Gabriel Kolko on the foreign policy Big Picture

Gabriel Kolko established a reputation decades ago as a "Cold War revisionist". He's still writing about American foreign policy, and still in a very critical-minded vein. So far as I know, he's more of a "left" critic than otherwise, although he does post his columns at the neo-Confederate LewRockwell.com site. That doesn't mean he buys that group's whole package; they have antiwar columnists who don't agree with their far-right domestic ideology, or even their isolationist/unilaterialist foreign policy perspective.

Kolko has a new piece at Antiwar.com, Mechanistic Destruction: American Foreign Policy at Point Zero by Gabriel Kolko 08/10/07. Kolko offers a perspective that deserves attention. Although, like anything else, his columns need to be read with a critical eye.

For instance, his argument that the United States "has failed to attain victory in any of the real wars it has fought since Korea" caused me to do a double-take. In the Gulf War of 1991, the goal of the (then-real) anti-Iraq coalition was to push the Iraqi army out of Kuwait and restore Kuwaiti sovereignty to the status quo ante. And that was clearly achieved. It's certainly possible to argue that the Gulf War and the way it terminated created a high risk of future war. But you really have to stretch things to argue that the Gulf War did not "attain victory", since it achieved its primary goal of freeing Kuwait from Iraq occupation.

But his jeremiad on the state of American politics internal and external certainly resonates:

At the present time it is losing two wars and creating a vast arc of profound strategic and political instability from the Mediterranean Sea to South Asia, it has resumed the arms race in Europe, and it is making Russia an enemy when it could easily have been friendly. Economically, it has run up the biggest deficits in American history, brought on the decline of the dollar, and wherever one turns this administration has been at least as bad as any in two centuries of American history – perhaps even the worst. We now have an unprecedented disaster in the conduct of American power, both overseas and at home, in part because of the people who now rule – ambitious men and women who calculate only what is best for their careers – but also because the imperatives and inexorable logic of past policies and conventional wisdom have brought us to this critical juncture. All the old mistakes have been repeated; nothing had been learned from the past, and official myopia is timeless.

I wouldn't embrace the notion that the Cheney-Bush administration is composed of "ambitious men and women who calculate only what is best for their careers", though there is no shortage of examples of that kind of characters. Dick Cheney, for instance, certainly seems to have broader goals of demolishing the Constitution in favor of a monarchical Executive, of instituting torture as standard practice for Americans and making the Middle East safe for American oil corporations. So we can't say that's quite so narrow as calculating only what is best for his career. He has broader goals in mind.

The following point Kolko states in an abstract formulation. But it's a critical idea that's at the heart of American foreign policy and needs to be addressed seriously by the public, not just by our Serious Foreign Policy Experts:

A large part of the United States' problem, whether Republicans or Democrats are in power, is that it believes it has the right and obligation to intervene everywhere, in whatever forms they choose, and that its interests are global. Interventionism – so the consensus among Republicans and Democrats goes – is the cost of its global interests and mission, because it has been convinced for almost a century that it was preordained to remedy the world's many wrongs – and to do so by whatever means it chooses. There is nothing whatever that is unique in this regard in the present Bush Administration. This pretension, which first began during the 19th century and which Woodrow Wilson articulated, is simply not functional and it has led it into countless morasses, bad for the U.S. and far worse for the countries it has interfered with. The fact is that no nation has ever been able to assume such an international role, and those that have attempted to do so came to no good end – they exhausted their resources and passions and follies.

Unlike the isolationist-unilateralists, I don't think Woodrow Wilson is the bogeyman of US history. But there has been a real unwillingness by Congress, the public and Presidents of both parties to come to grips with the real costs of the expansive assumptions of American foreign policy.

As I wrote here, I was gobsmacked the other day when I saw a couple of Serious Foreign and Military Policy Thinkers refer to future situations like the Iraq War as "similar opportunities in the future".

But it's also true that if we continue to assume that the US has primary responsibility for establishing order and conformity to American standards of globalism all over the world, we will have "similar opportunities in the future". There are certainly various organized interests who are happy to see the US have such "opportunities". But are those the kind of opportunities that the American people really want? Would it be such a bad thing to leave such "opportunities" to other countries who may have the misfortune to be run by people of the caliber of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush?

Talk about factors like "technological imperatives" and war profiteering have not been much of a part of the foreign policy discourse among our Serious And Responsible Foreign Policy Experts. But both are a part of the reality of our foreign and military policies. There is a "if we build it, they will come" effect at work in acquiring military technology:

To a critical but scarcely exclusive sense, the Pentagon's penchant for military toys makes an ambitious, aggressive foreign policy essential. Without enemies and conflicts, real or potential, there is no reason to spend money, and this reality often colored its definition of Soviet goals after 1947 – despite the objections of senior CIA analysts. But the Defense Department, and national security establishments in general, are immense and all kinds of constituencies exist in them: there are procurement experts who draw up budgets and go after equipment mindlessly, people who have always dominated its actions, but thinkers too. Each does their own thing and they are often very different. It has always had these contradictions.

There is also a "whether They come or not, we'll make money from it" element:

But that those who run military establishment have technological illusions, which many ordinary people share in this and other domains of human existence, keeps immense sums of money flowing to arms manufacturers and their minions. There is a very profound consensus between the two parties on arms spending, which began under the Democrats a half-century ago and it will not go away – no matter how neglected the bridges and infrastructure, health, or the like. Arms lobbies are not only very powerful in Washington but create crucial jobs in most states and military spending keeps the economy afloat. Weapons producers make money regardless of whether the Pentagon wins or loses its wars – and making money is their only objective. It is surely a key causal factor even if it is far from being the sole explanation of why the U.S. intervenes where it shouldn't.

"War profiteering" should be neither an uncommon phrase nor an infrequent topic in respectable discussion. In other wars, including the Second World War, limits on war profits were imposed in the national interests. Arms manufacturers still made lots of money.

This is not an area where "free market" dogma should hold unrestrained sway. For one thing, it's an area that is particularly subject to creation of a market that didn't exist and doesn't even need to exist, through fear-mongering and Congressional lobbying. Pet rocks are one thing. Multi-billion-dollar Star Wars boondoggles are another. The former at worst will be just a waste; the latter can get lots of people killed.

Given Kolko's reputation as a maverick Cold War "revisionist", I found this particularly interesting:

Some of the most acute criticisms made of the gross simplisms [sic] which have guided interventionist policies were produced within the military, especially after the Vietnam experience traumatized it. My history of the Vietnam War was purchased by many base libraries, and the military journals treated it in detail and very respectfully. The statement at the end of July by the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael G. Mullen, that "no amount of troops in no amount of time will make much of a difference" if Iraqi politics fails to change drastically reflects a current of realism that has existed among military thinkers for some decades (whether he acts on this assumption is another matter and depends greatly on considerations outside of his control). Like the CIA, the military has acute strategic thinkers, and the monographs of the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute – to name one of many – are often very insightful and critical. Academics tend to be irrelevant and dull by comparison.

Readers of this blog, I'll modestly point out, are exposed fairly often to material from the Army's Strategic Studies Institute. In fact, the more analytical military sites are a resource that is very much under-used in the liberal blogosphere. The PR happy-face pages are something else altogether. But the serious military sites have some great stuff.

Kolko has some useful thoughts on the limits of the effects of rational and reality-based analysis in foreign policy, not least of which is personal ambition:

Those in power simply ignore the critical military's insights, and the vast bulk of officers obey orders. Many of them know better. They have learned the hard way – experience. Neocon intellectuals and scribblers utterly lack it.

... It is difficult not to be pessimistic when – as it should be – realism rather than illusions guide our political assessments. But realism is the only way to avoid cynicism.

Interesting, provocative writing. Check it out.

Tags: gabriel kolko, iraq war