Where Is the Tea Party Revolution on
Foreign Policy?
by Stephen Kinzer, Posted January 6,
2011
America’s latest populist movement, which reaches back to revolutionary
history by calling itself the “Tea Party,” helped shape the remarkable
results of last November’s midterm election. Some dare to hope that
candidates elected in that political uprising might help arrest America’s
alarming decline. Others see the uprising as no more than a cover for the
corporate power that lay behind many so-called insurgent campaigns of
that extraordinary political season.
One thing about Tea Party ideology is clear: it is almost entirely a
reaction to the Obama administration’s domestic policies. The decline of
American greatness, however, is due at least as much to profoundly
misguided foreign policies. Unless those policies are reevaluated and
changed in some fundamental way, there will be little chance of
reclaiming America’s immense promise.
Where do the self-described insurgents stand on crucial questions of
America’s role in the world? It’s hard to tell. Daunting global
challenges face the United States, but Tea Party activists have no
coherent approach to them.
When it comes to dealing with those challenges, the newly triumphant
insurgents are of two minds. Some, such as Sarah Palin, seem to embrace
what has become known as neo-con ideology: that the United States is the
world’s enforcer, and that to protect America’s interests, the U.S.
government needs to rattle sabers every day and wage war on those who
defy it. Senator-elect Marco Rubio of Florida seemed to embrace this view
with his chest-thumping proclamation that the United States is “the most
exceptional country in the history of mankind.” That is the opposite of
insurgent thinking. It sounds like a depressing reaffirmation of
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s famous assertion, “We are the
indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”
That view, endlessly echoed across the political spectrum, holds that
Americans have been granted unique insight into how societies should be
organized, and they have the right and duty to impose their political,
social, and economic values on others.
A few of the elder statesmen who helped inspire the Tea Party movement,
such as Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, take the opposite view. They argue
that the world will not collapse if Bolivia and Sudan and Kyrgyzstan are
left to deal with their own problems without tutelage from Washington.
Even after last year’s so-called political insurgency, however, theirs
seem to be lonely voices in the hypermilitarist Tea Party wilderness.
America’s global military reach cannot be considered in isolation from
its daunting budget problems. The United States spends nearly as much on
“defense” as the rest of the world combined. The Pentagon’s 2010 budget
is well over half a trillion dollars, not counting additional
appropriations of more than $150 billion for what the Bush administration
called the “global war on terror” and the Obama administration has
rebranded as “overseas contingency operations.” Such expenditures will
rise steadily as long as the United States continues its pursuit of “full
spectrum dominance.” It is an endless spiral, based on the view that the
United States must project power to every continent, control every ocean,
rule the world’s skies, monopolize outer space, guarantee through
military power its access to important resources, and spend endlessly to
prepare for every imaginable future conflict.
To project this power, the United States maintains more than 700 military
bases around the world, peopled by more than a quarter-million soldiers.
Are they necessary to protect America? Is it urgent that the United
States station 75,000 soldiers in Germany? Must it maintain 11 carrier
strike groups, while no other country has even two? Are dozens of bases
in Japan and Okinawa essential to its security? Do its vital interests
require large-scale deployments of troops and weaponry in Turkey, New
Zealand, Honduras, Spain, Thailand? Must it encircle perceived rivals
such as Iran, China, and Russia with an intimidating ring of soldiers,
jet fighters, and nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles?
Militarism, left and right
There was a time when answers to those questions fell along the
Right/Left divide in American politics. Rightists believed that no
expense was too great if it promoted American global power; leftists
wanted to cut military budgets. Like so much in American political life,
this 20th-century divide has been slow to change as global realities
change. Many still insist that “full spectrum dominance” remains
essential to protecting American lives. Others a lamentably small
minority suggest that the obsession with hegemony does not serve true
security needs and is instead a cover for America’s insatiable lust for
resources and the interests of arms makers at home in essence, a lavish
subsidy for powerful interests that bankroll the political campaigns of
pliant lackeys in Congress.
Evidence of such interests rains down on Americans every day. Take this
brief and seemingly innocuous note, recently published in the New York
Times, about Rep. Howard McKeon, the incoming chairman of the House
Armed Services Committee: “His district is home to important military
contractors, including Northrop Grumman and General Atomics, maker of the
Predator drone, which have donated generously to his campaigns.” Why have
those companies sent money and jobs to McKeon’s district and to the
districts of so many other influential members of Congress, regardless of
party? It is part of the legalized bribery that has become a foundation
of America’s political system.
This sobering reality, which is recognized by most Americans and widely
acknowledged in Washington, cries out for an angry,
peasants-with-pitchforks insurgency. Might members of the Tea Party
movement lead it? Prospects are not good. Too many of those
self-proclaimed insurgents, like too many traditional Republicans and
Democrats, accept self-destructive mantras of security policy that are
based on the idea that the world is a vast territory made for the United
States to control and exploit; that it needs to be managed; and that
Americans must do the managing.
There is another view. It draws on the ancient and immutable pattern of
the rise and fall of great powers and sees the United States embarking on
the imperial overreach that usually marks the beginning of decline. In
Washington, however, the pull of consensus is intense. In the inner
councils of Republican and Democratic power, and at think tanks that
consider themselves liberal or conservative, those who question the need
for America’s global hegemony, or for endless wars in faraway lands, risk
being labeled as ignorant, dangerous, or both. Today this consensus is
bipartisan not simply because of the money that flows to both parties
from corporations that profit from militarism, but also because of the
pull of party politics. Most Democrats shrink from criticizing a
president of their own party. Many Republicans equate guns with power and
have never seen a war they didn’t like.
There have always been isolated dissenters from this consensus, dating
back to Abraham Lincoln, whose opposition to the Mexican War contributed
to his defeat in 1848 after a single term in the House of
Representatives. Today such iconoclasts are stigmatized as being on the
“extreme right” of Ron Paul or the “extreme left” of Dennis Kucinich. The
fact that that is unlikely to change suggests that last year’s political
revolution was not much of a revolution at all.
Unlikely insurgency
The 2010 election campaign was waged mainly on economic issues, not
foreign policy. Yet if the new Congress wants to cut spending, where
better to start than in Iraq and Afghanistan, where, according to the
Congressional Research Service, the U.S. government is now spending a
mind-numbing $10 billion every month? Beyond the financial drain of those
wars, and the global military expenditures that prepare Americans to
fight new ones, lies the stark fact that they do little to enhance
American security. On the contrary, America’s reputation as the world’s
self-appointed enforcer undermines its security and creates new enemies
every day.
Dissenters from the militarist consensus disagree among themselves about
what the United States should do with the huge amounts of money it would
save if it retreated from militarism. Those on one end of the political
spectrum would use it to pay for education, infrastructure improvements,
and other domestic programs. Those on the other end would return it to
citizens through tax cuts. That would be a wonderful debate to have, but
it is unlikely to emerge because the militarist consensus is so strong.
The United States is a warlike nation and is likely to remain so even as
its insistence on global hegemony weakens it economically and
politically. This is the looming danger that threatens America’s future.
It is what Reinhold Niebuhr called “the irony of American history.” The
more powerful and better armed Americans become, the weaker and more
besieged they feel.
Public-opinion surveys suggest that many Americans believe their country
is in decline or heading in the wrong direction. Who could disagree? But
the new legislators who have arrived in Washington seem no more open to a
fundamental reordering of foreign and security policies than those they
defeated. If any of the Tea Party insurgents who won election last year
turns into a true insurgent on those issues, many will cheer. America is
waiting for brave voices to challenge the militarist consensus. Some
newly elected Republicans are ideally poised to make that challenge.
None, however, seems ready to do so. On issues of global security and
America’s role in the world, they are likely to be just as mindlessly
conventional as the Democrats they profess to loathe.
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd1101e.asp
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