The U.S. Has a Horrible, Murderous, Ineffective Foreign Policy

Why I'm generally pretty non-interventionist

Foreign policy is really damn complicated. There are lots of countries doing lots of things involving lots of other countries involving complex treaties and ethnic disputes and wars over territory and nuclear weapons and disputes for power with Russia and China. It is often quite difficult to know what to think about a particular foreign policy intervention.

Nevertheless, I tend to be pretty non-interventionist on foreign policy. And I think there’s a good principled justification for this — one that doesn’t require figuring out the specificities of what’s going on in a variety of countries. Here, I will explain why, in general, I oppose U.S. interventions.

There’s a lot of evidence that the U.S. has been primarily a force for ill in the world. The war on terror alone has displaced probably over 38 million people, and killed nearly a million people. This is a sizeable chunk of the world that has been displaced. It also squandered a sizeable share of the GDP — all the while causing more terror.

Against The War on Terror

Additionally, if we poll people globally, the U.S. is rated as the biggest threat to world peace. This is pretty unsurprising given the U.S. tendency to invade other countries, and kill vast numbers of people.

The U.S. routinely conducts horrific human rights abuses. It sometimes bombs countries into oblivion, killing 10% of their population — as it did with Laos. These bombs continue to this day to hamper Laos.

Chomsky additionally notes that

… parliamentary governments were barred or overthrown with U.S. support in Guatemala in 1954, in the Dominican Republic in 1963 and 1965, in Brazil in 1964, and in Chile in 1973, among others. In Central America, the number of people murdered by U.S.-backed forces since the late 1970s was around 200,000, as popular movements that sought democracy and social reform were decimated.

The source later notes

According to Chomsky, the U.S. wars in Indochina fall into the same pattern. He cites U.S. support for the Suharto takeover in Indonesia in 1965, and U.S. backing for the overthrow of Philippine democracy by Ferdinand Marcos in 1972. Suharto’s coup involved the slaughter, in a few months, of around 700,000 people, mostly landless peasants. In Cambodia, the US supported the Khmer Rouge after the genocide under Pol Pot. Writing about Indochina, Chomsky has said, “We killed a couple of million people and destroyed three countries [Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos] and left them in total wreckage and have been strangling them ever since.”

The United States gives arms away more often to those that violate rights. Schoultz reports

These correlations are uniformly positive, indicating that aid has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizen

This was confirmed by some later studies, though the finding is subject to some significant dispute.

One of the most thorough and detailed reports on U.S. arms sales concluded the following.

Moreover, the United States has a long history of selling weapons to nations where the immediate risks were obvious. From 1981 to 2010, the United States sold small arms and light weapons to 59 percent and major conventional weapons to 35 percent of countries actively engaged in a high-level conflict. The United States sold small arms to 66 percent and major conventional weapons to 40 percent of countries actively engaged in a low-level conflict.7 As one author noted, in 1994 there were 50 ongoing ethnic and territorial conflicts in the world and the United States had armed at least one side in 45 of them. Since 9/11, the United States has sold weapons to at least two dyads in conflict: Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and Turkey and the Kurds.8

After conducting a thorough metric for the risk of arms sales to various countries, they conclude.

Three important observations immediately emerge from the analysis. First, there are a large number of risky customers in the world, and the United States sells weapons to most of them. Thirty-five nations (21 percent) scored in the highest-risk category on at least two metrics, and 72 (43 percent) were in the highest-risk category on at least one of the five measures. There simply are not that many safe bets when it comes to the arms trade.

Second, the data provide compelling evidence that the United States does not discriminate between high- and low-risk customers. The average sales to the riskiest nations are higher than those to the least risky nations. Considering discrete components of the index, for example, the 22 countries coded as “highest risk” on the Global Terrorism Index bought an average of $1.91 billion worth of American weapons. The 28 countries in active, high-level conflicts bought an average of $2.94 billion worth of arms.

Applying our risk assessment framework to the list of 16 nations currently banned from buying American weapons helps illustrate the validity of our approach. The average score of banned nations is 11.6, with 12 nations scoring 10 or higher. The highest-scoring nations were Syria, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with Iran, Eritrea, and the Central African Republic not far behind. Clearly these are nations to which the United States should not be selling weapons. What is especially troubling is that the United States sold weapons to several of these countries in the years right before sales were banned, when most of the risks were readily apparent. Moreover, America’s customer list includes 32 countries with a risk score above the average of those on the banned list. This reinforces our concern that the U.S. government does not block sales to countries that clearly pose a risk of negative consequences.

The third major observation is that this lack of discrimination is dangerous. As simple as it is, our risk assessment is a useful guide to forecasting negative consequences. The five countries that scored as high risk on all five measures provide a clear illustration of the risks of arms sales. This group, which purchased an average of $1.8 billion in U.S. weapons since 9/11, includes Libya, Iraq, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan. These five countries, recall, are classified by the various metrics as: “terror everywhere,” “not free,” “most fragile,” “large impact from terrorism,” and as being involved in high-level conflicts. These governments have used their American weapons to promote oppression, commit human rights abuses, and perpetuate bloody civil wars.

Within the Very Risky category, each country rated as “highest risk” on at least one measure, and 30 scored as “highest risk” on at least two measures. This group also represents the full range of unintended consequences from arms sales. Afghanistan, Egypt, Somalia, and Ukraine fall into this category. This group collectively spent an average of $1.38 billion over the time period. Since 9/11, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (which scored a 12) invaded Yemen, intervened in Tunisia and Syria, and provoked a crisis with Qatar, while cementing a track record of human rights abuses and government oppression. Other states in this category, such as Afghanistan (score of 14), have entangled the United States in counterproductive conflicts since 9/11 and continue to do so today.

Even arms sales to the less risky nations do not come without risk. For example, the Somewhat Risky category includes the United Arab Emirates, which is involved in an active conflict in Yemen, as well as Georgia, which has dangerous neighbors. Finally, the Lowest Risk category includes most of the NATO nations, Taiwan, South Korea, and a range of other, mostly smaller nations with stable governments, such as Barbados and Grenada, located in friendly neighborhoods. These countries pose little risk for problems like dispersion, destabilization, or misuse of weapons for oppression. In some cases, however, arms sales could alter regional balances of power in ways that increase tensions and the chance of conflict. U.S. arms sales to NATO allies, as part of the European Reassurance Initiative, for example, have upset Russian leaders.14 Similarly, arms sales to Taiwan, itself not a risky customer, have nonetheless raised tensions between China and the United States.15

In short, even a relatively simple risk assessment makes it clear that the policy of the United States is to sell weapons to just about any nation that can afford them without much concern for the consequences. Though the United States does limit its most advanced weapons to allies16 and maintains a ban on the sale of materials related to weapons of mass destruction,17 the United States has sold just about everything else, in many cases to countries embroiled in interstate and civil conflicts, to countries with horrendous human rights records, and to countries that represent a risk for entangling the United States in unwanted conflicts.

In a thorough empirical analysis of the correlation between war and arms sales, the following conclusion is reached.

It appears, overall, that arms transfers are associated with war involvement, but not the worsening of war outcomes

The U.S. frequently carries out 9/11 esque atrocities, usually many times worse than 9/11 itself. Sometimes it even carries out those atrocities on the date of 9/11, such as when, in 1973, we overthrew Allende, replaced him with Pinochet, ushering in a economic disaster, and leading to thousands of people being killed or tortured and many more being forcefully imprisoned. Additionally, we overthrew Chilean Democracy — a Democracy which had previously been robust since 1932.

The U.S. also carries out a murderous sanctions regime which hundreds of thousands or millions of people, all of questionable efficacy.

All of this tells a deeply troubling picture — one where foreign people are entirely divorced from America’s circle of moral concern. If the price to pay for securing the national interest by having one more base is 10,000 foreign lives, then that’s a price that we’re willing to pay. With this being the case, we should expect the U.S. to be primarily a force for evil.

Imagine there was an alien species that frequently overthrew democracies, imposed crippling economic sanctions that killed millions, was the best friend of terrorism by fostering the conditions for more terrorism, all the while conducting a war on terror that displaced many tens of millions of people. These aliens claim to be kind humanitarians, yet there is an inverse correlation between human rights and alien military aid — they’re more likely to fund those who torture, brutalize, mutilate, and violate human rights.

They often back dictators around the world — ones that kill hundreds of thousands or millions of people. They overthrow lots of democracies.

If we were confronted with these aliens — and then we asked if they should go into Iraq, or Afghanistan, the answer would be obvious: no! When their track record is so bad, we should not trust them to do the right thing.

The United States is analogous to that alien regime. It’s very easy to imagine the U.S. as some benevolent global police state whose job is it to react to the things that go on in the world. When terrorism afflicts overseas, a natural question is what the U.S. will do in response. The answer is pretty much what most countries should do. The U.S. has a horrible track record as the world’s policeman. The U.S. is the world’s police force — but it’s a police force deeply in bed with business interests; one willing to kill vast numbers of people on a whim. A police force that is supplying weapons to the criminals and vaporizing huge numbers of people.

This is basically what we should expect. The government is generally pretty incompetent at doing complex tasks. It turns out that running the entire world is a pretty damn complicated task. Government also tends to be willing to abuse power. When you put the government in charge of the complicated task of running the world, and allow them to abuse as many human rights as they’d like, when we know that they see the lives of people in other countries basically the same way that factory farmers see farm animals — as nameless, faceless, pawns that are useful for various tasks, but pretty much irrelevant, for whom the only reason not to abuse them is that sometimes if you abuse them too much in a public way, people get mad. The historical record is far too littered with the bodies of the victims of American atrocities for us to trust the U.S. to do foreign policy right. A country that, based on virtually no evidence, kills millions of people through sanctions and wipes out 10% of countries is not one that can be trusted with foreign policy.

This becomes even clearer if we look back at wars long after the fact. There are a few wars that were probably good for the U.S. to intervene in — the two world wars come to mid. Though, of course, the U.S. was willing to vaporize hundreds of thousands of people, largely unnecessarily. But most of the other U.S. interventions are recognized as having been disasters. This is certainly true of Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and more.

But the situation is even more dismal than that. The U.S. isn’t just a benevolent force that keeps blundering. There’s significant evidence that U.S. foreign policy has more to do with business interests than even achieving U.S. interests. As Chomsky notes

From 1939 to 1945, extensive studies were conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. One group was called the War-Peace Studies Group, which met for six years and produced extensive geopolitical analyses and plans. The Council on Foreign Relations is essentially the business input to foreign policy plainning. These groups also involved every top planner in the State Department, with the exception of the Secretary of State.

The conception that they developed is what they called “Grand Area” planning. The Grand Area was a region that was to be subordinated to the needs of the American economy. As one planner put it, it was to be the region that is “strategically necessary for world control.” The geopolitical analysis held that the Grand Area had to include at least the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British Empire, which we were then in the process of dismantling and taking over ourselves. This is what is called “anti-imperialism” in American scholariship. The Grand Area was also to include western and southern Europe and the oil-producing regions of the Middle East; in fact, it was to include everything, if that were possible. Detailed plans were laid for particular regions of the Grand Area and also for international institutions that were to organize and police it, essentially in the interests of this subordination to U.S. domestic needs.

With regard to Latin America, the matter was put most plainly by Secretary of War Henry Stimson in May 1945 when he was explaining how we must eliminate and dismantle regional systems dominated by any other power, particularly the British, while maintaining and extending our own system. He explained with regard to Latin America as follows: “I think that it’s not asking too much to have our little region over here which never has bothered anybody.”

The basic thinking behind all of this has been explained quite lucidly on a number of occasions. (This is a very open society and if one wants to learn what’s going on, you can do it; it takes a little work, but the documents are there and the history is also there.) One of the clearest and most lucid accounts of the planning behind this was by George Kennan, who was one of the most thoughtful, humane, and liberal of the planners, and in fact was eliminated from the State Depatment largely for that reason. Kennan was the head of the State Department policy planning staff in the late 1940s. In the following document, PPS23, February 1948, he outlined the basic thinking:

We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population…. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction…. We should cease to talk about vague and…, unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

Now, recall that this is a Top Secret document. The idealistic slogans are, of course, to be constantly trumpeted by scholarship, the schools, the media, and the rest of the ideological system in order to pacify the domestic population, giving rise to accounts such as those of the “official view” that I’ve already described. Recall again that this is a view from the dovish, liberal, humane end of the spectrum. But it is lucid and clear.

So it is small wonder, with this kind of background, that John F. Kennedy should say that “governments of the civilmilitary type of El Salvador are the most effective in containing Communist penetration in Latin America.” Kennedy said this at the time when he was organizing the basic structure of the death squads that have massacred tens of thousands of people since (all of this, incidentally, within the framework of the Alliance for Progress, and, in fact, probably the only lasting effect of that program).

In the mid-1950s, these ideas were developed further. For example, one interesting case was an important study by a prestigious study group headed by William Yandell Eliot, who was Williams Professor of Government at Harvard. They were also concerned with what Communism is and how it spreads. They concluded accurately that the primary threat of Communism is the economic transformation of the Communist powers “in ways which reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial economies of the West.” That is essentially correct and is a good operational definition of “Communism” in American political discourse. Our government is committed to that view.

On these grounds one can predict American foreign policy rather well. So, for example, American policy toward Nicaragua after the 1979 revolution could have been predicted by simply observing that Nicaragua’s health and education budget rose rapidly, that an effective land reform program was instituted, and that the infant mortality rate dropped very dramatically, to the point where Nicaragua won an award from the World Health Organization for health achievements (all of this despite horrifying conditions left by the Somoza dictatorship, which we had installed and supported, and continued to support to the very end, despite a lot of nonsense to the contrary that one hears). If a country is devoted to policies like those I’ve just described, it is obviously an enemy. It is part of the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” — the Russians are taking it over. And, in fact, it is part of a conspiracy. It is part of a conspiracy to take from us what is ours, namely “our raw materials,” and a conspiracy to prevent us from “maintaining the disparity,” which, of course, must be the fundamental element of our foreign policy.

If you want to know why we are committed to destroying Nicaragua you can find the answer, for example, in a section of an Oxfam report that came out just a few weeks ago. It was written by Oxfam’s Latin America Desk Officer Jethro Pettit, based on an interview with Esmilda Flores, a woman peasant, on a cooperative.

“Before the revolution, we didn’t participate in anything. We only learned to make tortillas and cook beans and do what our husbands told us. In only five years we’ve seen a lot of changes — and we’re still working on it!” Esmilda Flores belongs to an agricultural cooperative in the mountains north of Esteli, Nicaragua. Together with seven other women and fifteen men, she works land that was formerly a coffee plantation owned by an absentee landlord. After the revolution in 1979, the families who had worked the land became its owners. They have expanded production to include corn, beans, potatoes, cabbages, and dairy cows. “Before, we had to rent a small plot to grow any food,” Flores said, “And we had to pay one-half of our crop to the landlord! Now we work just as hard as before — both in the fields and at home — but there’s a difference, because we’re working for ourselves.” … There has been a profound shift in cultural attitudes among women as a result of their strong participation in Nicaragua’s social reconstruction. Women have taken the lead in adult literacy programs, both as students and teachers. They have assumed key roles in rural health promotion and in vaccination campaigns.

Chomsky provides an explanation of the limited correlation between human rights and military aid. He explains that there’s a much better theory of U.S. foreign policy — one which matches the data far better. Describing the theory, he writes

There’s one by Edward Herman, who investigated the same sort of thing that Schoultz did but on a worldwide basis. Herman found the same correlation: the worse the human rights climate, the more American aid goes up. But he also carried out another study which gives you some insight into what’s really happening. He compared American aid to changes in the investment climate, the climate for business operations, as measured, for example, by whether foreign firms can repatriate profits and that sort of thing. It turned out there was a very close correlation. The better the climate for business operations, the more American aid — the more we support the foreign government. That gives you a plausible theory. U.S. foreign policy is in fact based on the principle that human rights are irrelevant, but that improving the climate for foreign business operations is highly relevant. In fact, that flows from the central geopolitical conception.

Now how do you improve the business climate in a third world country? Well, it’s easy. You murder priests, you torture peasant organizers, you destroy popular organizations, you institute mass murder and repression to prevent any popular organization. And that improves the investment climate. So there’s a secondary correlation between American aid and the deterioration of human rights. It’s entirely natural that we should tend to aid countries that are egregious violators of fundamental human rights and that torture their citizens, and that’s indeed what we find.

Thus, we should at least have a reasonable credence in the hypothesis that foreign policy blunders are no accident. U.S. foreign policy is carefully planned and curated to help business, all with human rights ignored. When the U.S. has such a bad track record of horrible mutilation, brutalization, and repression — and it’s plausible that it has horrible motivations, such that this stuff should be expected to continue, we should not trust it with the task of running the world.

If we think of U.S. foreign policy from the standpoint of the rest of the world — the part of the world that’s being invaded and conquered — we get a much clearer picture of foreign policy. When we imagine it, not as some neutral police force tasked with upholding global justice, but as the country that is ranked by poll results as the biggest threat to both global peace and democracy that overthrows countries on a whim and kills vast numbers of people, it becomes much clearer that foreign policy is a disaster. When we imagine being the victim of a campaign of international terror, like the one conducted by the U.S. against Laos — one that kills 10% of your country — it becomes clear that the U.S. is not a mostly benevolent force in world affairs.

American empire runs red with the blood of foreign children — ones bombed to death, starved by sanctions, and repressed by brutal totalitarian regimes. The ones who have been lighting the world’s fires are not the ones who should be called to put out the fires.