Foreign Policy Implications of the American Election

Republicans, Democrats, and Moral Imperatives for the World

(Text of a talk delivered to the American Studies Assocation, August 2004)

In the early eighties, when Jeanne Kirkpatrick visited Sri Lanka, she was asked whether perhaps American relations with Iran had been badly affected by American support for a regime seen as undemocratic and oppressive. Kirkpatrick did not quite dodge the question, but she ignored its tenor. Her response was that the problem had arisen because America had not stood by its allies firmly enough. In effect, what she was saying was that, had America supported the Shah solidly, there would have been no problem.

Kirkpatrick was President Reagan’s Ambassador to the United Nations, and was known as a controversial figure. Along with his National Security Adviser, Alexander Haig, she was considered a hardliner, one of those who would deal firmly with the liberalism which, according to the Reagan mythology, had brought America low during Jimmy Carter’s tenure of office. Her response regarding Iran was typical of what many Americans who had voted for Reagan wanted to hear – America was unquestionably right, and therefore those who supported it must be unquestionably right. They had therefore to be supported unconditionally, if the world was to be strengthened for the values that characterized America. Listening to her, I was reminded of my former flatmate, now a Conservative MP in England, who claimed that the West had to support the apartheid regime in South Africa for the sake of democracy.

Such doublethink unfortunately possessed the world during the Cold War. Personally I believe that America is democratic, whereas the Communist world was not. Personally I have no doubt that the American economic system is far more productive in the long run for people than a system based on centralized planning. Unfortunately, one has to recognize that these were not the fundamental beliefs on which the Cold War was fought.

Initially they may have been. If I might be permitted to engage in a slightly simplistic historical overview, when mistrust began the Western position was I think idealistic. The Cold War started after all when the Soviet Union established one party Communist governments in the countries of Eastern Europe, so it was understandable then that Western nations saw the battle as one between authoritarianism and democracy. In Western Europe they did not ban Socialist parties, and in fact in both Italy and France Communist parties allied to the Soviet Union won large proportions of the popular vote in the quarter century after the War. And instead of fighting left wing authoritarianism with right wing authoritarianism, the United States initially laid stress on economic development, which they felt would prevent people being attracted by Communism. They instituted what was termed the Marshall Plan, economic assistance to the countries that had been ruined by the War, and this proved very effective in ensuring that countries such as Germany and Italy and Japan adopted capitalist models of development that improved the situation of the people so that they turned away from authoritarian socialist systems.

But in what seemed the intensity of the conflict in those days, the United States and its allies also developed other measures to stop the spread of Communism. They instituted military alliances that in effect encircled the Communist regimes, beginning with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which included European nations up to Greece (and subsequently Turkey), but going on to a Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) which included Iran and Pakistan (and initially Turkey), to the south of the Soviet Union, and the South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) which included Malaya and the Philippines.

Whereas NATO and the Marshall Plan were started in the forties, when Truman was President, these other alliances were developed in the fifties, under Eisenhower. And it was under Eisenhower that, largely it should be pointed out under British influence, the United States ensured the downfall of the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mossadegh, and replaced his government with an absolute monarchy. Perhaps indeed it was the desire to establish these encircling military alliances that motivated the change of perspective that played down the importance of democracy. Thus, in the fifties, the United States began to feel that alliances with any sort of regime were desirable provided it was against Communism. So the idea of defending democracy was forgotten, and capitalism or rather opposition to communism became the only important criterion for American support.

So it was that, in South Asia, the United States supported the military regime in Pakistan, as opposed to India which was a functioning democracy, simply because the Indian government professed socialism, albeit of a very moderate sort that was far removed from communism. And in East Asia it quite blatantly supported right wing dictatorships, as the best way of combating communism. Most of these, in South Korea or Indonesia or Thailand, were military regimes, but in others even civilian rulers were encouraged to ignore even the forms of democracy. The most notorious instance occurred in South Vietnam, where the United States again got involved in a war to preserve a corrupt and unpopular regime in order to prevent unification under the Communist north. And though America got involved in the quagmire under Democratic presidents in the sixties, it should be remembered that the failure of the South Vietnamese regime to fulfil its obligations under the Geneva agreement were with the connivance of the Eisenhower regime, which began the process of providing assistance to Diem when he made it clear that he was determined to remain in power.

Why was this? Why did America support regimes that traduced democracy and human rights and the rule of law, which are essential for economic development on capitalistic lines, as well as for the pluralism essential for exercise of the freedoms America publicly cherishes? I don’t know whether there is any clear answer, but I would like to suggest that one problem is the view of the world held by many Americans, and unfortunately by those who now dominate the Republican Party.

If I might again be permitted to go back in history, the Republican Party was for a long time, and certainly when I was growing up, considered to be isolationist. It had not been particularly keen on Woodrow Wilson getting involved in the First World War, and after that War it stopped America joining the League of Nations. Again, albeit with support from some Democrats, it had been against Roosevelt’s tilt towards Britain in the Second World War, and it was only the attack on Pearl Harbour, followed by Germany’s declaration of war on America to support Japan, that had permitted large scale involvement in Europe then.

There are those who would argue that this streak of isolationism amongst Republicans ended when the Taft wing of the party had to accept Eisenhower as the Republican nominee in 1952. But I would argue that the spirit of isolationism continued, in that the Republican party really continued to have little interest in the world at large. This changed a little with regard to Europe, which it realized spoke a similar sort of language. Though there were continuing doubts about the French, understanding of shared interests was ensured by NATO – despite de Gaulle’s pyrotechnics - and the Marshall Plan, together with increasing numbers of American politicians arriving on centre stage with commitment to European roots (Eisenhower, Kefauver, Agnew, Muskie, Ferraro, Dukakis, all names unthinkable for such positions in the first half of the century).

But the rest of the world – that was a strange place, composed of funnily coloured people who didn’t use the American alphabet or believe in God or eat pizza. The only way to deal with it was to identify allies who confirmed their loyalty by adherence to one or other American on the spot, reinforcing this preferably by alienation from the other fuzzy wuzzies, and to cling to such allies through thick and thin.

If I might digress again, the American attitude to Israel over the years seems to me to confirm this analysis. The world at large is now convinced that it was America that created Israel, but this is far from being the case. Whilst many Jewish organizations of course supported Israel, and indeed contributed to the strengthening, especially in the period just after the Second World War, of terrorist groups in the British mandated territory of Palestine, groups that then helped to establish the army that routed the Arabs in 1948, the American government was not in the forefront of the movement to establish Israel. Rather, it was the European nations, ashamed of the manner in which Jews had been treated in Europe during the Nazi period, who dominated the vote at the United Nations that established Israel. The upshot however was the establishment of an essentially Western oriented country in what had for many centuries been areas of Arab occupation.

America fell in with the plan, but at government level however continued ambivalent for some time. Jews after all were still not quite kosher as it were. So in 1956 the United States actually opposed the capture of the Suez Canal by Israel. It was not the West as a whole but only Britain and France that supported Israel in launching the attack, given their anger at the nationalization of what had earlier belonged to them. Though the attack had succeeded, the United Nations ordered Israel to withdraw and, since the United States supported this, the Canal was restored to Egyptian sovereignty.

Over the next few years however many Arab nations underwent socialist military coups, and as a result perhaps the United States came to see Israel as its most reliable ally in the area. And of course by the sixties Jews were almost wholly acceptable in American society, as being as American as apple pie, unlike in previous decades when they were considered aliens who spoke in funny ways and could not possibly be considered as part of the ruling establishment. So, in 1967, when there was another Arab-Israeli war, and Israel took over the whole of Palestine, as well as parts of Egypt and Syria, the United States vetoed the United Nations resolutions ordering Israel to withdraw. From that time onward, though at intervals it has urged Israel to reach some sort of accommodation with its Arab neighbours, the United States has basically allowed Israel to dictate the terms of its Middle East policies. Israel is essentially seen as a Western country, surrounded by alien tribes.

This principle of, not only my country right or wrong, but my allies right or wrong, can be seen too in US relations with China and its policy towards Cambodia. After it became clear that America had to withdraw from Vietnam, Nixon pursued a policy that, in accordance perhaps with the philosophy of his National Security Adviser, can only be described as aggressive realpolitik. China, on the strength of its opposition to the Soviet Union as well as its acceptance of some economic reforms, was supported to the hilt. The most bizarre result of this was support also for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. There, Nixon’s games had led to the ouster of King Sihanouk and his replacement by a military regime that was generally loathed. The reaction was a takeover by an extremist Khmer Rouge in 1975. Supported by the Chinese, who were themselves abandoning the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot embarked upon policies that, even in his salad days, Mao would have found extreme. When finally Pol Pot was expelled by a Vietnamese sponsored invasion, China continued to support him and the Americans continued to do the same.

I should at this point note that the Khmer Rouge was overthrown in 1979 when there was a Democratic President in office, and it would not be correct to claim that Democrats are exempt from the criticisms I have made. It was Kennedy after all who began active military support to Diem in Vietnam, which Johnson continued. But in both those cases, as with Jimmy Carter, there were indications of a more pluralistic approach in general, of a greater willingness to put pressure to at least encourage democratic norms. While one cannot be sure, I have no doubt that Carter would have revisited American support for Pol Pot during the eighties. For Reagan however, opposition to the evil empire, the Soviet Union, and therefore to its surrogate Vietnam, and therefore to its protégé in Cambodia, was an absolute. If this meant support to the Khmer Rouge, that was not a problem.

My argument then is that, when a Republican president is in office, there will be a tendency to see the world in black and white – which could be literally in the current context. Based on a combination of what seem to be fundamental principles, and ignorance about areas that do not loom large in the American imagination or curriculum, actions may be taken that unfortunately detract from the strength of the leadership America should be able to provide for what I still believe to be its core values.

What has happened in West Asia I believe signally proves this contention. To return to Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s bugbear in the early eighties, Republicans seemed to be traumatized by the regime in Iran. It had overthrown a good friend, and then taken Americans hostage in the embassy in Teheran. All this could not have been the fault of the Shah, it was entirely due to Jimmy Carter’s pusillanimity. When then the monsters in Iran picked a fight with someone else, that someone else had to be supported to ensure the triumph of American values. And so Saddam Hussein received state of the art equipment and training to ensure the defeat of Khomeini. Incidentally, the principle of helping even the devil if he was opposed to your personal enemy was taken further with Contragate, when even Iran seemed less horrid than the Sandinistas in nearby Nicaragua, but that is another story.

To return to Iraq, what astonished me at the time was not the support the Reagan regime extended to Saddam Hussein (for, lovable as he was, one realized the old rascal – I mean Reagan, not Saddam Hussein) had a myopic view of the shape of the world) but the manner in which many American intellectuals jumped on the bandwagon. I taught twice during this period on the University of Pittsburgh Semester at Sea programme, and was astonished to find its textbooks drawing very sharp distinctions between Sunnis, who were essentially good chaps, almost Christian in their approach to life, and Shias who were violent and emotional. All this was based, of course, on the need to demonize Khomeini and his cohorts.

But Americans unfortunately believe what they are told. So it was not only my students who argued that only Shias – and Communists of course – were bad, but also American bureaucrats who made policy with regard to areas nearer to our own who thought on similar lines and then acted on them. Thus Zia ul Haq, who had been in bad odour after he overthrew and then killed Bhutto, became the favoured agent of the Americans when the Soviets set up a client Communist regime in Afghanistan. His chosen guerillas, the Taleban, not terrorists since they were fighting an illegitimate regime, received massive support. That Zia was using some of this to support terrorists in Kashmir and even in the Punjab was not especially important. These were Sunnis, or Sikhs, which probably meant the same in American eyes, not Shias or Communists or Hindus, which were also synonymous.

And hence perhaps, since the Gandhis were close to the Soviet Union, and therefore opposed to charming freedom fighters such as the Khmer Rouge and the Taleban, the need to support those who challenged their hegemony in the region. You can imagine then what music Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s works must have been to J R Jayewardene as he prepared to roll up the electoral map. The Reagan regime, he would have understood, would support him through thick and thin, as Carter should have done the Shah. So he started playing games, with his referendum and the July 1983 riots, and the Trincomalee Oil Tanks and the Voice of America, and then India in turn started playing games which they would have termed self defence, and all hell broke loose. And though J R was undeniably naïve, with friends like Kirkpatrick can one characterize as totally irrational his plea in 1981 to England as well as the United States, sent through Shahul Hameed, to come to our aid militarily if India intervened overtly? At that stage the Americans indicated that Ms Kirkpatrick had perhaps exaggerated, and even the British – against Margaret Thatcher’s predilections – indicated clearly that the Defence Treaty of the 1940s could not be activated.

That, sadly, is how the Cold War affected us so disastrously. Now I certainly do not blame the Americans. J R’s brinkmanship, his belief that he could take on India because of his Western predilections, was his own folly. But the impressions conveyed by some of Reagan’s policymakers may also have played their part in helping him build up the mythology in which he encased himself. Certainly there is evidence that a similar sort of thing happened with Saddam Hussein, when he invaded Kuwait – the American ambassador at the time, another lady, seems to have given him to understand that this would not be a major problem.

Fortunately George Bush Senior reacted differently, and Kuwait was liberated. Unfortunately, in my view, the military action that the world had in general authorized was not pursued at that point, and Saddam Hussein continued in power. The Americans perhaps were wary, since Iran was still a primary enemy, of creating a power vacuum in Iraq that might be filled by emotional and violent Shias. So a decade and more passed, during which Saddam Hussein, an aggressively secular ruler to begin with, transformed himself into being a Muslim champion – albeit still without any theocratic connotations such as Iran had institutionalized.

And by the late nineties, Sunnis though they were, the Taleban had done the same in Afghanistan. By then of course the Americans had a Democrat President, who was in any case less likely to interfere. It is a matter for regret however that little pressure seems to have been applied either, for instance to try to change the appalling treatment of women. But I can see why that would have had little effect, while the sort of global involvement that might have been more productive would not have been possible then without clearer evidence of abuse. Even in Rwanda, where such evidence was more obvious, the United Nations system failed, and one can see why, after Somalia, Clinton was unlikely to get involved. The only exception to this was in the former Yugoslavia, where he was able to initiate a settlement while pressurizing the divided Europeans also into acting. It should I think be noted that the American intervention then was on behalf of a persecuted Muslim population.

Meanwhile, fuelled I believe by American support for Israel, which was showing itself increasingly incapable of the compromises Rabin had initiated (his assassination, like that of Neelan Thiruchelvam, being signal proof of the efficacy of terrorism, in that it shuts up the voices of moderation), the Taleban was preparing to bring low the Great Satan. It is instructive, given the new alliances that are emerging in the world, that when Clinton launched a minor strike in response to an early Taleban attack, the bodies found in the Taleban camp that was destroyed in Afghanistan belonged to Kashmiris being trained for action against India. But the scope of their operations was not really understood until September 11th 2001.

And this is when America, sadly, began to blow it. When the whole world practically was outraged, and supportive of action against the Afghan regime that had nurtured such violence, the younger George Bush announced a vendetta against what he termed an axis of evil, that encompassed Iran, Iraq and North Korea. In short, he gave credence to those who claimed that America, far from responding on principle to objectively identifiable situations, was pursuing the priorities of its own subjective mythology.

The rest is history. The world joined in the attach on Afghanistan, and the Taleban regime was overthrown. A new regime was established with a great degree of consensus. Then Afghanistan was forgotten. Aid programmes are conducted, except by some exceptional individuals, without a sense of urgency. Money goes back to donors through a multiplicity of consultancies, and the purchase of expensive equipment, whereas the development of an efficient communications and telecommunications network, that might help both with employment as well as stabilization, has not been pursued consistently.

I should note that I am generalizing on the strength of a brief visit and far from comprehensive discussions. But the case seems a priori established from the manner in which America so swiftly shifted its attention to Iraq. What actually motivated this cannot be claimed with any certainty, least of all I believe by its perpetrators. The claims regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction have been shown to be grossly exaggerated, and to some extent falsified, but this does not necessarily mean that George Bush did not believe them. The claim that Saddam Hussein was conspiring with the Taleban seems equally far-fetched, but that too might have been believed. The argument that he was a monster who should have been removed anyway may seem more plausible, but it raises more questions than it answers, with regard to history and the legitimacy and methodology of reaching and acting on such conclusions.

Then we come to the more dramatic conspiracy theories. The jolliest is that George Bush is surrounded by businessmen involved in the Military-Industrial Complex that was so prominent a part of theories about the Vietnam War, with the added dimension of Services of a complexity the simple sixties could not sustain. This would be insulting the President’s intelligence, but more insulting is the claim that he too is part of that Complex. Equally demeaning I think is the argument that American foreign policy is run by Israel and, since Saddam Hussein emerged as the champion of the Muslims, he had to be brought low. Adding spice to this is the argument that the Israel lobby in the States now includes not only Jews, but also Fundamentalist Christians who have identified Islam as the Great Satan, to borrow a term from other fundamentalist mythologies.

Finally, and most complimentary to the President’s patriotic streak, is the assertion that America wants to control the oil supplies of the world, and that, with Al Qaeda and Weapons of Mass Destruction providing an excuse, Iraq was the place to start. That argument is fleshed out with assertions that Iran too will soon be attacked, and that regime change in Saudi Arabia is also on the cards.

Now I am well aware that the world is full of conspirators, and I am sure proponents of all these priorities for American public policy have advanced arguments which decision makers in America have taken into account. But conclusions I believe are reached on far more simple lines. What allowed George Bush, having listened to all the arguments, to reach the decision to go ahead, was very simply the traditional Republican perception that the world outside was a very different world from that of the United States. The same rules did not apply there, so that the way to proceed was first to reach a conclusion and then find reasons for it. Hence indeed the initial outburst way back in 2001 that the axis of evil had to be destroyed.

Underlying all this is the assumption that, if things do go disastrously wrong, it doesn’t really matter too much. The Communists were defeated, and it did not matter too much what the Taleban did in that strange never-never land, not at least until they actually started doing things in America. So, there was no need to formulate plans carefully about what would happen in Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s removal, since Afghanistan had worked out well with American nominees being put in place to oversee those who had already formed a resistance to the Taleban, and something of the sort would doubtless happen in Iraq. The differences in the positions of those who had been in exile and those who had remained as dissidents seems to have escaped the planners, such as they were.

My contention then is that, as far as the Republican Party is concerned, muddle in the rest of the world is not really a problem. As with the Tafts, or Eisenhower or Nixon or Reagan, involvement is to be avoided. Intervention however may be necessary, and increasingly so in a globalized world, but it should lead to the establishment of a friendly regime, with whom involvement will be restricted to business dealings rather than political engagement based on the principles America itself cherishes.

Whether a Democratic dispensation will be different I do not know, given the continuing power of the various lobbies, in Congress and outside, that have supported current Republican policies. But I believe that that there is a less subjective moral streak in some American politicians, and there is a concept of public interest amongst some academics and journalists that may conduce to some different approaches. I continue to believe that Jimmy Carter, with all his weaknesses, or perhaps because of them, helped to set certain standards with regard to International Law and Human Rights, and I believe Clinton, more effectively if less idealistically, contributed to the expansion of such rights to a few more areas. As far as the world is concerned then, I believe the election of John Kerry in November may at least change the terms of the debate now being conducted within America as to its role in a world it continues to dominate.

Rajiva Wijesinha