A Fresh Look At U.S. Foreign Policy
In the light of the disaster in Ukraine it's time for a long-overdue re-evaluation of our national security strategy.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has sorted a through a lot of different thoughts regarding the Ukraine-Russia War, from the humanitarian disaster, to how the invasion might have been avoided (if such was even possible) to the tactical and strategic implications moving forward. A few thoughts on the current situation…
*I’m all for helping the Ukrainian refugees fleeing into Poland would recommend Caritas.org as an organization that’s vouched for by people I respect.
*As far as the governments in question go, I’m not going to get emotionally invested in a fight between Putin, Zelensky and Biden—three individuals for whom I have no regard.
*The performance of most Republicans has been downright embarrassing, with Mike Pence, Mitt Romney and Lindsey Graham leading the charge for a war they won’t suffer from, to Sean Hannity being their media mouthpiece. I’m not particularly interested in following the foreign policy guidance of people who were proven wildly wrong about Iraq twenty years ago and have learned nothing from their self-induced disaster.
*I’m not entirely sure what to think of the two men left in American politics that I do seriously follow, those being our past and probably future president Donald J. Trump, along with the Leader of the Free World down in Florida, a certain Ronald Dion DeSantis.
I don’t believe Putin would have invaded if Trump was still president. I think that’s almost an obvious point, given that Putin didn’t invade when Trump was president. It’s not like this is a theoretical discussion. We have an actual, real-life track record of Putin not invading Ukraine when Trump was in office, while the Russian president did get bellicose on Ukraine prior to Trump and then, of course, invaded almost immediately after Trump left.
But, as I indicated in this space last week, I’m deeply disturbed by Trump’s hawkish rhetoric on Putin, a tone that has been echoed by DeSantis. There is frankly no one in any significant public role whose rhetoric hasn’t left me concerned. It’s that disturbance that leads me into what’s really on my mind in this disaster, which is this question…
Presuming we get through this without a nuclear strike and get things settled back down, where does the United States go from here?
Let’s take a step back and ask ourselves why the United States is so involved in these conflicts to begin with. The Founding Fathers envisioned a country that kept itself free of foreign entanglements. Indeed, a warning against such involvement abroad was the key theme of George Washington’s farewell address.
Some, particularly those in the interventionist wing of the Republican Party (Cheney, Graham, Bush, Romney, Crenshaw) will argue that the world has changed since the time of George Washington and that his vision is no longer applicable. I would point out that if anything, the argument against foreign involvement is even stronger today than it was at the time of George Washington.
Why? The fact that in intervening 240-plus years, the United States has extended itself beyond 13 small states and into a coast-to-coast nation. At the time of America’s founding, we were protected by the Atlantic Ocean, but the western frontier was still chaotic and subject to influence and control by European powers. Today—and really, for a long time—the United States has been safely bracketed by two oceans. That geography should shape how we understand threats to national security.
There are two ways events in Europe and Asia can cross the ocean and impact the security of the United States…
Nuclear weapons are the big one. But a nation simply getting a nuclear weapon does not mean it has the capability to use it against us. There are two parts of acquiring a nuclear arsenal. The first is the weapon itself and the second is the delivery system. The latter is a lot harder to get, particularly a system that can launch a weapon over an entire ocean. That’s one reason I argued so passionately against the Iraq War—I believed that even if Iraq had such a weapon, there was no way they could deliver it and strike the U.S.
The only way a rogue nation could hit the United States with a nuclear weapon is to smuggle it onto our homeland. That would point to border security as a key issue. The other way is a nation like Russia, with an advanced nuclear capability, being pushed to the brink and choosing to launch a nuclear strike knowing full well we would retaliate. That would point to not getting involved in situations that might be a tripwire to this fatal moment.
Economic impact is the other way the United States can be affected. The reliance on Russian and Middle Eastern oil is a prime example of this and one we are feeling at the gas pump. And if you think that’s rough, wait until China moves on Taiwan and gains control of the computer chips that come out of that small nation. Everything from refrigerators to washers and dryers and a lot more rely on technology from Taiwan. Seeing that fall into Chinese hands will make life…well, let’s just it will make life a little more interesting.
All of this points to developing economic independence. The United States is rich in natural resources. We have an abundance of farmland. We have the ability to develop our own technology, if only we place on emphasis on doing this domestically. It might take some time to get there. But it can be done.
By doing all of this, we mitigate the ability of instability abroad to impact us here at home. Think of that is solving the indirect problem. The direct problem remains—how do we defend the actual physical security of the United States?
This is where we need a significant shift in how we see the world. We see the world from the perspective of Europe first and then Asia. That’s been true my entire lifetime, it’s been true going back to the end of World War II and maybe even before that. That focus made sense, at least up until the fall of Berlin Wall. It has been less logical since the events of 1989-91 brought down the Soviet Empire.
It’s been long past time for the U.S. to shift its strategic focus back to our own hemisphere and look south. The domestic turmoil experienced on the southern border is the direct result of terrible conditions in the nations of Central America. The people that suffer from it are the legal immigrants that come from these countries. It’s why, along the Rio Grande Valley, Hispanics came out in droves for Trump-backed candidates in Texas’ March 1 primaries. And it’s why we should focus on Central America in foreign policy.
What does that mean in actual practice? Kamala Harris, after having had the border crisis dumped in her lap, made remarks that suggested the U.S. should look at the root causes of why people were pounding on our southern border—that is, the conditions in their home country. Harris’ comments were a political misdirection play—trying to get people’s minds off of securing the border, while making it politically palatable to pour out money to corrupt regimes in Central America. But her comments were also not wrong.
The United States has to stop the bleeding first and foremost. That means border security, which in turn means building a wall. Once the tourniquet has been applied, the U.S. can then start doing some long-term strategic thinking about how to help Central America become more self-sufficient.
In order for economic assistance to work, there has to be a stable political order. Until that happens, foreign aid is just lining the pocket of banana republic dictators while people starve.
Military action to put honest governments in place won’t work either. In the first place, we don’t even have an honest regime here in the United States. I’m not sure how we’re going to give what we don’t have. In the second place, nation-building exercises with the military will be as a big a disaster in this hemisphere as they were in the Middle East. So that’s out.
Where does that leave us? Let me suggest going back into the foreign policy tradition of the United States and drawing on the doctrines of two great presidents—James Monroe and Ronald Reagan.
Monroe was a two-term president that was first elected in 1816. Even then, he understood the national security importance of our own hemisphere over and above what happened across the two oceans. He put in place The Monroe Doctrine, which basically told the European Powers to stay away. We should emulate that doctrine today. A fight with Russia or China over control of territory across the seas is a fight they’ll want to win far more than we will. But a battle, say over the control of Nicaragua? That’s in the U.S. sphere of influence and one we can place a clear red line around.
The Reagan Doctrine is then our tool to support healthy political change in the countries of Central America. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Reagan knew the American public would never support extensive military involvement down south. Instead, the Gipper opted for the more reasoned approach of providing weapons and support to freedom fighters who wanted to overthrow their corrupt regimes. The Reagan Doctrine acknowledged the limits of U.S. power, while still leveraging our ability to help those who wanted to help themselves .
This combination of the Monroe and Reagan Doctrines can keep out bad actors from abroad, while supporting reform. If legitimate and honest governments are able to establish themselves down south, then the United States can be first in line with economic aid and investment.
For all of this to happen, the United States is going to have to accept that we can’t control events. Simply blasting images of disastrous stories abroad and using it to prime the pump for war, is not the way any country can run its foreign policy. At least any country that doesn’t want to end up bankrupt, with shattered military families across the fruited plain. It’s time to start a complete pivot in the very way we see the world.