[Peace-discuss] Parties to the right of the public

[C. G. Estabrook]

	American Public Still Ahead Of Its Leaders on Foreign Policy
	By Mark Weisbrot

This column was published by The Guardian Unlimited on August 27, 2009. If 
anyone wants to reprint it, please include a link to the original.
Americans are famous for not paying much attention to the rest of the world, and 
it is often said that foreign wars are the way that we learn geography. But most 
often it is not the people who have little direct experience outside their own 
country that are the problem, but rather the experts.

The latest polling data is making this clear once again, as a majority of 
Americans now oppose the war in Afghanistan, but the Obama Administration is 
escalating the war and his military commanders are asking for even more troops 
than the increase to 68,000 that the Administration is planning by the end of 
this year.

This gap between the average American and the foreign policy elite has been 
around since the Vietnam War and long before. The gap is also large between 
Democratic voters, three-quarters of whom oppose the war in Afghanistan, and the 
politicians and think tanks that represent them in the political arena. A few 
decades ago there was a real voting base of "Cold War" liberals - people who 
were progressive on social and economic issues but right wing on foreign policy. 
That base has largely disappeared. Yet amazingly, the foreign policy 
establishment - including most of the media - has managed to maintain this 
political tendency as a very influential force.

The gap between the public and the foreign policy elite is not due to the 
ignorance of the masses, as the elite would have it, but primarily to a 
different set of interests and values. Very few foreign policy decision-makers 
-just a handful of Members of Congress, for example -- have sons or daughters 
who actually fight in the wars that they decide are "wars of necessity." The tax 
burden for these wars is more affordable for most foreign policy experts than it 
is for an American with median earnings. And perhaps most importantly, the 
average American doesn't have the same interest in trying to have the U.S. rule 
the world.

For the foreign policy elite, the importance of running the world - as much as 
it is possible - is taken as given. Walter Russell Mead is a Senior Fellow at 
the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), one of the most influential foreign 
policy organizations in the United States. He represents the more liberal end of 
the political spectrum at the CFR. In a recent interview with The Brazilian 
Economy, he argued that all countries must accept what he called "the 
Anglo-American system." For him, the lessons of history show that there is no 
alternative: "To me, there is one clear lesson: by joining the [Anglo-American] 
system and becoming part of it, you can achieve far greater results, whether 
measured by international power, state security, or the prosperity of your 
people. You actually do much better by co-operating than resisting."

While one can argue that Europe and Japan have done reasonably well as 
subordinate partners to the United States in the post-World-War II era, the same 
cannot be said for the majority of countries in the world. This is especially 
true in the years since 1980, which have seen a sharp slowdown in economic 
growth, and reduced progress in social indicators such as life expectancy and 
infant mortality, in the vast majority of low-and-middle-income countries. The 
biggest exception is China - which succeeded by rejecting the "Anglo-American" 
policy prescriptions and opted for state control of their banking system, 
foreign exchange, foreign capital flows, and a host of other important economic 
decisions. China also remained outside the World Trade Organization (WTO) until 
2001, when they were economically strong enough to take advantage of it. 
Resistance, it seems, is not always futile.

Foreign economic policy is even more removed from public input than foreign 
policy in general, with unaccountable institutions such as the International 
Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and WTO making decisions that affect the lives 
and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people. It is this one-step-further 
removal from public accountability - there are no voters that these institutions 
have to answer to - that makes them so attractive to the elite in rich 
countries. In the current economic downturn, the IMF can use taxpayer dollars to 
bail out Western European banks who made imprudent loans in Eastern Europe, 
something that the contributing governments might not be able to get away with 
politically if it were done directly.

Policies that primarily cause harm in other countries, such as the failed 
macroeconomic and development policies that the IMF, World Bank, and WTO have 
pressured other countries to adopt, would not get support from the public as 
they do from the elite. The average American has a moral sense that seems 
lacking in policy discussions here in Washington, where it is the custom to 
appear amoral, almost like an insect. In 2006, when television newscasts were 
showing regular footage of Iraqis killed and maimed by explosions, Americans 
were horrified and opposition to the war increased substantially. It is only by 
keeping the ugly reality of our foreign occupations away from the public that 
our government can even get enough support to keep funding them.

Conversely, where there are independent citizens' organizations that can exert 
influence, some of the crimes involved in U.S. foreign policy can be 
successfully challenged. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union waged a 
five-year battle that led to Attorney General Eric Holder's decision this week 
to appoint a special prosecutor to look into some of the instances of torture 
and abuse of prisoners by the CIA.

But the powerful and rigid institutional arrangements of our foreign policy 
establishment, the sloth and weakness among the intelligentsia, as well as the 
corruption from the interests of military contractors, makes it an uphill battle 
for common sense to prevail.  It is not that the American people are so backward 
and ignorant, or bellicose;  rather the main problem is that the public has so 
little input into foreign policy decisions. That is what must change if we are 
to get away from the prospect of never-ending wars and conflicts, and from a 
foreign policy that continues to be one of the greatest obstacles to social and 
economic progress in the world.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/aug/25/us-foreign-policy-public-opinion