foreign policy – Hank Kalet

Imposing democracy on a shadow government: Shining a light on the foreign policy establishment

More document leaks, courtesy of WikiLeaks — a new defender of democracy.

The response from official Washington? Typical McCarthyite drivel. Sen. Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat, offered this — which is typical of the comments offered by the people who run our foreign policy.

The people who are leaking these documents need to do a gut check about their patriotism. And I think they’re enjoying the attention they’re getting. But frankly, it’s coming at a very high price in terms of protecting our men and women in uniform.

Of course the people in Washington don’t like Wikileaks. It damages their monopoly on information and their ability to perpetuate their own little worlds.

(Read Andrew Bacevich‘s book, The Limits of Power, to get a better handle on the issue.)

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Another anti-imperial voice lost

Chalmers Johnson, the historian and political scientist/economist, died Saturday. His death, an obvious personal loss for his family and friends, is also a blow to what is left of the American anti-imperial cause.

Johnson, in his most recent work, has demonstrated the designs on international power that drive our foreign policy. Basically, his work — along with books by historians like Andrew Bacevich — make it clear that we no longer rely on our military for defense, but use it offensively to project power and impose our will on distant nations and have been for decades.

It already has resulted in blowback (the title of one of his books) and will again. And when that blowback occurs, it will give the national security state all the justification it needs to shred the Bill of Rights.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

New direction in foreign affairs

Maybe I’ve been too harsh on the Obama administration’s foreign policy efforts. While I think his proposal on Iraq can be filed under the heading of “too little” and his Afghanistan plan should go under “too much,” he has signaled a hefty shift in direction by reaching out to Iran, meeting with Russia to talk nuclear weapons and planning to meet with the Chinese.

On the Russia front, for instance, moving beyond President Bush’s silly “look into his eyes and see his soul” approach already is yielding fruit — as this story from The Washington Post makes clear:

President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev launched negotiations on a new nuclear arms treaty today, even as they agreed to pursue new and broader cooperation across a wide range of policy areas.

In a statement after a closed-door meeting, the two leaders pledged to begin work immediately on a new treaty on offensive nuclear weapons to replace the 2002 Moscow Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions, which expires at the end of this year. They committed to reducing their nuclear arsenals to levels lower that those mandated by the START treaty, which calls for both nations to have between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads by Dec. 31, 2012.

“The Presidents decided to begin bilateral intergovernmental negotiations to work out a new, comprehensive, legally binding agreement on reducing and limiting strategic offensive arms,” the statement says. Obama told reporters that he will travel to Moscow in July, the date by which the two leaders said their negotiators should report progress on the new arms reduction treaty.

He also “met Wednesday with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Chinese President Hu Jintao. The closed-door sessions focused on the global economic crisis, and Obama announced plans to visit China during the second half of this year.”

A joint statement from Obama and Hu after their session said the two nations were launching new strategic and economic dialogues as part of an effort to pursue closer relations. The strategic dialogue will be led by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for the United States and Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo, the statement said. The economic effort will be led by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan.

The statement commits the United States and China to better military-to-military relations and to a resumption of consultation on nuclear nonproliferation and international security. Obama and Hu also pledged to work together to help rescue the world economy and reform the financial regulatory system.

So, to be clear, the Obama administration is making legitimate efforts to ease tensions that have increased in recent years with both Russia and China, is taking a less confrontational approach to Iran and is refocusing on the Israeli-Palestian conflict and the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area.

It is too early to know if any of this will bear fruit or what kind of policies and changes will result, but this new tack certainly is encouraging.

Opening up the closet door

Glenn Greenwald has it in for the so-called experts who have made such a mess of our foreign policy. His critique — that these guys and gals have a set of ossified and obsolete rules that determine what can be discussed, under what circumstances and how the issues should be framed — is spot on.

An interesting aside from today’s post, however, concerns Barack Obama’s comments about Pakistan. Readers of this blog know I found them irresponsible, but Greenwald notices something else, as well:

Most of the recent “controversies” involving Barack Obama’s foreign policy statements — including his oh-so-shocking statement that it would not make moral or political sense to use tactical nuclear weapons to bomb isolated terrorist camps as well as his willingness to attack Al Qaeda elements inside Pakistan if the Musharraf government refuses (as they did for some time) — were not “controversial” among the Establishment on the merits. They were “controversial” (and “naive” and “irresponsible”) because they breached the protocols and orthodoxies imposed by the Foreign Policy Community governing how we are allowed to talk about these issues.

This was vividly illustrated by the sharpest exchange from last night’s debate, where both Hillary Clinton and Chris Dodd excoriated Obama for his comments on Pakistan, not on the ground that Obama’s statements were wrong on the merits (i.e, not that we should avoid military action inside Pakistan under those circumstances), but instead on the ground that he committed the sin of actually discussing with the American people what our foreign policy would be.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, when you get down to it, but one that has some potentially dangerous consequences for the nation.

As Powers points out, the Foreign Policy Community has proven itself to be reckless, irresponsible and deeply unserious. These “scholars” have lost the right to judge anyone or to declare anyone else unserious. It is long past time to aggressively challenge their most precious orthodoxies.

Leave aside whatever views you may have about the wisdom of attacking Osama bin Laden or other Al Qaeda elements inside Pakistan because that is a separate question entirely. There are few issues more vitally important than destroying the supremacy and monopoly of our Foreign Policy Community and forcing a re-examination of our most fundamental assumptions about America’s role in the world. To the extent that Obama’s campaign will continue to challenge not only the establishment’s orthodoxies by the Establishment itself (and whether he will remains to be seen), that can only produce vitally needed outcomes.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.