Some Good Advice on Foreign Policy

One of the things I haven't understood about the Bush foreign policy is the inability to separate terrorists from the government of whatever outlaw area they manage to show up in. Not all countries fully control their territories or their borders. It would certainly help if every country truly controlled what happens inside their boundaries and there is much the United States can do to help without implementing a foreign policy that is so blunt and arrogant that it simply ignores reality and merely aggravates regional problems. Aggravating regional problems in the Middle East is the last thing we need.

Ernest Wilson of TPM's America Abroad has some useful thoughts on foreign policy:

The familiar bumper sticker reads ‘Think Globally, Act Locally.' Let me flip that bromide and urge us to “Think Locally, Act Globally".

If you're going to invade someplace as a global power, maybe you should know something about the neighborhood.

In last week’s blog I argued that Americans need to do two things to design a more user-friendly and effective foreign policy. First, learn a lot more about local matters in ‘neighborhoods’ around the world – their cultures, traditions, histories of political alliances and conflicts, and so forth. Policy makers should know, for example that Sunni groups dominate in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, and Shiites in Iran, Iraq and in Hezbollah, and the history and implications of shifting alliances. Secondly, Americans should avoid building simplistic one-size fits all ‘containment’- type frameworks that fail to appreciate adequately the role of the particular and the local in this globalizing world of ours. The failure to get these two things right has gotten American into a lot of trouble lately. Knowing the local (and tamping down our arrogance) is one of the main cautionary tales to extract from the Iraq debacle.

There is no 'new thinking' from the Bush Administration. It's mostly old thinking applied so badly that problems just get worse. And Congress has become too right wing to shine a bright light on the poor thinking of the Bush administration.

The media has also done a poor job of remembering that good advice can come from different directions. Bush is getting different advice from Republicans. The neoconservatives say attack Iran. People like Senator Lugar say it's time to talk (let's forget those in a third group who continue to ignore facts and who say Bush is on target; the overwhelming majority of informed people think otherwise and so do most Americans). Now why is it proof of lack of unity when Democrats can think for themselves and offer advice that varies somewhat but that is largely consistent on the facts and largely consistent in the general direction our policies need to go?

There was a time when good politicians simplified the explanation of their policies so that most Americans could understand what was going on; FDR was good at this (and he spoke in complete paragraphs). I don't think it's a good policy but it's still possible to roughly explain policies over several weeks with a series of good sound bites. But that's not what's happening these days. Sound bites are now used to mislead Americans, not to guide them.

If I spend a thousand dollars on a new computer, I want to understand what I'm buying, though it's not necessary for me to know exactly how the computer works or to know every single function of a computer program and so on. If a sales person misleads me, I'm going to be very angry. The same applies to the Middle East. If I'm going to spend a thousand dollars on 'bringing democracy to the Middle East' (we're spending more than that per American), I want to know how that money is being used and why. That means being informed at some minimal level.