(In the Trump era, with
foreign policy advisors such as John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, appeals to
diplomacy rather than war remain critical for the peace movement. A repost -August 7, 2015-from
the days of United States/Iranian diplomacy).
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Not every conflict was averted, but the world avoided nuclear
catastrophe, and we created the time and the space to win the Cold War without
firing a shot at the Soviets.
….Now, when I ran for president eight years ago as a candidate who had opposed the decision to go to war in Iraq, I said that America didn’t just have to end that war. We had to end the mindset that got us there in the first place. It was a mindset characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy, a mindset that put a premium on unilateral U.S. action over the painstaking work of building international consensus, a mindset that exaggerated threats beyond what the intelligence supported. (Barack Obama, “Full text: Obama gives a speech about the Iran nuclear deal,” The Washington Post, August 5, 2015).
The peace movement has often been faced with a dilemma. Should
it channel its energies in opposition to imperialism, including economic
expansion and covert operations, or should it mobilize against war, or both.
The problem was reflected in President Obama’s August 5, 2015 speech defending
the anti-nuclear proliferation agreement with Iran. On the one hand he
defended diplomacy as the first tool of a nation’s foreign policy and on the
other hand his defense included the argument that through diplomacy the United
States “won” the Cold War, and thereby defeated a bloc of states that opposed
capitalist expansion. The implication of his argument was that pursuing
imperialism remained basic to United States foreign policy but achieving it
through peace was better than through war.
The speech was presented at American University 52 years after
President Kennedy called for peaceful competition with the former Soviet Union.
In June, 1963, nine months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which nearly led to
nuclear war, and weeks after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s call for “peaceful
coexistence,” President Kennedy responded by urging the use of diplomacy rather
than war in the ongoing conflict with the Soviet Union.
A small but growing number of scholars and activists at that
time had begun to articulate the view that the threat of nuclear war, growing
U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, and repeated covert interventions in
Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, and the Congo, had to do with U.S. imperialism. The
dilemma for the peace movement in 1963 then as it is in 2015 is how to respond
to United States imperialism at the same time as supporting the use of
diplomacy to forestall wars.
In the context of political discourse in 2015, dominated by
“neoconservative” and “humanitarian interventionist” factions of the foreign
policy elite, the danger of war always exists. Therefore, any foreign policy
initiative that reduces the possibility of war and arguments about its
necessity must be supported. The agreement with Iran supported by virtually
every country except Israel constitutes an effort to satisfy the interests of
Iran and the international community and without the shedding of blood and
creating the danger of escalation to global war.
Neoconservatives, celebrants of war, have had a long and growing
presence in the machinery of United States foreign policy. James Forrestal, the
first Secretary of Defense in the Truman Administration, was a leading advocate
for developing a militaristic response to the Soviet Union in the years after
World War II. As historian Andrew Bacevich pointed out, Forrestal was one of
the Truman administrators who sought to create a “permanent war economy.” He
was, in Bacevich’s terms, a founding member of the post-World War II
“semi-warriors.”
Subsequent to the initiation of the imperial response to the
“Soviet threat”-the Marshall Plan, NATO, wars in Korea and Vietnam, the arms
race-other semi-warriors continued the crusade. These included the Dulles
brothers (John and Allen), Air Force General Curtis LeMay, and prominent
Kennedy advisors including McGeorge Bundy and Walter Rostow, architect of the
“noncommunist path to development,” in Vietnam.
Key semi-warriors of our own day, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney,
Elliott Abrams, Robert Kagan, and others who formed the Project for a New
American Century (PNAC) in the 1990s, gained their first experience in the
administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The PNAC view of how the
United States should participate in world affairs is to use military
superiority to achieve foreign policy goals. The key failure of Clinton foreign
policy, they claimed, was his refusal to use force to transform the world. For
starters, he should have overthrown Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
The neoconservative policy recommendations prevailed during the
eight years of the George Walker Bush administration. International
organizations were belittled, allies were ignored, arms control agreements with
Russia were rescinded and discourse on the future prioritized planning for the
next war. And concretely the United States launched long, bloody, immoral wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Humanitarian interventionists, more liberals than conservatives,
argued that the United States should use force, but more selectively, to
achieve various goals. These goals included interventions that allegedly
defended the quest for human rights. Advocates of humanitarian interventionism
argued that the United States must use all means available, military and
diplomatic, to maximize interests and values. And force need not be the first
or only instrument of policy.
But in the end the humanitarian interventionists encouraged
bombing Serbia, intervening in a civil war in Libya, funding rebels
perpetuating war in Syria, expanding military training and a U.S. presence in
Africa, and funding opposition elements against the government in Venezuela. In
addition, with advice from humanitarian interventionists, the United States
increased the use of drones to target enemies of U.S. interests in East Asia,
the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East.
Neoconservatives and humanitarian interventionists (and in
earlier times anti-communists) have led the charge for war-making in the United
States since World War II. Between the end of the war and the 1990s, 10 million
people died in wars in which the United States had a presence. Hundreds of
thousands of young men and women serving in the armed forces of the United
States have died or been permanently scarred by U.S. wars. And the physical
landscape of Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, Central America, and the Middle
East has been devastated by war. And in the United States, foreign policy
elites, politicians, and think tank experts still advocate violence to address
international problems.
Therefore, in the context of a huge arms industry and global
economic and political interests, any presidential initiative that uses
diplomacy rather than force, declares its opposition to unilateral action, and
challenges the war mindset deserves the support of the peace movement. Given
the long and painful United States war system, the battle to secure the
agreement between the P5 plus 1 nuclear agreement with Iran is worthy of
support.
