Tag Archives: foreign policy

Eric Holder and Gun Running

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Is he making it up as he goes along, or are these further examples of our Attorney General’s incompetence, or is it something else?

Last spring, Attorney General Eric Holder could have apologized, or otherwise acknowledged his responsibility as head of the DoJ for Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s death, to Terry’s mother when they crossed paths at the May Police Week in D.C., but he did not.

Last Tuesday (8 November), during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Holder flatly refused to apologize to the Terrys, and more amazingly, he further testified that he hadn’t even bothered to speak with them.  When pressed by Senator Cornyn (R, TX), all Holder would offer was weasel words and “regrets.”

Now, through Politico, Holder reveals a letter characterized as “private” that he wrote to the Terrys wherein he does express his sorrow over their son’s death.  There are two things of interest with this revelation.  One is Holder’s decision to publicize the letter even before the Terrys had received it.  So much for the “private” nature of the communication.  The other is that the letter is dated last Wednesday (9 November)—the day after Senator Cornyn’s questioning.  Is the letter at all sincere?

It’s also interesting that, although Holder’s letter references a letter the Terrys had written Holder on 1 November (in which they wrote, among other things, “We have been irrevocably harmed because of Operation Fast and Furious and its deadly ramifications. We seek accountability from our government….”), the DoJ insists that Holder did not receive that letter until after the hearings mentioned above.  For Holder to get out a letter to the Terrys by the day after those same hearings represents an astonishingly fast turn-around for any government bureaucracy, much less Holder’s, whose junior bureaucrats routinely screen his correspondence and determine for themselves what is fit for him to read.

In the meantime, Holder is continuing actively to obstruct a government investigation, as he refuses to present 11 witnesses whom the House Oversight Committee have called in order to interview them about his “Fast and Furious” gun running operation.  I have to wonder why Holder is so anxious to prevent independent investigators from learning the details of his failed operation.  Is it because Holder’s own IG is investigating?  Nah—the two investigations have no need of interfering with each other as they pursue their independent looks.  Police forces do this all the time.  Surely two Federal government investigations can do the same.

On top of all this, Holder, as recently as that Judiciary Committee hearing three days ago, still is insisting that

It’s [Operation Fast and Furious] a federal law enforcement operation that was of local concern. It was not a national operation.

Hmm….  Operation Fast and Furious was designed to allow guns to leave the United States and enter Mexico.  How is an international operation only of “local concern?”  How is an international operation “not a national operation?”

What’s up with this guy?  Why does Obama insist on keeping him on the Federal payroll?

America’s Future—Foreign Policy Principles, Part I

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In the next few posts on America’s future, I’ll explore what our foreign policy should entail if we’re to have a successful future as a nation.  In order to identify that policy, though, it’s necessary to understand our purpose, and what our principles are, in the conduct of our foreign policy.  Accordingly, in this post and the next, I’ll talk about our necessary foreign policy principles.  In a later post, I’ll discuss what a foreign policy structure might be that would make our efforts more efficient and more effective in satisfying these principles.  Note that this will not be a restructuring of our Department of State, but of the principles that State should satisfy.

The purpose of our government is to protect our individual, inalienable rights; the purpose of our foreign policy must be to support that on the global stage.  Thus, our primary foreign policy principles must be those things that, if satisfied, serve that purpose and thereby enhance our government’s ability to satisfy its domestic purpose.  These foreign policy principles, then, will be those things that address foreign impediments to our government’s purpose while those impediments are small and overseas, and so neutralize them before they become problems for us at home.

What are these principles that are the extra-domestic support of our government’s purpose?  The overriding principle must be a focus on doing what is in our own national interest and not simply what will enhance our popularity.  (I don’t set aside popularity altogether; that can be narrowly useful in short-term situations, but it can only be useful in this fashion.)  Within this there are three principles that give substance to our national interest: protection of American citizens while they are abroad, assured access to the resources we need for our economy, and support for our friends and our allies.  (Notice that these also have military implications; I’ll address the military aspects of these goals in a post on our necessary future military policy.)

There are a number of reasons, both practical and moral, why our own national interest must come ahead of all else in our foreign policy.  The practical reasons include these.  As noted above, the purpose of our government is to protect our inalienable rights—this is why we formed our social compact those 200 and more years ago.  Wealthy as we are, we have only finite resources, and we must see first to our own welfare with those resources before we can see to any others’ welfare.

Secondly, we must operate our foreign policy from an “enlightened selfishness” perspective.  If we are not as strong as we might be, if our citizens are not as safe as they need to be, if our economy does not have access to the resources we need, then our ability to support our friends and allies, even our ability simply to help other nations, other peoples, will be impaired, perhaps to the point we are unable to provide any support at all.  The depth of another nation’s need has no impact on our capacity to help satisfy that need.

Finally, related to this, is the fact that we simply cannot afford to help others if the damage to ourselves from the assistance is greater than the gains from providing that aid.  An extreme example of this comes from WWII.  Our materiel aid to the Soviet Union and to Great Britain sorely tried our industrial output and our ability to equip our own military forces, both in preparation for the coming fight, and in its prosecution.  Yet helping these two, one an ally and one a friend, were critical to the combined effort of destroying NAZI Germany in Europe.  On the other hand, providing monetary assistance to a bankrupt nation that shows no capacity for learning the lessons of its bankruptcy, and doing so in a time of our own economic crisis, will harm us far more than it will aid that nation—and so we must not provide that assistance.

There are moral reasons for seeing to our own national interest first.  One is that it is our duty, as it is the first duty of all nations, to satisfy our own interests first so as to not become a burden on other nations by shifting the necessity of satisfying our needs onto them.

Secondly, this helps prevent our hand up aid from being transformed into a handout, thereby shifting the receiving nation into dependency on us rather than leaving them responsible and capable in their own right.   As German Chancellor Angela Merkel noted a year ago as the present Greek crisis was becoming fully developed, the other EU member states would not make as much of an effort (in helping Greece or themselves), nor would Greece make as much of an effort on its own behalf, if Germany proved too generous.  Making other nations dependent on us does not support their moral health or ours.

The failure from losing this moral aspect is illustrated by these examples.  Fifty years of dependence on the American military umbrella left Europe completely unable to deal with the mayhem in the Balkan states that followed President Josip Broz Tito’s death and Yugoslavia’s subsequent dissolution.  We had to apply American airpower so that the scant European troops could have the protection they needed in order to impose a semblance of peace on the region.  The situation had gotten little better 20 years later in Europe’s attempt to support the rebels in Libya.  After less than two months of a low key air “campaign,” the European air forces began dropping American ordnance—they’d run out of their own.  And we had to supply almost all of the air surveillance, command and control, and air refueling assets: the Europe nations, still dependent on us, had too little of their own military assets.

In a later post I’ll talk about the foreign policy principle of supporting our friends and allies.  This principle not only is important in its own right, it also facilitates the remaining two principles.  For that reason, I’ll spend that later post on this principle, and I’ll talk about the remaining two principles after that.

America’s Future

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This isn’t as apocalyptic as it might sound; on the contrary, this is the first in an occasional series I’ll be writing on our foreign and defense policies, with the latter being approached both in its own right and as an arm of our foreign policy.

In this post, I intend to outline what I believe is the environment for these policies as we move through the 21st century.  Another post will address the framework of our foreign and defense policies, and future posts will look at necessary structures for each, actions for and by each, and how events of the day might be handled by the new policy(s).

The present and future periods seem sufficiently different from the period ending in the mid-20th century that such a rethinking and reformulation, central as foreign and defense matters are to our existence as a nation, seems in order.  Many of the seeds of these differences, certainly, were sewn in the latter half of the 20th century, a period dominated by the Cold War and by the ready view of combat in progress in the Vietnam War, which was carried out within that Cold War.

This Cold War period was characterized by political maneuvers that would have made Metternich blush, and by military confrontations that seemed on the surface to threaten the century’s third total war, but that were, in fact, proxy confrontations wherein both sides used small surrogates to do the fighting.  Here was a use of foreign policy as a means of outright conflict, and this use represented the beginnings of a diffusion of physical conflict across a more amorphous set of actors than had been the formally structured nation-states that had dominated war for the preceding two or more centuries.

The environment within which international interactions are carried out has changed radically, including through large extensions from those earlier beginnings.  We operate in the 21st century in a media age where the events of the day, wherever on the planet they may occur, become available for viewing, commenting, prognosticating in near real time anywhere else on the planet.  We can see the results of an earthquake near Indonesia, or of an earthquake and tsunami in Japan, or of a failure to pay an international oil bill in the Ukraine, within hours, if not minutes, of their occurrence on our televisions, on our telephones, via the Internet, through nearly any visual and/or audio medium modern technology can provide a consumer.

We operate in the 21st century in a communications age that brings news of the event, or conversations with our friends and neighbors and strangers, to us nearly instantaneously via dinky little cell phones, that same Internet, video and still cameras—portable enough to be standard equipment in those cell phones—and bring us that news and those conversations from wherever our friends and neighbors might be, including half a planet away, and wherever we might be.

And we live in a 21st century where the major actors are not limited to formal nation-states.  These actors include international corporations with operating budgets larger than many of those nation-states.  These actors include less formally or classically organized entities which do great ill—terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda.  These entities also often have budgets larger than some nation-states, and they have military establishments that are the envy of many nation-states.  It is the threat from these, the terror organizations, of which al-Qaeda is only the most well-known, that must inform our policy formation, for the point of foreign and defense policy is the survival of the nation.

To be sure, the prosperity of the nation also is a major purpose of foreign policy, but without survival, there is nothing.

In this new set of conditions, the old, formal arrangements are not optimal.  NATO has lost its designed foes—both the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact no longer exist—and it has gained no other purpose; although this defensive alliance has been used, clumsily, to project political and military power offensively.  The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have descended into piggy banks for the profligate.  And so on.

Cropping up is an ad hoc arrangement of free trade areas, each of whose individual purpose seems as much to be to compete politically with other areas, both free trade and not, as to provide mutual economic benefit to the particular members.

We have a fractious, nonhomogeneous Europe trying to force itself, Procrustean-like, into a single coherent whole, of several layers: a Union of European nations loosely subordinating a poorly understood level of national sovereignty to a European “government;” a subset of that attempting to bind economies that operate from radically different moral and political imperatives to a single common currency; and a growing division among Mediterranean Europe, northern Europe, and eastern Europe.

We have a Russian Federation, perhaps in a demographically-driven last hurrah, that is attempting to reform the earlier Soviet empire, this time with a different arrangement of how Russia will rule from its geographically broad and vulnerable center.

We have a People’s Republic of China that perceives a political vacuum developing in Asia and the Pacific and so is rapidly expanding its military capabilities, and sopping up resources like oil and iron, in an attempt to fill that vacuum.

And we have a world that, on the one hand, demands that we spend our treasure and our blood in attempting a semblance of peace in the Balkans when Europe effectively refuses their moral duty in their back yard, and on the other hand that vilifies us for supporting an ally against threats to its very existence.  We have a world that lectures us on our proper economic or moral comportment.  The list goes on.

Accordingly, our policy principles must be informed by the following necessary underlying mindset.  Following George Washington’s advice, in spirit if not literally, we must be chary of entering into formal alliances too quickly.  In this light, we must review our existing alliances for their suitability to our national interests.  Further, we must make plain that our friends know who they are and that they have nothing to fear.  We will stand with them steadfastly through all of their—and our—trials.  We must also make plain that our enemies know who they are and that they have everything to fear; their existence is at risk.  They have complete control, though, over their status as our enemy.  Finally, we must make plain that those who sit on the sidelines and “comment” on American actions here or there, or in this or that milieu, are demonstrating their level of integrity and courage by standing on the sidelines.  Their words are unimportant, and we do not hear them.

We must also recover our recognition that the United States is an exceptional nation and our understanding that our 18th century liberal/modern conservative values of individual responsibility, individual liberty, entrepreneurship are what made us great.  Other nations, other peoples will benefit from these values, also, regardless of the form these might take when tailored to the specific polity involved.  Thus, it not only is in our interest to talk about these values in all areas of the world, it is in those areas’ interest to hear them.  And a more prosperous, freer world is in both our interests.

Within that, it is in our interest, also, simply to provide aid to nations and peoples that need help.  We need no consensus, we need no permission of consensus, to do this, our duty.  Americans are the most generous people on Earth, and that innate generosity works to our, as well as the recipients’, advantage.  For example, after the 2004 tsunami struck Indonesia and killed 185,000 around the Indian Ocean, American aid, delivered by our Navy’s hospital ships, with our Navy’s aircraft carriers providing critical helicopter transportation and supply in support of relief efforts, Indonesian economic and physical recovery were both made possible and accelerated.  And the Indonesian people altered their opinion of us—in the middle of our war against terrorism that, by its nature, mainly involves groups claiming to be Muslim.  Beyond that, our aid cut the Indonesians’ favorable opinion of Osama bin Laden by 60%.  Similarly, our aid to Pakistan after a 2005 earthquake in Kashmir had killed 80,000 helped Pakistan recover far more rapidly than would have been possible otherwise, and it altered the Pakistanis’ opinion of us almost as radically.  And today there is a measure of peace, if not necessarily of complete justice, in the Balkans because we acted.

In subsequent posts, I’ll expand on the impact these issues should have on our foreign and defense policies.