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America's role in the world |
| Looking at
things "on balance" ... Framing an
understanding of America's role in the world today
by Gene TeSelle, Witherspoon Society Issues
Analyst
[3-29-03]
Gene TeSelle would welcome comments
about this essay, which he has prepared for the next issue of
Witherspoon Society's Network News.
Please send a note with your thoughts.
Richard John Neuhaus wrote, back in 1985, "On the balance
and considering the alternatives, the influence of the United States is a
force for good in the world."
Neuhaus may be, "on balance," right. We can all think of
ways the U.S. has been a force for good, a model of democratic institutions
and civil rights and legal due process, a source of food and economic aid, a
rescuer when there is natural disaster or war. It would be nice to puff out
our chests and pull ourselves up high in a fit of patriotism.
But it's that "on balance" that bothers me. The balance
can tip at just a little over 50%. Even something healthy may have cancer on
the inside or be a "Typhoid Mary" spreading disease to others. When you
begin to think about it, you see more and more ways the U.S. is not a "force
for good in the world."
Recent debates around the military buildup to attack Iraq
have brought a number of ironies to light.
 | The Bush administration's unilateralist posture has
alarmed many people. The Clinton administration was bad enough, dragging
its feet on environmental agreements and refusing to sign the treaty
establishing an International Court of Justice. But the Bush II
administration has been far more arrogant, thumbing its nose at the
international community in many ways, withdrawing from five treaties and
refusing to sign new ones. The attitude is that "the ruler is above the
law," that the one who makes the law does not have to obey it.
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The record of the U.S. is mixed at best when it comes to
supporting human rights and democratic institutions. In our own hemisphere
we cannot help but be aware of U.S. sponsorship or approval of coups in
Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina, where democratically elected
governments were replaced with military dictatorships supported by the
U.S. and whose human rights violations are still being covered up with the
aid of the U.S. government. Expressions of concern for atrocities in
countries like Iraq and North Korea look hypocritical in light of the
see-no-evil approach toward other countries.
| Our massive military budget has flourished at the
expense of medical care, education, and nutrition both at home and abroad.
Promises of having guns and butter has always turned out to be false. The
result of military preparation and military intervention turns out, all
too often, to be an increase in human misery.
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| It was the U.S., ironically, that funded and armed the
Islamic extremists who formed the core of the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan, the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization that has the U.S. in its
sights, and other Islamic extremists who are creating problems in
Indonesia, Pakistan, and Northern Africa. The strategy planners in the
C.I.A. and the Pentagon, in order to cause trouble for the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan, calculated that religious fanatics would make
the best fighters. The result was that the U.S. triggered the first
militant jihad in hundreds of years. Such heedlessness of consequences may
be typical of a country where corporations look ahead only to the next
quarterly report and office holders only to the next election.
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| Finally, one cannot help reflecting on the bumper
stickers and yard signs that call on us to "Wage Peace." A number of
Catholic thinkers have suggested recently that, instead of asking only
about what would constitute a "just war," we should ask what might make
for a "just peace." As we look at the last few decades, it seems that the
U.S. has not contributed very much to justice during peacetime. Instead we
have had what goes by the name of "the Washington consensus," the doctrine
that the world must be made safe for free trade by multinational
corporations. |
By approving NAFTA and the World Trade Organization,
Congress and the Clinton-Gore administration effected a massive transfer
of sovereignty away from the U.S. government, away from states and
localities, to shadowy tribunals where corporations can sue for monetary
damages if regulations make it more expensive for them to do business. The
next stage that the "Washington consensus" has in mind for the world is to
do away with all national restrictions on investment (and thus economic
control) from abroad; to open up all services, public and private, to
international competition; and even to privatize and commodify essential
things like water, on the principle that as it becomes scarcer it will be
a good "profit center."
Globalization has made the world not safer but more
dangerous, doing away with traditional safeguards, putting steadily more
economic pressure on everyone from hourly workers to middle managers, and
making ordinary people compete with powerful corporations.
When we Americans make claims about our constructive role
in the world, we have a responsibility to ask how well-founded those claims
are, and even more than that, a responsibility to ask how our role in the
world can be improved. We in the U.S. have often operated with a kind of "exceptionalism,"
asserting that we are "different" from other countries and thus are exempt
from the pride and delusion that seem to be displayed so obviously in them.
True patriotism is not blind loyalty to a self-proclaimed
leader, nor to an ideology. It is the readiness to examine our assumptions,
our behavior, and the consequences of both, then to propose course
corrections that will keep our nation faithful to the best in its heritage.
Those corrections may be much more demanding than we expect, but if we
refuse to consider them we will be turning our backs on all that is good -
even great - in that heritage.
Please send a note with your thoughts.
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A major
Ghost Ranch event this summer!
July 28 - August 3, 2008
Paths toward Peace and Justice:
Spirituality, Earth-Care, and the Prophetic Word in a time of
Violence
More info >> |
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An index of
our reports
from
BECOMING NEIGHBORS:
An Invitation
to Global Discipleship
A Witherspoon conference
on global mission and justice
September 16 - 19, 2007
Louisville, Kentucky |
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