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#american foreign poilicy – @protoslacker on Tumblr
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@protoslacker / protoslacker.tumblr.com

I read posts online that interest, infuriate, stimulate, inspire, or otherwise move me. I'll share short snippets. Mastodon Shuffle
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Critics of this growing military engagement have argued that creating a large security assistance and training program and putting the U.S. in charge militarizes the U.S. engagement in these regions (and elsewhere) at the cost of stability, good governance, and economic growth. As Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated, the security focus overwhelms and distorts the orientation of governments, corrupts political institutions, can exacerbate conflict and corruption, lead to human rights abuses, and divert public resources from investment in economic progress. The American military is not the right tool for the counterterror mission.

Gordon Adams at Responsible Statecraft. The U.S. military should end its counterterror operations in Africa

#american foreign poilicy#africa#empire#endless war
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[T]here is no serious rationale for seeking or maintaining major U.S. forces in the Philippines. Washington must resist a New Cold War reflexive “freak out,” and rather adopt a more innovative, flexible and demilitarized approach to strategy across the Asia-Pacific. That will be the best way to retain substantial influence in a plainly multi-polar world. Instead of blaming Duterte’s erratic policies and his often anti-American demeanor, U.S. taxpayers, servicemen, and strategists alike should thank the hot-headed leader for helping to inject a major dose of reality into contemporary American strategy formulation.

Lyle Goldstein at Responsible Statecraft. Duterte’s gambit: Why Americans should thank the hot-headed leader of the Philippines

#asia pacific#american foreign poilicy#decolonization#visiting forces agreement#philippines
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Pompeo is an outspoken evangelical who has said in the past that world conflicts, especially in the Middle East, will continue until the Rapture. The Rapture is, according to many evangelicals, an apocalyptic event when Christians will suddenly disappear from earth as God ushers in the end of all things. Barr’s war on secularism and Pompeo’s end-times infused diplomacy are windows into why Trump’s evangelical supporters will not turn on him because of his foreign policy in Turkey, much less his willingness to withhold aid from the Ukraine in order to garner an investigation into a political rival.

Bradley Onishi at Rewire.News. Barr and Pompeo Speeches Show Why Evangelical Warriors Won’t Abandon the President

Barr’s war on secularism and Pompeo’s end-times infused diplomacy are windows into why Trump’s evangelical supporters will not turn on him because of his foreign policy in Turkey, much less his phone call with Ukraine.

#dominionism#american foreign poilicy#christofascism#manicheanism
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What threatens Pompeo is not war. It’s peace. He is doing everything he can to ensure that tensions with Iran don’t get resolved. For him, the “war” to start a war with Iran started when the U.S. embarked on a path of resolving its tensions with Iran.

Trita Parsi at Responsible Statecraft. Trump Faces Swift Backlash for Killing Soleimani as Iraqi Parliament Votes to Expel U.S. Troops

#american foreign poilicy#war#iran#iraq
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Both this new report and all previous SIGAR reports show the American occupation has been a disaster for both the U.S. and Afghanistan. American forces are enabling corruption and fueling conflict instead of the opposite. It's time to realize that and get out.

Ryan Cooper in The Week. The Afghanistan Papers were always hiding in plain sight

#afganistán#war#american foreign poilicy
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A few days earlier, I’d shot an interview with an 18-year-old Salvadoran girl who had to stop halfway through because she was sobbing too hard to keep telling her story. She was stuck in Ciudad Juarez, alone, waiting for an immigration hearing in El Paso a few months out, and she was scared. Watching her tiny body convulse with sobs as a colleague tried to comfort her, I was overcome by a recognition that the pain she was experiencing was the very intention of the people writing our immigration policies. From their point of view, the grief and fear flooding out of her were proof of just how well those policies were working.

Ashoka Mukpo at Popula. Fuck “civility”

The presumption is that we have a decent society to lose, which right now, we do not.

#assylum#migration#american foreign poilicy#cruelty
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The challenge for U.S. policy makers going forward was to reconcile a lofty rhetorical and moral emphasis upon the principle of political self-determination with the necessity of investing military force (i.e., “other assistance”) whose paramount end was securing the market freedoms of national and international capitalists. The teleological (and tautological) proposition that a substratum of properly capitalist economic relations organically yielded a democratic harvest would be the farmer’s almanac of a rising generation of modernization theorists. But the reality on the ground—in a world where the main provenance of self-determination was defined by the bloody rearguard defense of colonial prerogatives on the part of the United States’ most important allies and industrial partners—was bitter, and far less susceptible to universalizing nostrums. Straight-talking U.S. policy makers, particularly those at the center of the military apparatus, knew it.

Nikhil Pal Singh in Boston Review. Banking on the Cold War

The Cold War says more about how U.S. elites imagined their “freedom” than it does about enabling other people to be free.

#empire#james forrestal#liberal democracy#decolonization#war#american foreign poilicy
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And it’s that context that Democrats must get comfortable talking about, if they ever want to deal with the reality of U.S. foreign policy. Any politician brave enough to do that Tuesday night would have had to say something like this: Look, the U.S. is the center of the most powerful empire that’s ever existed. We’re not in the Mideast for moral reasons, like protecting the Kurds, so you can forget about that. We’re there to keep the oil flowing (even though any Mideast government will happily sell their oil to anyone buying), to get whatever profits we can for U.S. corporations and to make sure our Saudi friends recycle their profits back into the American economy. We can protect people like the Kurds only with a massive enlargement of our empire. So if you care about them, get ready for much higher taxes and your kids dying in Rojava. Or we can get rid of our empire — in which case you better start thinking about how to restrain all the other countries who’d like to run the Mideast and care about the people there as much as we do. Or we can muddle along in our current half-assed fashion, in which we agree not to ask too much of you and you agree not to ask any tough questions. You tell us!

Jon Schwarz in The Intercept. WHAT I LEARNED FROM THE DEBATE: DEMOCRATS STILL CAN’T LEVEL WITH VOTERS ABOUT THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

#american foreign poilicy#empire#politics#multi-polar world
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Öcalan was particularly taken by Bookchin’s 1982 book, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, which proposed the creation of an egalitarian “ecological society.” In 2004, Öcalan wrote to Bookchin, seeking to apply his ideas to the Middle East. What interested Öcalan most was Bookchin’s ideology of communalism, in which central governments would be replaced by loose federations of autonomous communities. Öcalan wrote a new manifesto, Democratic Confederalism, which blended Bookchin’s ideas with those of the growing Kurdish feminist movement. (Bookchin died in 2006.) He also ordered his guerrillas to stop attacking the Turkish government. Rather than agitating for a communist state, Öcalan was now calling for a bottom-up system in which “decision-making processes lie with the communities.”

Shane Bauer in Mother Jones. I Went to Syria and Met the People Trump Just Gave Turkey Permission to Kill

An anarchist revolution—and the Americans volunteering to defend it.

#syria#kurds#american foreign poilicy#murray bookchin
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Robert Mugabe obituary
Ruthless president of Zimbabwe once hailed as a beacon of African liberation whose rule bankrupted the country he had fought so hard to win
www.theguardian.com|Stephen Chan

Stephen Chan, SOSA University of London, does a fantastic job of providing context of history and Mugabe’s contribution in it. 

Emmett Till was lynched in August the year I was born. The struggle for civil rights is one of the big stories in the history of my time. Independence from colonial rule in Africa is another one.

Looking back over the events in my lifetime, it seems American foreign policy in Africa has been bad, and it's bad ongoing. I'm no scholar, of course, but as an ordinary white guy it seemed natural to use a lens of racism to view and understand the struggle for civil rights. But it's rather astounding to me that as bad as I knew American foreign policy towards African states to be, I rarely saw the issues through a lens of racism. Instead, Cold War politics was the primary lens I used  to view the news and issues.

Recently I got a digital subscription to The New York Times. The NYT's obituary written by veteran corespondent Alan Cowell is quite different from Stephen Chan's obituary for Robert Mugabe. Cowell seems to home in on Robert Mugabe's life from a lens of white resentment.

The contrast between these obituaries makes me think that American foreign policy in Africa has been so awful as a result of American racism to a degree that I have not imagined before.

#robert mugabe#world news#zimbabwe#american foreign poilicy#racism#africa#decolonization
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The United States and Russia seem to be drifting into a new arms race, either out of some bizarre nostalgia or because no one can think of anything better to do.

Jeffrey Lewis at Foreign Policy. A Mysterious Explosion Took Place in Russia. What Really Happened?

Russia’s catastrophic test of a nuclear-powered missile proves that a new global arms race will mean new nuclear accidents.

#nuclear weapons#american foreign poilicy#ban nuclear weapons
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To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!

Ronald Reagan in conversation with Richard Nixon (October 1971) quoted in an article by Tim Naftali in The Atlantic. Ronald Reagan’s Long-Hidden Racist Conversation With Richard Nixon

In newly unearthed audio, the then–California governor disparaged African delegates to the United Nations.

#ronald reagan#racism#american foreign poilicy#richard nixon
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[I]n 2019, the countries potentially most at the mercy of Washington when it comes to access to Gulf oil are economically fast-expanding China and India, whose oil needs are only likely to grow. That, in turn, will further enhance the geopolitical advantage Washington enjoyed as long as it remains the principal guardian of the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf. How it may seek to exploit this advantage remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that all parties involved, including the Chinese, are well aware of this asymmetric equation, which could give the phrase “trade war” a far deeper and more ominous meaning.

Michael Klare at Tom Dispatch. The Missing Three-Letter Word in the Iran Crisis

Oil’s Enduring Sway in U.S. Policy in the Middle East

#war#cater doctrine#american foreign poilicy#oil#climate change
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[Y]oung voters are eager to engage the world in ways that cooperate rather than coerce and kill. Their generation is the most enthusiastic of all on the issues of climate change, human rights, and global living standards. “Isolationists” they are not. But Democrats need to articulate a positive vision that combines peaceful engagement with military restraint — an American internationalism fit for the 21st century. Otherwise Trump’s nativist pitch will stand alone as the alternative to establishment platitudes.

Mark Hannah and Stephen Wertheim in The Guardian. Here's one way Democrats can defeat Trump: be radically anti-war

For too long, Democrats have accepted the national-security establishment consensus. Voters are desperate for a different kind of foreign policy

#democratic party#politics#american foreign poilicy#antiwar
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