By Joanne Landy
WITH THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA, millions in the United States and around the world are hoping for relief from the dangerous arrogance and destructiveness of George Bush’s foreign policy. President Obama is expected to take important positive initiatives — like closing Guantanamo and lifting the rule denying international organizations receiving U.S. aid the right to let women know about abortion. When the inevitable right-wing reaction to these initiatives comes, it will be crucial for us in the peace movement to defend them. On some broader questions, there is a chance that with strong continuing popular pressure — from both within and outside the United States — the pre-election hopes of many Obama supporters can be realized on issues such as an end to the war in Iraq or stepping back from Bush’s attempt to install “missile defense” in Poland and the Czech Republic.
The Obama administration will face a host of critical issues in foreign policy, such as how to relate to Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, Cuba, Russia, China, Latin America, AFRICOM (the new Pentagon structure for Africa), North Korea, NATO expansion, weapons in space, nuclear and conventional weapons — and perhaps most important, the international economy and global warming. Popular movements can succeed in moving Obama to some degree on these questions, and that makes immediate mobilization imperative. But achieving a thoroughgoing and consistent progressive foreign policy will require a substantive, not just rhetorical, transformational politics in the United States that goes far beyond what we have reason to expect from Barack Obama’s presidency.
Obama’s foreign policy advisors and appointments, campaign speeches and website remind us that he has already shown his support for many of the central tenets of U.S. imperial policy. More fundamentally, given the corporate interests with which Obama and the Democratic Party are intertwined, there are limits to how far his administration can or will go in transforming U.S. relations with the rest of the world.
But people have been energized by the sweeping repudiation of Bush’s policies and the election of a candidate who has spoken broadly, albeit often vaguely, of the need for change. If movements in this country and abroad can build on popular hopes and show that what is needed is genuinely progressive change, they can push U.S. foreign policy to those limits, and place on the public agenda more profound challenges to the way the United States relates to its own people and the rest of the world. In so doing we can begin the process of forging the radical-democratic transformational politics this country requires.
A New U.S. Foreign Policy
THE PEACE MOVEMENT HAS LONG BEEN doing extremely valuable work opposing the many wars, interventions, and weapons systems of the U.S. government. But it is also necessary to step back from these day-to-day defensive battles and think in a broad, positive way about what a progressive U.S. foreign policy would look like. The New York-based Campaign for Peace and Democracy (of which I am a co-director) has contributed to the discussion of a new foreign policy, advocating a “détente from below” approach to resolving international conflict by forging an alternative to great power politics, an alternative based on movements for peace, social justice and democratic liberties across national boundaries.1 The Campaign calls for a new U.S. foreign policy that will:
• Renounce the use of military intervention to extend and consolidate U.S. imperial power. This would mean withdrawing all U.S. troops from around the world and closing down the more than 900 U.S. global military bases.
• End support for corrupt and authoritarian regimes.
• Oppose, and end U.S. complicity in, all forms of terrorism worldwide.
• Reject the notion that great powers have the right to “spheres of influence” that deny smaller nations their rights and autonomy. This means that Russia has no legitimate claim to hegemony over Georgia, Ukraine, or the rest of what it considers its “near abroad,” but likewise that the U.S. has no right to intimidate Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, or other countries in the Caribbean, Central America or Latin America.
• Support the right of national self-determination for all peoples; in the Middle East, this would include the Kurds, Palestinians and Israeli Jews.
• End one-sided support for Israel in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
• Take major unilateral steps toward renouncing weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, and vigorously promote international disarmament treaties.
• End double standards whereby some countries are unjustly allowed to have nuclear weapons and others are not.
• Abandon and replace a global economic system that brings mass misery and insecurity to people around the world.
These initiatives, taken together, would constitute a truly democratic foreign policy. Such a policy could begin to reverse the mistrust and outright hatred felt by so much of the world’s population toward the United States. At the same time, it would weaken the rationale for imperial interventions by other great powers, and undercut the appeal of terrorism and reactionary religious fundamentalism. Though nothing the United States can do would decisively undermine these elements right away — they were, after all, a long time in the making — over time a new U.S. foreign policy would drastically undercut their power and influence.
Obama’s Foreign Policy
PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD ARE enormously relieved by the defeat of John McCain, and hope that it signals a rejection of eight years of the destructive policies of the Bush Administration. And indeed, we can expect that President Barack Obama will put an end to the macho cowboy style of George W. Bush, with his bellicose rhetoric of “If you’re not with us, you’re against us,” “Bring ’em on,” “Axis of Evil,” “Dead or Alive,” and “Global War on Terror.” But the end to such provocations, while extremely welcome, is not enough. And a review of some highlights of Obama’s foreign policy positions gives cause for concern, even alarm.2
(1) Afghanistan and Pakistan
PERHAPS THE MOST DISTURBING ELEMENT of Obama’s program, repeatedly stated during his campaign and afterwards, is his plan to increase the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan — above the 30,000 troops already there, and quite possibly above the 20,000 additional troops recently requested by the Pentagon. Obama is also expected to try to pressure NATO countries to increase their military forces in Afghanistan, though he is likely to encounter considerable resistance from governments facing voters unhappy with the prospect of sending their soldiers into what appears increasingly to be a dangerous and unwinnable war.
Obama has threatened to target Osama bin Laden and other “high value” al Qaeda figures in Pakistan, with or without the agreement of the Pakistani government. It is not yet clear whether Obama intends to continue Bush’s policy of using American military power to attack Taliban forces in Pakistan’s northern areas. In any case, U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan is doomed to fail, but beyond that, the U.S. ground and air wars routinely kill and wound large numbers of civilians, in the process recruiting waves of new supporters of terrorism and fundamentalism.