www.iwallerstein.com
As the U.S. elections approach, U.S. foreign policy is gingerly
becoming one of the issues. It is no secret that over the past
half-century, there has been a certain long-term consistency to U.S.
foreign policy. The sharpest internal differences took place when George
W. Bush became president and launched a supermacho, deliberately
unilateral attempt to restore U.S. dominance in the world by the
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Bush and the neo-cons hoped to intimidate everyone around the world
by using U.S. military strength to change regimes that were deemed
unfriendly by the U.S. government. As seems clear today, the neo-con
policy failed in its own objective. Instead of intimidating everyone,
the policy transformed a slow decline in U.S. power into a precipitate
decline. In 2008, Obama ran on a platform of reversing this policy, and
in 2012 he is claiming that he has fulfilled this promise and therefore
undid the damage the neo-cons caused.
But did he undo the damage? Could he have undone the damage? I doubt
it. But my intent here is not to discuss how successful U.S. foreign
policy is or is not at this moment. Rather I wish to discuss what the
American people think about it.
The most important element in current U.S. public opinion on U.S.
foreign policy is uncertainty and lack of clarity. Recent polls show
that for the first time a majority of Americans think that the military
interventions Bush undertook in the Middle East were an error. What
these people seem to see is that there was a large expenditure of U.S.
lives and money for results that seem to them to be negative.
They perceive the Iraqi government to be closer in sentiment and
policy to the Iranian government than to the United States. They
perceive the Afghan government to be on very shaky grounds – with an
army infiltrated by enough Taliban sympathizers that they can shoot U.S.
soldiers with whom they are working. They want U.S. troops to leave by
2014 as promised. But they do not believe that, once these troops leave,
there will be a stable government in power, one that is somewhat
friendly to the United States.
