Foreign Entanglements

Our nation’s first president warned in his farewell address, among other things, to avoid unnecessary foreign entanglements, advice that our current president would be well served to heed. Our last president, strong in resolve but sorely lacking in wisdom, as befits the anti-intellectual he portrayed himself to be, got us into two such entangling messes. The first one seemed reasonable enough at the time, go after the people who attacked us and prevent them from repeating the process. Perhaps had we kept after this mission, which had early success, we would have been able to accomplish what we set out to do. But we didn’t and we haven’t, and here we find ourselves closing in on a decade later and still clinging to the same rationale that gave us the impetus to invade Afghanistan in the first place despite evidence that seems to blatantly suggest that the original casus belli was flawed, and that our ability to carry out such a flawed strategy is suspect.

The notion that we can, with our military, keep our homeland secure from a terrorist attack by eliminating so-called safe havens is naïve and unrealistic. The world is a big place, and even if we could somehow create a stable centralized government in a place that hasn’t known such government control since antiquity, there are countless other swaths of anarchy across the globe where sworn enemies could migrate.

Furthermore, we have neither the will nor the ability to create such stability, and even if we did it still wouldn’t be a wise course of action. Liberals like to see the world as a place where if only a little tender love and care were applied then everything would just magically fall into place, and everyone would live in peace and harmony, happily ever after. Conservatives like to imagine that might makes right, and by the sheer strength of our military prowess we can remake the world in our image. If only it were that simple. We could bomb the bad guys into submission, convert the natives to Christianity and Western liberal political ideology, then pour in financial aid to build their societies into utopian gardens. We would be loved and respected and feared worldwide and we could all go back to feeling safe and secure in fortress America, full of paternal satisfaction.

It’s not that simple of course, but don’t try telling that to the majority of the public, who would rather believe the fairy tale version of foreign policy because it’s simpler and easier to grasp. And don’t try telling that to our political leaders, who would rather pander to people’s desire to feel that complex issues can be solved with minimal effort or sacrifice on their behalf. President Obama has come up with the brilliant plan, backed without dissent by his minions in the cabinet, that we can go in with some extra troops, train the Afghans to handle their own business, and be out within a couple of years. Sounds like a story I’ve heard before. Imagine FDR telling us on December 8, 1941 that we were going to fight the Nazis for a couple years and then pull out by the summer of ’43, by which time the French would be ready to handle things on their own and our boys could all come home.

Even if a military and nation-building strategy had even a remote chance of success, the cost alone is much too great given the return on the investment to our national interest such a mission would actually achieve. We are broke and are having to figure out how we are going to pay for basic social services here at home, states can’t fund education adequately, infrastructure is in disrepair, healthcare costs continue to put a drag on personal finances and the larger economy, the interest on our ever increasing deficit promises sooner or later to make the cost of borrowing, the lifeblood of our economy, more prohibitive. Amidst all of this, we are supposed to believe that we have the financial resources to put into rebuilding, or more appropriately building since you can’t rebuild something that never existed in the first place, a nation racked with poverty, illiteracy, and a culture that shows complete disregard for the fundamental rights of half of their population. Not to mention the situation in Iraq, which we would like to believe is miraculously all taken care of simply because our government and our media have conveniently forgotten about it, but which seems likely to explode into civil war and anarchy in the not so distant future, all while over 100,000 of our troops remained trapped there.

There comes a time when you must walk away from the table, cash in what few chips you have left, chalk up the losses and learn lessons to prevent the same thing from happening in the future. That time has come, and no amount of going all in with the hope of somehow salvaging a hopeless situation can change this reality. I realize that it won’t happen, our leadership doesn’t possess the wisdom and the courage to do so, and our electorate is as yet too immature to demand such measures. The only question that I have is how long it will take, how many more lives will be needlessly lost, how much more money will be wasted, before we grow up and figure it out. My hope is that we are close to a tipping point where the American public will say enough is enough, and our government will have no choice but to heed our demands. My fear is that we are still living in denial and that the realization of the error of our policy decisions won’t be realized until the situation reaches crisis proportions. My strong belief is that if we are waiting for our political leaders to guide us we are in for a long wait, and that our best hope of achieving a rational and realistic foreign policy won’t come from the so-called best and the brightest, but from the wisdom and common sense of ordinary citizens with the courage to see the world for what it is and demand policies that reflect that reality.