The USA will only succeed in achieving its best potential in international relations by cooperating with other key nations as co-designers of our plans for the future. The attempts to achieve positive outcomes by the different foreign policy movements, Foreign Policy Realists, Foreign Policy Liberals, Neo-Conservatives, etc, will all fail. Each movement assumes the USA can only act on its own, which makes it inevitable we will be working at cross purposes with our natural allies, and inevitable we will make bad decisions when we assume we are acting on their behalf, which is improbable because we have not sufficiently consulted with our allies as to what they believe is in their own best interest. The drawbacks of working in concert with selected nations are: They might betray us, they might have unsound goals and unsound methods, and we might be drawn into hostilities that we would be better off avoiding. I counter with this point: What we have been attempting is not effective, in that we have been acting alone, or as the superior among allies and demanding they comply with our strategies, so now we are challenged in three regions by powers that would have the entire world be different than what we and other freedom loving peoples deserve to live in, and we are too weakened by our foreign policy failures (the two sloppily prolonged wars) to meet their challenges.. Does the USA have its stains? Bloody stains, yes. Have we unleashed hateful racists with too much firepower in the homelands of other races and religions that our American racists detest? Sadly, yes. Has US foreign policy and wars been decided by Americans with conflicts of interest, such as ties to war related industries? Sinfully, yes. The VIPs in US politics and among foreign policy circles take too much credit for successes and too little blame for failures. They have yet to assess their own performances accurately, but they enthusiastically tear at the competing schools of foreign policy theory and members of those competing schools, but not their own schools. Reading their writings is like being back at high school, with cliques sniping at each other and flattering themselves. Thus I have no confidence we are being well cared for, nor will we be, by the VIPs of foreign policy. We need to put our heads together with people who have converging interests, and get to ideas that have escaped our own US foreign relations thinkers, and make plans for the future alongside the nations that have as much or more at stake as we do in making their nations free, secure, and prosperous. Its time to leave the schools behind and work in and with the world.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 06:22:34 +0000
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