WHERE SHOULD THE PEACE MOVEMENT STAND? IMPERIALISM, WAR, AND/OR DIPLOMACY
Originally posted August 2, 2015
Harry Targ
“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 Alan), 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.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is
deplorable and the issues between all contending parties are more intractable
today than the negotiations with Iran referred to above. However, Russia’s
engaging in violence and destruction, and the United States and NATO supplying
arms to Ukraine, can only lead to more death, hunger, and the danger of
escalation to nuclear war.
