Despite their macho schoolboy bluster, the Republican presidential candidates are no more eager than the Democrats to repeat the chaotic US efforts at regime change in Iraq and elsewhere which fell far short of producing stable pro-American puppet governments enjoying popular legitimacy. Last night’s debate saw all of the candidates, including Trump and Cruz, join with Obama and Kerry in opting to keep the Assad regime in power rather than letting it fall to the Syrian rebel opposition.
US foreign policy is more bipartisan than domestic policy, and the American defence and foreign policy establishment has belatedly recognized that even popular uprisings not led by the left can have unintended radicalizing consequences which are inimical to US interests. As a result, both major parties have swung from their early encouragement of what they hoped would be a pro-Western uprising in Syria against the Assad regime to support of the regime against what has become an insurgency led by ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, and other radical Islamist militias. As the report linked to below notes, “Cruz argued that the revolutions in Egypt, Libya and Syria demonstrated that overthrowing dictators often results in the kind of chaos and instability that gives terrorists space to take root” while “Trump, for his part, gave an impassioned argument against the human and financial costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that could just as easily have come from the mouth of Bernie Sanders or other progressive politicians.” http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/16/fps-six-top-moments-of-the-gop-debate/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
