George Freidman has argued that America has had a consistent
foreign policy wired into its DNA at least since the Monroe Doctrine in 1823,
even if American politicians weren’t always aware of it. That policy is not
unlike the policy Britain followed, successfully, for hundreds of years – keep
a balance of power across the world so that no single power coalesces that can
challenge American hegemony. Around that
central policy other subsidiary policies have appeared and disappeared; such as
“Manifest Destiny” to justify expanding across the entire continent, “Wilsonian
Democracy”, Woodrow Wilson’s rather naïve view that we could get everyone to
live peacefully together, and more recently the naïve neocon belief in
spreading American-style democracy across ancient tribal lands at the point of
a gun. But underneath these ephemeral fads the core policy has remained
unchanged. It seems to me history supports that analysis.
One of the advantages of being such a wealthy and powerful
nation is that we can afford to make really dumb mistakes - mistakes which
might destroy a smaller nation – and it doesn’t destroy us. The American
debacles in Vietnam, and more recently our fruitless adventures in the Middle
East, demonstrate this.
So what is there to say about American foreign policy? We
have had periods when we seemed to do the right things. We managed the Cold War
through a policy of alliances and containment, and it succeeded, in the sense
that we did not have a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, nor did the Soviet
Union invade and conquer Western Europe. And indeed we had about a 70 year
period of unusual peace (for the most part) throughout the world. On the other
hand, in more recent years the Washington foreign policy establishment has been
in the grip of neocons who were eager to throw America’s weight around and
interfere in the affairs of other nations, mostly with disastrous results. Now
the Trump administration, with its “America first” attitude, is in the process
of cleaning that cabal out (to the vociferous dismay of many of its political
and media supporters), but we don’t yet know what will replace it.
There are certainly worrisome signs. The appalling ignorance
of history, civics, geography, science and basic economics of the American
voters is only matched by the even more appalling ignorance in these same
fields of our supposedly better-educated political class. There has clearly
been a massive failure of the American educational system over the past few
generations. For example, the current appeal of serious socialism to the
Millennial set, despite the dismal history of socialist systems throughout the
world, is an example of our national blindness to history or evidence. Are we
perhaps going to have to live through George Santayana’s famous dictum: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
And there is the endemic problem of the ballooning national
debt, and of both political parties addiction to deficit budgets to pay for
popular vote-getting social programs. We have gotten away with this thus far
because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, so we have a bit more
leeway with debt than other nations. But there is a limit, and it is a lesson
of history that great empires are as often as not brought down by
over-extending themselves to the point of financial ruin.
And finally there is the creeping corruption of corporate
power and wealth in American politics and government. It is no secret that growing corporate power
and corporate wealth has suborned many of the government agencies and political
processes that are supposed to protect us and protect our rights. When a company like Monsanto, using its
leverage with government agencies, can force out of business almost all of its
competitors in the soybean seed business, one ought to begin to worry. When
pharmaceutical companies, using their campaign donations to pressure
politicians, can prevent Medicare from negotiating competitive drug prices for
Medicare patients, something is amiss.
One or more of these problems may eventually bring an end to
American global hegemony, but the sheer dumb luck of being a large nation
protected by oceans and weak neighbors, amply endowed with resources, with the
most productive agricultural land in the world, will probably keep us on top
for another century at least, despite our inevitable political and diplomatic
blunders.
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