Sunday, October 4, 2015

A failed foreign policy

RtO spends a lot of time making fun of rightwingers, because they are evil, stupid and harmful to our polity. But the left or liberals have their failures as well.

They are just not as funny.

It is true that President Obama's foreign policy has failed, at least where he has tried to use military force. He has had numerous successes in the political sphere.

Part of his failure results from having an incompetent military. He inherited that but he hasn't tried to fix it.

But a big part has been his misunderstanding of the situation. RtO has consistently called him out on this, starting in 2009 and continuing off and on since. I have concentrated on asking for support for a free and independent Great Kurdistan.

This is not because Kurdistan is the most pressing issue of international politics but because it is the most clearly justified. If America stands for democracy and self-determination -- it hasn't since 1945 but it did once, sort of -- then freedom for the largest ethnic, historical, linguistic population without a nation of its own ought to be a self-evident policy.

If we cannot understand that, how can we expect ourselves to understand more complicated situations?

The Kurds have acted to the limits of their military capacity to set up a homeland. From the New York Times story cited above, it looks as if the Iraqi Shia are prepared to accept that:

The reality is that Iraq’s Shiite majority seems to be settling in to a divided Iraq and increasingly questioning whether it is worth shedding Shiite blood in areas like Anbar Province or Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which the Islamic State captured in June 2014.

Waving the white flag at the new caliphate is a stupid position to take, and the Shia will come to regret that; but no one can say the Iraqi Shia have ever demonstrated any political sense. However, a recognition that the artificial borders of Iraq are not worth preserving and that something like a return to the three provinces of the Ottoman era could be made to work is something.

To make a Great Kurdistan, four old states will have to be broken up. Two already have been: Iraq and Syria.

In Syria, as in Iraq, Obama seems devoted to preservation of borders that go back only a century or so and were drawn to suit European empires, not the people who live there. Obama is no wiser than Kissinger in this respect.

Certainly, the questions call for skillful manipulation, and it can hardly be true that every trouble spot will be best served with a cookie-cutter response. The United States is on firm ground in supporting the independence of Ukraine, but it was silly to balk at the defection/seizure of Crimea, never historically Little Russian and only written into the borders of a fake "autonomous" republic of Ukraine as a result of cynical imperial maneuvering in the 1950s.

Foreign ministries almost always favor stable borders. It makes their life easier, at least so they think. Obama appears to have deferred to the Foggy Bottom bureaucracy too much, and neither of his secretaries of state has shown any vision or understanding of the aspirations of foreigners.

It cannot be a surprise that people will not willingly die for antidemocratic, antisocial, kleptocratic regimes. They won't always decide to die to get rid of them, but they will never choose to die for them.

 

10 comments:

  1. It is true that President Obama's foreign policy has failed, at least where he has tried to use military force. He has had numerous successes in the political sphere.

    Can you name one?

    (I'll spot you the TPP.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Part of his failure results from having an incompetent military.

    Yet another example of why you need to rename your blog to Ranting the Odious.

    You have no earthly idea what you are talking about.

    I have concentrated on asking for support for a free and independent Great Kurdistan.

    Politics is the art of the possible.

    ReplyDelete
  3. 'Politics is the art of the possible.'

    Maybe somebody should have told that to G. Bush before he invaded Iraq. And besides, I don't think a free Kurdistan is impossible.

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  4. And besides, I don't think a free Kurdistan is impossible.

    Well, let's all bow down to His Harryness, then.

    I rather suspect Turkey disagrees.

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  5. We know it does. Iran too. But then so did Iraq and Syria ad were are they now?

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  6. Who the heck knows what the future holds. But at the moment, and all the moments prior, your advocacy has been so empty as to leave a hard vacuum envious.

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  7. Yeah, right. And defending the integrity of Iraq has proven so successful.

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  8. Nothing was not an option -- which is what you have been advocating.

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  9. What I advocated was redrawing the borders in southwest Asia to reflect something better tan colonial convenience.

    It would have been an interesting exercise to have worked patiently to encourage plebiscites. Perhaps some boundaries coud have been altered peacefully. It has happened before.

    You keep asserting that nothing was not an option, but if the only other option was starting and losing a war and killing millions of people, then nothing was the better of two possibilities.

    Feel free to list all the benefits from Bush's policy.

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  10. What I advocated was redrawing the borders in southwest Asia to reflect something better tan colonial convenience.

    It would have been an interesting exercise to have worked patiently to encourage plebiscites. Perhaps some boundaries coud have been altered peacefully. It has happened before.


    And I advocate pastel unicorns showering peace sparkles over Southwest Asia.

    Why not? It's no further from reality than you are.

    You keep asserting that nothing was not an option ...

    Nothing not only was not an option, nothing doesn't exist.

    You have taken the brave intellectual position of defending a null.

    ReplyDelete