Strong, Wise, and Good

This week super-smart General Patraeus has told Congress we need to keep up our efforts in Iraq. But over 60% of Americans say we need a timetable for a pullout (USA Today). Everyone seems confused. We seemed to have lost our “mojo”. We’ve degenerated from confidence to uncertainty. It’s time to find our way. It’s time to form a real foreign policy that will help create a future world we want our children to live in.

It’s a tragedy that our nation has wasted its leadership capital since we became the world’s only super power in 1989. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, we had defined our role in the world as the good warrior who opposed demon communism. Once we won that war, we lost our strategic compass and often behaved as a confused giant. Well, the world’s changed a lot in the past six years, mostly for the worse. Civil strife, genocides, pestilence, and poverty pummel Africa. The Middle East is violent and chaotic. Nuclear Pakistan is a staying area for Islamic fundamentalists. China has the largest army in the world and nuclear missiles capable of targeting any Starbuck’s in Western North America. Meanwhile, our armies are weary and our defense budget overdrawn. Our greatest enemies are not nations but quasi-religious groups and international gangsters who want to destroy both our peace and way of life. Other than that, everything’s dandy.

It’s time for more than a new set of tactics. It’s time for a major change in foreign policy strategy that is both grounded in values and anchored by common sense that can be our overarching theme for future decades.

In an effort to kick-start new thinking, I wonder if we might adopt a foreign policy that is strong, wise, and good.

This is a foreign policy that first focuses on self-defense with a clear definition of what “self” means. Our foreign policy should seek our well-being and safety, while making us invulnerable to the unilateral actions of untrustworthy tyrants. Our oil based economy and addiction to cheap labor have tied our national interest to unpredictable behavior of both the Middle and the Far East. This is not wise. It weakens us daily.

Second, we ought to be leaders of international legal legitimacy. We must have the moral authority to spread a civilized international rule of law we love to tout but appear to treat superficially whenever we just want to act tough. We’ve spent decades establishing broad agreement about what’s legally acceptable behavior for world leaders and their armies and now is not the time to abandon that effort into a geo-political every-man-for-himself free-for-all.

Third, we must put great effort in minimizing violence. Unfortunately there are times when force is necessary. Those times are far fewer than most of us rationalize. But without the strength of arms and a wise willingness to use them, the world will be run by despots and tyrants. That said, open democracies will not sustain wars that have ambiguous aims or are incompetently waged. This is not due to lack of patriotism but rather because of it. War is a blunt instrument with unimaginable unintended consequences. And often the threat of violence is more powerful than its exercise. Increasingly, violence is non-strategic except in the most obvious and extreme circumstances. Perhaps most importantly we need to focus on stopping the spread of war weapons, everything from weapons of mass destruction to AK47s. The terror achieved with automatic weapons and shouldered missiles are enough to bring a society to its knees. There will always be sociopathic villains. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Atilla will always be with us. We must, for our children’s sake, do more than we have to limit the weapons at their disposal.

And fourth, we need to emphasize on our humanitarianism. The Tsunami relief effort created more good will in Muslim Indonesia than diplomatic maneuvers ever could. The world agreed long ago what true humanitarianism is. It’s found in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. A declaration we had a major hand in authoring. These are the rights human civilization must foster for the whole world to thrive. They are necessary to create hope and tolerance among the hopeless and hateful.

This fourth dimension of foreign policy is vital to our future because right now middle eastern oil money funded by our insatiable need for gasoline is being spent by the tens of millions to relieve poverty and insecurity of the world’s Muslim children. Islamic fundamentalist schools teach their growing generation that the U.S. version of civilization is corrupt and must be overthrown. The values of our Bill of Rights and individual self-determination are skewered on a sword of violence. And we are letting it happen.

Our battle is the oldest in the world. It is the battle for people’s minds. The battle to spread the point of view through which all decisions, personal and political, are made. We cannot win that war with guns or sanctions. We must win it because our ideas are more noble, more just, more meaningful. Of course we can establish schools, social programs and T.V. stations in troubled countries. But most of all we must lead by doing. We must be the first to exhibit the values we espouse to relieve suffering and provide opportunity. This is tough sledding. We cannot be naive. We cannot expect that our money or resources filtered through corrupt governments will achieve any good. Nevertheless, we must persist and invent new ways to systematically spread the collective wisdom of civilization so that some day, maybe a century from now, everyone in the world will have more to gain by peace than to lose by violence.

Strong, wise, and good: self-defense, legal legitimacy, minimize violence, emphasize humanitarianism. What do you think?

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