..out of the dark

In order to say something comprehensible about foreign policy in general about now, it's necessary to acknowledge two points. One, that Europe and the EU does not have a foreign policy (although some changes are taking place). Two, that what has been driving our individual foreign policies has been, for the large part if not dependent on the United States, at least influenced and guided very heavily by it.

Nato has, for instance, changed it's role from being a purely defensive union and to becoming a more aggressive alliance against the enemy of the hour - China, the general middle east, Turkey, Russia, etc. And this has been possible due to our individual foreign policies being reliant in large parts on that union, in France, Germany, Britain. And as leaders on setting the foreign policy agenda, all of those countries have had an intrinsic interest in shaping all their actions around that framework. Indeed, several think tanks and organisations spring from that transatlantic cooperation, and has not been an unmitigated disaster, by any means.

Let's take a specific example. In '99, through some fiddling with the interpretations of the Nato charter, a Nato force attacked Kosovo in order to stop a further escalating situation in that region, after some ten years of negotiation was brought to an end by a joint effort between Milosevic and the KLA, so to speak. It was then a reaction to a state actor attacking a minority with the intention of defeating them utterly. Something that, of course, would be unacceptable to simply stand by and watch. Genocide returned to europe on our watch during the Yougoslavia debacle, and noone was too keen on repeating that. While the russians were not interested in an escalating tension in the region, and certainly not interested in a strong leader taking hold of the area. The americans on their part were of course scared to death of some new emerging power in the region, and also would support stopping "genocide". Which is what Clinton sold the war on to the Congress, even though that wasn't true, of course.

In other words, OSCE chairman and the rest of us, from left to right, nodded cleverly to each other and was quite happy about a military operation like this that - if it had to happen - was very efficient in practical terms, as well as was a geo- political stroke of genius. It brought every part more closely together, it ensured that we would have some international forces to send, and that would also ensure military cooperation between our countries. Even ordinarily peaceful personalities tended to agree, in this case, that the operation in Kosovo was a wise w..w...wa... armed operation.

However - what did we really do? A preemptive attack in order to stop an emerging threat? We would later come to hear these kinds of justification for Iraq. Was it a way to remove an emerging power that would upset the balance in the region? We hear this regarding Syria and Iran today. Something that of course just demonstrates how removed from any practical considerations these two operations are.

Which is the main thrust of this fairly random text. The progress from particular and specific operations dependent on careful and long involvement, and into preemptive scenarios manufactured in an office below the Pentagon.

Because what is the difference between Iraq and Kosovo, from the point of view of policy- makers? In the one instance, we have a series of events leading up to the "conclusion" that at every point had some sort of challenge and involvement associated with it. On the other, it is an incident continually justified in the "present", by creating scenarios out of events that are interpreted out of history. Most of which, as now know for absolutely certain, never took place.

The phenomenon I am illustrating is then the way in which we have moved more and more away from reactive and analytical foreign policy, and more and more into what I'll call predictive and active foreign policy. In which the first generally takes a conservative view of history, and is built on engagement with parties on the various sides, always attempting the approach that - while prone to constant failure - may reach a compromise everyone can live with in the end. The other is a foreign policy where you stage scenarios you wish will happen, and then create the conditions in which that scenario is likely. Needless to say, all diplomacy is about a mix of the two.

Nevertheless, in policy- making circles, the more and more frequent argument to turn up has been "if this happens, then that scenario will be likely", even to the exclusion of facts and actual scenarios as they are. And that is where we run into trouble - we are, after all, powerful. In more than one way, the west - if acting collectively, can bring to bear a lot of firepower, both diplomatically and militarily. And so we do in fact have the power to shape scenarios very much. We could, for instance, force the existence of Israel. A feat. We could make Saddam utterly isolated, and force him to disarm his weapons (before the invasion, yes - and no, I won't discuss that again - you know who you are).

And it is not for no reason that europe has failed to construct a common foreign policy. We have serious difficulties with reconciling that aforementioned duality, never mind the technical problems, of mobilising a continent that has in fact a bigger collective economical and military capability than the United States.

In fact, the difficulty with deploying forces is what tends to gear our more ambitious foreign policy establishments towards the NATO framework, because that allows them the opportunity to talk to friendly allies overseas about how nice it would be to force the smile off Ghadaffi's face, and how sweet it would be to teach those Arab bastards a lesson. (Hey, I promised no difficult words).

And so we end up with a foreign policy that is geared not towards the UN and collective dialogue and unanimity - but specific interests and contacts acting to convince individual nations and governments to participate. This has of course always been an element - even Norway has a weapons industry - but it has never been the primary guiding principle of any foreign operation. Neither has the foreign policy ever been geared that aggressively towards active participation in shaping regional interests. Even though, as I said, this has always been a danger that we have generally been very aware of, and which is the reason why typically both Europe and Asia has been seeking towards the UN instead of, for instance, two- part engagement.

I'm sure "globalisation" has something to do with it as well, but I'm not going to go into how the US somehow discovered that word only when they discovered that terrorism existed in 2001.

The situation at the present then stands in the following way - because of the political impossibility of having any of our european governments now cooperating with the US - we have no foreign policy. It is non- existent. And at the eve of a new millennium... sorry. And as we near the end of this decade, or perhaps a couple of years past it.. we have instead been offered an opportunity to shape a foreign policy that can be, quite frankly, independent of stupid fucking american imbeciles and their corporate monopsonistic (dang!) interests.

As for instance Chris Patten says, we could easily extend the european model on diplomacy that is based on inclusion and mutual interest (that has been, after all, successful since ww2 in the form of the EU and the EEC). And not believe that it's necessary to to enforce a sphere of interest (our scenarios) by military. Which has not been successful in the end, as we've seen several times. And in doing so, we can indeed provide the alternative to the course we are currently on.


(no sources for this random text, google previous OSCE chairman Knut Vollebæk (Vollebaek, perhaps), and Chris Patten, the very skillful and seasoned diplomat)

And at the end, for no particular reason, is a link to a video of a parrot reciting the holy Quran.
http://www.mobilemastee.com/details.php?file=23631