one country to provide illegal funding aid to death squads in another country, and then pardon everyone involved.
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1841
To be clear, that happened half a decade later.
