Fresh Start in Foreign Policy

We Need a Fresh Start

We need a fresh start. The United States needs to completely review our foreign policy objectives and strategies. It is in our long term national interest to help the under-developed world on its feet: we should also stop trying to control the world militarily instead of influencing the world with our ideas and practice.

The Cold War was a mistake: we should have reached out to all people that were devastated by WWII instead of limiting our help to the non-Communist world. We should have reached out to third world countries that were emerging from Colonialism and offered to help them get on their feet so that they could provide for the general welfare of their countrymen.

We should have embraced Castro. The young man and his cohorts would have been receptive to establishing Democratic institutions were it not for American efforts to maintain control of the Island. Castro was part of that vanguard of colonized peoples that demanded freedom. An alliance with Cuba would greatly improve our relationship with peoples in the Western Hemisphere. Instead, we got on the wrong side of history.

Obviously, we should have avoided engagement in Southeast Asia: Ho was also receptive to Western progressive thought regarding Democracy. Toppling Mosaddeq in Iran in 1953 was a terrible, short-sighted blunder, and overthrowing the Guatemalan government the following year only made matters worse. It’s pretty obvious that arming Hussein was a mistake.

Our relationship with Israel is one of the worst mistakes in recent memory. I mean by that, not a commitment to provide shelter for the traumatized people reacting to the holocaust, but our acceptance of the genocide of the Palestinian people by Zionists in order to establish the new country: we have blindly stood by while Israel militarily extended its borders and expelled the existing people from those lands in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria.

Sentient beings across the planet knew the conquest of Iraq was an enormous travesty but had to watch it unfold on TV any way. Now, we see that George wants to extend his war machine into Persia, and Democrats are chafing at the bit to show that they can be just as jingoist.

We need to understand the Iranian Revolution: it was a massive public uprising of the Iranian people. They wanted to end the brutal dictatorship of our puppet in the country. Carter failed to grasp the significance of that. He should have embraced the revolution without support for any faction in the country. Those Democratic forces in the country were isolated by continued US hostility. He should have promised to step aside while the international community helped them establish Democratic institutions that would make it possible for Iran to choose a new social order. They would likely have supported those Democratic institutions as a means of expressing those preferences. Our bungling set back that struggle for decades.

We had enjoyed very close ties with the Iranian public for decades before the revolution. Immigration into America was one of the ways that we bonded with one another. Many of us from that generation have fond memories of those friendships. There is every reason to believe that we could use that old relationship to rekindle the warm relations we once enjoyed.

Before closing, I want to review two issues: Israel and Democracy. We have to be very careful to avoid creating instability when we change our policy toward Israel: we should extend any military or other alliances that we have to all of Palestine with a proviso that our aid may not be used against the people of Palestine or its neighbor as part of an effort to keep confiscated land. I mean by Democracy, popular control of government: I do not mean to equate Democracy as a political system with Capitalism which is an economic system.

We need to announce to the Middle East that we need to withdraw our military apparatus from the region and promise to help build Democratic institutions from afar. We need to couple that with a commitment to invest billions in alternative energy in order to overcome the basis for our behavior.