Background: Why We Need Just Foreign Policy
The need for active public pressure and input with regard to foreign policy issues in the United States is becoming increasingly urgent. The institutions of civil society are so underdeveloped with regard to foreign policy that if one only had access to the most widely received journalism – i.e. the major broadcast, cable, and print media – it would be easy to conclude that civil society barely existed.
All one has to do is compare the debate and discussion over Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito to the discussion of any major foreign policy issue – e.g. the war in Iraq, the political changes sweeping South America, the growing confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program – to see how much civil society is excluded from the determination of foreign policy. Despite the outcome of the Supreme Court debate, it was at least joined by some sectors of organized civil society whose voices were heard by millions of Americans: People for the American Way, NAACP, the Sierra Club, National Organization for Women, Alliance for Justice, and others. On foreign policy, Americans who do not have time to do their own research will hear almost exclusively from the foreign policy establishment: mostly government officials and former government officials. Occasionally, voices from a narrow range of associated institutions and individuals – who, it can be argued, share assumptions about America’s role in the world that are not held by the vast majority of their fellow citizens – may also be heard. While there are a number of important and independent organizations working on these issues, they are generally excluded from media and policy discussions.
Yet U.S. foreign policy is becoming increasingly important to the lives of all Americans, and to the rest of the world. This is not because of the actual threat of terrorism, which for Americans today is still less than the threat of being killed by lightning. Rather it is because U.S. foreign policy threatens to impede, perhaps as never before, this country’s economic and social progress.
There are several ways to see this: first, there are economic and fiscal constraints. During the Cold War, the United States spent trillions of dollars on an arms race with the USSR, as well as hot wars such as Korea and Vietnam. Yet we were able to establish Medicare, Medicaid, and enact large enough increases in Social Security to drive the poverty rate among the elderly down from 35 percent in 1959 to less than 12 percent by the end of the era.1But the “War on Terror” era – which our leaders propose to be never-ending -- will be a different story altogether. At the height of the Vietnam War, in 1968, the U.S. gross federal debt was 43.5 percent of our economy and falling. Today it is over 67 percent and rising. And the main reason such a debt load is affordable at this time is that real interest rates are at very low levels. This will not last for many years.
This means that military spending will increasingly squeeze out other discretionary spending. For example, the United States now spends about twice as much of its national income on health care as other high-income countries (and has worse health outcomes). But, health care reform, despite the fact that it would reduce the nation’s overall spending on health care, would still require an increase in government spending. The latter will be difficult or impossible with current or rising levels of military spending.
And unless there is a dramatic rethinking and re-formulation of U.S. foreign policy, U.S. military spending is likely to increase. In addition to the Iraq war, which economist Joe Stiglitz has estimated as costing upwards of $1 trillion, there are other costs that could become staggering in the not-to-distant future. Within a decade, China will have an economy that is larger than that of the United States. If the United States tries to keep its policy of maintaining military supremacy in Asia, this could entail an arms race with China that would make the Cold War look cheap by comparison. Unlike the last Cold War, this contest would lead to an unprecedented reduction in American living standards.
There are also political reasons that current foreign policy will stifle social and economic progress in the United States. Whatever the intentions or motivation of the Bush administration, the introduction of the Iraq “crisis” in the summer of 2002 had a major impact on the elections of that year. All other issues that might have affected the election – unemployment, Medicare, Social Security, the economy – were quickly displaced from the political and media agenda in the months preceding the elections. This was true even though polls showed most of these issues to be of higher priority to the public than Iraq, prior to their displacement in the media.
This means that so long as civil society remains marginalized and unrepresented on foreign policy issues, any government –not just a group of “neo-conservatives” with a particular plan for remolding the Middle East – will be able to create an international crisis and use it to displace other issues, as well as to consolidate political power. And these foreign interventions, such as the Iraq war, can by themselves greatly increase the threat of real terrorism. This is a cycle that can go on for many years, and even decades, preventing economic and social progress indefinitely. For example, Iran’s nuclear program – despite the fact that it 5-10 years away from bomb-making capability -- provides the material for a “security crisis” that can be invoked at any politically convenient time, including the run-up to the 2006 or 2008 elections. Such a “crisis” could involve economic sanctions or even military action, regardless of whether there is any real security threat to the United States.
The erosion of our civil liberties in the last few years has also brought home to millions of Americans the dangers of our current foreign policy. The weakening of the rule of law – as in the case of unauthorized surveillance, detention of American citizens without trial or access to counsel, the flouting of international treaties with regard to torture and secret prisons – has also caused great concern among many who would not otherwise pay so much attention to foreign policy.
This critical role of foreign policy in our domestic politics also opens up the opportunity that people who are more concerned with domestic issues such as health care, poverty, or civil liberties will begin to see that progress on any of these issues will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, so long as our current foreign policy remains in place. That realization, combined with the growing trends toward a multi-polar world in the international arena, will offer a host of new possibilities for change in the coming decade.
Sooner or later the United States will move towards a more multilateral approach to foreign relations, one that relies less on U.S. military and economic power, and more on international law and treaties, co-operation, and diplomacy. This will be inevitable as the world becomes economically and politically more multi-polar – the most obvious example being the growth of China as an economic and presumably military superpower. The main uncertainty is how long the transition to a more reasonable foreign policy will take, and how much will be sacrificed – in lives and economic well-being, at home and abroad – before this happens.
The role of organized civil society can be important in accelerating and smoothing this transition. We can see an example of this by looking at the last 15 years of foreign commercial policy: prior to NAFTA, commercial agreements were negotiated without anyone but specialists paying attention. In the 1990s, citizens’ groups began to organize and demand a role for the public. Although this role remains limited, there is no doubt that the debate has changed, and concerns about the environment, access to essential medicines, labor rights, and even some economic issues have entered the discussion and altered some outcomes. The “marketplace of ideas” regarding U.S. foreign policy, so far monopolized by a very small group of participants, needs an even larger dose of competition from organized civil society. Sizeable sectors of the public are more than ready for it, and this constituency is almost certain to grow rapidly in the near future.1 U.S. Census Bureau. Historical Poverty Tables. http://www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/histpov/hstpov3.html. Table 3. Poverty Status of People, by Age, Race, and Hispanic Origin: 1959 to 2003
