La superpotencia “líder” actúa como un aprendiz de brujo
Con agudeza, este breve artículo de Stephan Richter ofrece algunas pistas
para entender mejor los actuales dilemas y vicisitudes de la política exterior
estadounidense.
R. Yepe
----------------------------
The five deadly sins of US foreign policy
Is the US starting to resemble the Middle
East?
Last updated: 22 Aug 2014 15:30
Stephan Richter is the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Globalist,
the daily online magazine, and a columnist in newspapers around the world.
It is never a good thing if the leading world
power acts like the sorcerer's apprentice. That is all the more troubling if
that power - the United States - is now almost three quarters of a century into
the job of leading the world. And yet, here we are.
Sin #1:
Attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder
The events in Iraq and the wider Middle East
make it plain that the US
is incapable of handling all the elemental forces that it has awakened.
Worse, US foreign policy in the region is breathless at
best. It can only be
understood as an endless series of obsessions over the latest issue du jour.
Factors totally unheard of
even a couple of weeks before suddenly claim the front-page. The
Yazidis' plight, tragic though it undoubtedly is, is only the latest example in
a long chain of events.
While Americans fancy themselves
Hercules-like, single-handedly holding up the entire world, in actuality they
suffer from ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
The
deadly sin of US foreign policy that this points to is that it is
impulse-driven and event-driven. Under such
circumstances, no nation can travel along a rational course or pursue a policy
credible to even its own allies.
The US
media, especially television media, act as a multiplier of disastrous force in that regard. They monomaniacally seize the
"next" topic or angle with which to titillate the fearful American
masses. From the media's perspective, this effort is doubly legitimised:
Firstly as part of the desperate ratings game. And secondly as an effort to
give the viewers "what they want".
That such breathlessness does not lead to
deeper insight into a more rational policy is self-evident. Regardless, it seriously undermines a rational process of US foreign
policy making.
Sin #2: Money - Not a good predictor of outcomes
As President Barack Obama recently confessed,
even he - the commander-in-chief - was surprised by the rapidness with which
Islamic State group seized Iraq. That, though, is not his deficiency - nor is
it a lack of resources. The
US intelligence apparatus, measured purely in budgetary terms, is by far the
costliest in human history.
Unfortunately,
that does not mean that it is the most effective or most insightful. If
anything, staffing levels and budget volumes are inversely proportional to
quality and outcomes.
In
fact, at times, one has to wonder whether the real purpose of US foreign policy
isn't to enrich all the vast legions that serve as consultants and service
providers to the US government, military, and "homeland" security bureaucracies. This despicable trend has certainly built
many a townhouse in Washington's leafy suburbs.
Sin #3:
Who's toppling the
dominoes now?
How about the third deadly sin of US foreign
policy? It is practising
yourself what you have long accused others of doing.
To comprehend the full irony - and yes, the
disastrous path that US foreign policy has travelled in the Middle East - it is
important to recall the domino theory. From the 1950s onward, successive US
administrations employed this idea to justify the need for US intervention
around the world during the Cold War.
In its newer iteration, under George W Bush,
the official explanation for marauding around the Middle East was that it was
done in the name of promoting freedom and democracy. Of course, that was the
quite contrary to what the US had practised before then in its friendly
dealings with virtually every regime in the region (and even now as the US is
dependent on Saudi Arabia).
Today,
we live in a reverse domino world. It is decidedly not the spectre of communism
that is letting regimes topple. Rather, it is the reckless machinations of US
foreign policy that is a key factor. The invasion of
Iraq is American-made, and not a creation of Vladimir Putin's. It is also the
key element, the initial domino if you will, that unbalanced the entire Middle
East.
Sin #4: Strategy = tactics?
To make
matters worse, there is method to the madness. This concerns the fourth deadly sin of US
foreign policy. I still vividly remember the days when I arrived in Washington
to study foreign policy at Georgetown University's venerable School of Foreign
Service.
A new arrival from Europe, I was thoroughly confused
by my American graduate school classmates' liberal, interchangeable usage of
the terms "tactical" and "strategic". When asked where the
difference was between the two terms, they responded there was a big
difference: "Tactical was everything, say, until six weeks - and strategic
everything beyond that."
I should have known back then that this would
spell trouble down the road, all the more so, as the school's graduates were
destined for the US Foreign Service and intelligence agencies.
Sin #5: A negative sum game
You can
only understand the true purpose of US foreign policy, if you see all these
theatres as opportunities to conduct legal, and preferably prosecutorial,
spectacles.
Politics
in the US is becoming ever more vicious and mutually recriminating.
The
overall point in these battles, you see, is not to come up with a solid policy,
or any form of consensus. No, given the fact that lawyers
account for what is, by far, the largest contingent of members of Congress, everything is turned into a trial.
It is about raising charges and attacking, with very loose rules for presenting
evidence of any kind.
That
such viciousness is ultimately self-destructive escapes the attention of these
representatives.
Unfortunately, they are representative of the American people in one
regard: rather than endeavouring to have
any shared experiences or creating any kind of consensus, ever more of them are living in their
own realities - among those who share their opinions and, yes, their hatreds.
For
some, especially Republicans, it is more important to blame Barack Obama than
to get a grip on the Middle East. In that scorched earth endeavour, they are remaking the US ever more in the realities of
the Middle East.
Now, that is a surprising sort of convergence.
The US, so claimed President Bush et al., was there to lift down-trodden Middle
Eastern countries out of their division and self-destructiveness.
As things stand now, the reverse has occurred:
Politics in the US is
becoming ever more vicious and mutually recriminating. In that sense, it is the
US that has become more like the Middle East.
Who would have expected that? Maybe it was
that sense of extreme divisiveness at home that attracted the sorcerer's
apprentice to get himself ever more deeply involved in the Middle East.
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