Harry Targ
Robert Parry recently wrote about “Obama, the
Neo-Cons, and Liberal Interventionists” (Consortium News, August 21, 2014,
reposted on Portside.org). Parry describes the two, sometimes competing,
factions among the foreign policy elite that dominate United States foreign
policy today. The neo-conservatives, derived from Reagan era militarism and
institutionalized in the Project for a New American Century, advocate the
American use of military power virtually everywhere to create pliant regimes
and quiescent populations. Their theoreticians, including William Kristol and
Robert Kagan, argue that President Clinton in the 1990s and President Obama
today have failed to use U.S. military superiority to create a world order that
serves U.S. interests.
The neo-conservatives captured the White House in
2001 and Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the second level of administrators went
about launching two brutal wars, dramatically increasing military spending, and
establishing a military presence, soldiers, private armies, and drone-type
technologies all across the “arc of instability.” The “arc of instability”
constituted nations from northern Latin America, North Africa, the Middle East,
the Persian Gulf, South Asia, and the Pacific. Their vision was to reestablish a
U.S. global empire.
The Clinton era “liberal interventionists,”
sometimes called the “humanitarian interventionists,” also desired a new United
States global hegemony. They believed, however, that the goal could not be
achieved by unilateral militarism. Empire required alliances, international
institutional collaboration, and the selective use of force. Military tools,
preferably aircraft, drones, and selective assassinations, while avoiding
“boots on the ground,” would limit backlash from a skeptical citizenry who are
tired of U.S. wars. Preferably military interventions could be justified on humanitarian
grounds, not to achieve conquest but to save beleaguered populations.
President Obama, Parry pointed out, since taking
office in 2009 has “pursued conflicting strategies mixing his penchant for a
less belligerent ‘realism’ with Official Washington’s dominant tough-guy
ideologies of neo-conservatism and its close cousin, ‘liberal
interventionism.’”
During his first two years in office Obama dialogued
with leaders of the G20 countries, shook hands with former President Hugo
Chavez of Venezuela, condemned the military coup in Honduras, withdrew most soldiers
from Iraq, and agonized before he decided to send more troops to Afghanistan while
promising to end the U.S. military involvement there in a short time frame.
Unfortunately, in the face of increased international
conflict, pressures from dangerous allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, and
domestic pressures from both neo-cons and liberal interventionists, Obama
tilted to a more aggressive foreign policy, increasing drone attacks on human
targets in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia who were claimed to be terrorists, and returning
to traditional interventionist policies in the Western Hemisphere.
Over the last several months, and in part a response
to his efforts to partner with Russia to reduce civil war in Syria and improve
relations with Iran, Obama has been under increased pressure to send more arms
to Israel. In addition, neo-cons in his administration worked covertly with
Ukraine dissidents to overthrow the elected government in Kiev. They now are
encouraging Obama to intervene militarily to protect the Kiev government
threatened by Russian backed separatists in the eastern part of the country.
With the emergence of an Islamic fundamentalist army (ISIS) occupying large
swathes of land in Iraq and Syria, both neo-conservatives and liberal
interventionists have lobbied for U.S. military action. Obama, skeptical of
recreating Cold War with Russia, and getting more bogged down in the Gulf, is
moving cautiously but at the same time toward war policies that would be
disastrous for the peoples of Eastern Europe, the Gulf, and the United States
The conflict between foreign policy elite factions
today is reminiscent of similar conflicts in the Carter administration,
1976-1980. As historian Laurence Shoup wrote years ago, Carter, a modestly
“anti-establishment” candidate for president, ran on a campaign promising no
more Vietnams. He promised that United States foreign policy would be governed
by human rights. He also promised to respect the sovereignty of countries of
the Global South. Some of the key foreign policy advisors he assembled lobbied
for a less interventionist, more human rights oriented foreign policy.
During the first two years of Carter’s term, he
tilted in their direction. But, largely as a result of the shocking revolution
overthrowing the impregnable ally the Shah of Iran in January, 1979, Carter was
convinced by other advisers, global militarists, to return to Cold War. The
issue for them, of course, was not an alleged escalated Soviet threat but
rather the loss of U.S. control of the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf.
President Carter, tilting toward the militarist wing
of his administration, reintroduced draft registration, increased military aid
to Egypt and Israel, increased funding for NATO, launched a research program to
create a “neutron bomb,” and perhaps most significantly, began a covert funding
program for rebels fighting against the pro-Soviet government of Afghanistan
before the Soviets sent troops to that country. This funding of what would
become the predecessors of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS planted the seeds of
the spreading global resistance to the West today.
In both the Carter and Obama administrations, the
presidents sought to establish a set of policies that were a little less
militaristic, more supportive of diplomacy, and modestly respectful of nations
and peoples of the Global South. Both these presidents won the presidency
because they positioned themselves against the more militaristic aspects of traditional
U.S. imperialism. Peace movements
influenced these two presidents to be more “realist” than many of their
advisors.
However, both of these presidents encountered
sectors of the foreign policy elite who, despite modest differences, favored
war. Both these presidents had at least a vague sense that United States
hegemony could not be reinstituted militarily.
The recognition that foreign policy factions exist
does not negate the basic assumption that imperialism is the priority goal of
foreign policy elites, including presidents. But factions differ as to tactics.
They differ as to the amount of pain and suffering U.S. militarism causes in
the world. And they differ as to the impacts such policies have on the working
people of the United States itself. Therefore, whether United States foreign
policy is defined and administered by neo-cons, liberal institutionalists, or realists,
like Presidents Carter and Obama, matter. If
the realist presidents move away from their initial positions, they should be
challenged and they should be defended when they do oppose neo-conservatives
and liberal interventionists.
