..out of the dark

The failure in Iraq leads to the idea that perhaps military solutions may not always work. And yet in the face of this, the Bush- administration maintains how their vision, for greatness and democracy and so on, is a good one, and that only victory is an acceptable outcome. So why, some ask: if we cannot pacify even one country of tribal barbarians, how are we supposed to achieve this vision, anyway?

Also, things happening lately have proven to some that diplomacy, however difficult and uncertain, nevertheless is preferable to instant democracy- forging like in Afghanistan and Iraq. This again leads to the idea that it is maybe impossible to rid the world of all percieved evil, and as such a more elaborate solution may have to be found, if any can be at all.

In other words, we are back to the point where the previous administration was - never willing to abandon the idea that the US is the primary force in the world for good or bad (as one said), but nevertheless aware of certain difficulties with implementing global hegemony. That is, on the practical level.

In the wake of the Bush- administration, therefore, we are left with a certain number of narratives sprouting up.

- that the higher ground the US justifies the interventionism that has been contiuing since ww2, has been proven to not exist, and cannot be claimed for a long while. (Nation- building is unfeasable for "at least one generation", as a neocon said not too long ago).

- there is a belief in how the "great legacy" and "democracy" as the end to tyranny has been taken too far. But the belief in that legacy is deeply rooted in american culture, and the support for a foreign policy founded on ignorance and a penchant for sensationalism and irrational beliefs is the (obvious and therefore only) problem.

- that the genuinely hegelian vision for history has merely suffered a minor setback, due to a variety of passing problems, on the high road to victory.

- that the ruling elite, now in the form of Bush's neocons, instead of the old establishment's "realists" have hijacked the practical considerations of foreign policy and replaced it with ideology. And as such failure lies with their implementation and presentation of foreign policy, not with the idea behind it, or the ideology they were elected on, twice, and which still has serious support in Congress from left to right, as well as in the american electorate.


But - this is of course another list of haphazard generalisations on /perception of/ foreign poilcy, not theories on foreign policy. Generalisations of the kind the United States can produce an impressive amount of, thanks to the neverending braindrain to think- tanks funded by political parties. (And which have rarely any operational charters to steer by, fantastically enough). All of these approaches refuse, consistently, to describe the reasons for why the analysis suggests what it does. It is simply not in the setup. At best, one can see that one side correctly points out how the other is nothing but ideological bluster - but does so simply to further their own materially identical alternative. The height of this kind of criticism, as in the example below, comes from those who have /no obvious political affiliation/, even though they offer nothing that can be used to truly challenge the lack of reasonable approach in the foreign policy.

Example:
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/02/dominion-over-world-vi-global.html

I will frankly admit that one of my ongoing and often severe disappointments with regard to some of even the most intelligent of liberal-progressive writers and bloggers is their seeming inability to appreciate the continuity and uniformity of American foreign policy over the last century, and particularly since World War II. It appears that their determination to turn virtually every episode in our national life, no matter how disastrous, into an opportunity for partisan advantage and electoral victory overcomes analytic abilities which can often be very insightful on more limited questions. This myopic slant proceeds, in turn, from a willingness to allow the demands of tribal political identity to trump a more dispassionate (and I would submit, much more accurate) assessment of how the current Bush administration differs from previous administrations -- and how it does not. (I do not even mention conservative or self-identified "libertarian" apologists for empire in this context: writers and bloggers in these categories established beyond all question several years ago that reasoned and objective consideration of relevant facts is entirely impossible to them. And worse than that, they rarely even acknowledge the existence of those facts.)

This is simply because they too operate from the idea that foreign policy is something an elite should develop in isolation, and then force, coerce or convince the rest of the world to adopt. To this kind of analysis, any alternative does simply not exist, because any foreign policy is forged in the context above if it ever is "acted out". (Presumably, we need another word for foreign policy again).

In other words, to truly go against this percieved horror of a foreign policy, your basic foreign- policy expert would have to reject any foreign policy not possible to specify in straigh- forward particulars (something which again would be a way to impose something on others, of course), and revert to utter isolationism.

Does this mean, then, that one would have to agree to some lesser or greater extent to the ideas and main driving forces behind US foreign policy, in order to accept any measure of reality? Coversely, would one have to submit to utter and total rejection of foreign relations to have the moral high ground? Of course not.

The issue, as always, is the penchant americans have, even clever and suprisingly well- informed ones, for hiding ignorance (as in things we do not know and cannot know) in assumed straight talk and clarity of vision. And at the practical level for any aspiring know- it all on american foreign policy, this would be the only aspect worth addressing.


Next: on different operational contexts of foreign policy.