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us imperialism
The World Needs US Diplomacy, Not US Primacy
In the words of a European official, the Americans "thought they were kicking cans down the road, but they turned out to be hand grenades.”
Nov 16, 2023
The catastrophe in Israel and Gaza demonstrates yet again the truth of a remark by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan when asked about the greatest challenge for a statesman: “Events, dear boy, events.” Governments make elaborate plans for the conduct of foreign and security policy, only to find themselves scrambling to respond to some unforeseen development.
However, events like the Hamas attack on Israel or the Russian invasion of Ukraine do not come out of nowhere. They are the product of human decisions; and if the decisions themselves cannot be predicted in detail, the circumstances that produce them can be studied. That after all is why we have legions of intelligence analysts, foreign service officials, and “experts.”
The first lesson of the present horror for Western policymakers is therefore always to remember that the adversary has a vote, and its actions will be shaped by America’s own behavior. The second is that certain parts of the world are much more likely to generate disastrous events than others. The third is that the more areas of the world in which the United States involves itself, the more exposure to such events it has. The last lesson is that adversaries in one part of the world will inevitably try to take advantage of American difficulties in another.
By seeking primacy in every part of the world, the United States is ensuring that it will face threats and crises in every part of the world
In other words, the pursuit of U.S. primacy in every corner of the world (as laid down in the “Wolfowitz Doctrine” of 1992 and followed in effect by every subsequent U.S. administration) is a surefire guarantee that the United States will sooner or later find itself facing multiple crises simultaneously.
Twice since taking office the Biden administration has sought to deal with complex and dangerous international problems by shelving them while it dealt with something else. In the words of a European official, “they thought they were kicking cans down the road, but they turned out to be hand grenades.”
By the Spring of 2021, U.S. officials were declaring in private that the Minsk Agreement to solve the conflict in eastern Ukraine (providing for guaranteed autonomy for the Donbas within Ukraine) was dead. They had, however, no thoughts at all on what to replace it with, other than to go on arming Ukraine and emphasizing support for Ukraine and NATO membership at some unspecified point in the distant future.
The administration’s hope was that the issue of Russia and Ukraine could be shelved while America concentrated on confronting a far more powerful rival, China. When Moscow made clear that it would not play along with this, the administration had no plan, either for full commitment to Ukraine or a diplomatic compromise with Russia. Only the extraordinary courage and resilience of Ukrainian troops in the first weeks of the war saved Ukraine from conquest and America from shattering humiliation.
In the Middle East, a renewal of the nuclear deal with Iran was blocked and delayed by U.S. demands that it should have been obvious would never be accepted by Tehran, in the belief that Tehran was not in a position seriously to harm the United States or Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was basically ignored completely, even as Israeli settlement policy progressively destroyed the possibility of the “Two State Solution” to which the U.S. remains officially committed.
Instead, the Biden administration followed the Trump administration in seeking to do an end-run around both issues by promoting a de facto alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would contain Iran and leave the Palestinians completely isolated and without support.
But of course Hamas was able to see through this U.S. plan perfectly well. The result is a disastrous new conflict that will among other things wreck any hope of Saudi-Israeli normalization, and could destabilize U.S. client states across the Middle East.
Certain voices in Israel and the United States are now seeking to widen this disaster by using it to promote an Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran, just as they used 9/11 to promote a U.S. attack on Iraq. One might almost assume that these voices are working for Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping — for very few things are more ardently yearned for in Moscow than a war between the U.S. and Iran. It would distract U.S. resources from Ukraine, allow Moscow to hit back at the U.S. by providing weaponry to Iran, and utterly discredit U.S. claims to defend a “rules based order” in the eyes of most of the world.
By seeking primacy in every part of the world, the United States is ensuring that it will face threats and crises in every part of the world; and even if it can in principle muster the resources to address them all, it is very unlikely that the American people will have the will to go on indefinitely making the economic sacrifices required.
In the generation since 9/11, it has been proved again and again that the U.S. cannot solve these issues through military force. It is time to give primacy a rest, and let diplomacy have a try.
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How the Left Overestimates US Power
Despite the military and non-military assistance it provides to Ukraine and Israel, the United States still can’t determine outcomes on the ground.
Oct 28, 2023
The United States is the most powerful country on the Earth. If you add together its nuclear arsenal, its unmatched array of conventional weaponry, and its global economic reach, America might be the mightiest country in the history of the planet.
The United States has been responsible for destroying countries (Germany, Japan) and raising them from the rubble (Germany, Japan). It continues to hold sway in international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank. The dollar remains the global currency of choice. Wall Street is the Mecca of capitalism; Hollywood is a creator of global tastes; virtually everyone drinks Coca-Cola and eats Big Macs or dreams of doing so.
And yet U.S. power has serious limits. The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 was a punishing reminder of just how little the U.S. military and the provision of U.S. security and humanitarian assistance can do to defeat a determined guerrilla force and liberalize a brutalized society. The earlier defeat of U.S. forces in Vietnam, the inability to prevent countries like North Korea from going nuclear, the embarrassing failures of “drug wars” in various countries: These are but some of the indicators that U.S. reach exceeds its grasp.
The decline of U.S influence should not feed the narrative that anarchy has been loosed upon the world. The choice is not between a U.S.-led world and a Joker-led world.
The left, in particular, has often identified these very same limits when pushing for a more modest U.S. presence around the world. This is a reasonable demand. The limits of military force should indeed spur a reduction of U.S. military bases abroad, the budget that sustains them, and the arms exports that expand the capacities of U.S. allies.
Sometimes, however, these lessons learned about the limits of U.S. power are forgotten or willfully ignored.
In both Ukraine and Israel, the United States currently wields a measure of influence because of the military (and non-military) assistance it provides. This assistance can occasionally fool the Pentagon and the State Department into thinking that it can determine outcomes on the ground in both regions. That’s not surprising, given the arrogance of American power.
What is surprising, however, is that the left, which is so often mindful of the limitations of U.S. power, sometimes makes the same mistake.
End the War in Ukraine?
I recently participated in a public forum that pitted proponents of a “cease-fire now” against those of us who support Ukraine and its efforts to resist occupation.
Like every Ukrainian—and Russian dissident who stands with them—I desperately want peace in the region. Ukraine cannot afford this war. And neither can the world at large.
But Ukraine did not ask for this war. It was invaded. And Russia didn’t simply want to secure territorial gains in previously occupied lands in the Donbas and Crimea. It aimed to seize the entire country and extinguish Ukraine by absorbing it into a “Russian world.” At the beginning of its intervention in 2022, it committed horrifying war crimes. With its continued aerial assaults on Ukrainian cities, Russia continues to kill civilians on a regular basis. Ukrainians are very clear about the consequences of losing this war. It’s not just a matter of territory or culture. It’s a matter of life and death.
Why on Earth would a left that is deeply skeptical of how the United States has played power politics with smaller countries endorse a strategy of negotiating with a right-wing authoritarian power to dictate policy options to a smaller, struggling, occupied democracy?
Those who call for a “cease-fire now” do so out of a willful ignorance of the realities of the current war. Ukraine doesn’t support a cease-fire now because it hopes to push out all Russian occupiers. Russia doesn’t want a cease-fire now because it still harbors hopes of seizing all of the Donbas, perhaps taking the entire southern coast of Ukraine, maybe even reviving the original goal of displacing the current government in Kiev.
Rather than bring their demand to Moscow, which could indeed end the war tomorrow by withdrawing its troops from occupied territory, proponents of the “cease-fire now” position are trying to persuade the United States to use its influence over Ukraine to force a pause in the hostilities. This campaign has involved lobbying U.S. policymakers and even occupying the office of the country’s most progressive senator, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
“Use its influence” would, in realistic terms, mean cutting off military assistance to Ukraine, negotiating over its head with the Kremlin, and bullying Kyiv into accepting some kind of armistice agreement. Ukraine might one day conclude that it can’t win on the ground against Russian forces, something that the two Koreas ultimately realized in 1953. But at the moment, Ukraine believes that it can expel Russian forces, with U.S. assistance, much as the Croatian army did against Serbian forces in Operation Storm in 1995.
The ”use its influence” argument suffers from both pragmatic and ethical shortcomings.
The pragmatic problem is that, although the United States provides the lion’s share of military aid to Ukraine—a little over 50% through July 2023—it doesn’t direct Ukrainian operations. Ukraine’s military leadership doesn’t always inform the United States about the timing of its operations, often disregards the strategic advice of the Pentagon, and has conducted targeted attacks within Russia such as assassinations that have “complicated its collaboration with the CIA,” according to The Washington Post.
Even if Washington were to cut off assistance to Kyiv, Ukraine would continue to fight with whatever resources it could muster because it understands that the current Russian offensive—and any future military intervention—poses a continued threat to the survival of the country and its citizens. U.S. assistance is welcome, even essential. But it is not a light switch that, if turned to the off position, would shut down Ukrainian resistance.
The ethical problem runs deeper. Why on Earth would a left that is deeply skeptical of how the United States has played power politics with smaller countries endorse a strategy of negotiating with a right-wing authoritarian power to dictate policy options to a smaller, struggling, occupied democracy? Why would a left committed to human rights avert its eyes from the shocking (and ongoing) human rights violations that Russia has committed? How can a left endorse peace without any measure of justice?
I was not the first choice of the organizers of the aforementioned public forum on Ukraine. The other proponents of my position were not available. The organizers, who supported the “cease-fire now” position, asked me for suggestions of another panelist of my persuasion. I asked if they had reached out to any Ukrainians in the area. They hadn’t. They didn’t have any contacts either.
A debate about Ukraine without any Ukrainians? That has been a recurrent problem with the “cease-fire now” position. It fundamentally doesn’t take into consideration what Ukrainians—or the Russian left—has to say. It spreads misinformation that denies Ukrainian agency, such as the myth of a “U.S.-engineered coup” in 2014 and the myth of a “proxy war” run by the United States today. And it proposes “solutions” that involve the United States forcing “peace” down the throats of Ukrainians as if they were infants incapable of making independent decisions.
It seems that this segment of the left has forgotten the well-worn recommendation of nihil de nobis, sine nobis—nothing about us without us.
End the War in Israel?
U.S. policy toward North Korea once suffered from a peculiar fallacy. According to this fallacy, China could and should use its considerable influence over the North Korean leadership to restrain the latter’s nuclear ambitions and push it toward an incrementally more open society. China and North Korea, after all, were allies dating back to the Korean War. North Korea was heavily dependent on Chinese economic assistance. The leadership of the two countries met on a semi-regular basis. Surely this was evidence of potential Chinese leverage.
This superficial friendship fooled U.S. analysts into thinking that China could, with a little pressure, make the North Koreans do their bidding. If Beijing refused to apply such pressure, then it must in fact support its neighbor’s nuclear program and erratic economic and political policies.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. The North Korean government seemed to take almost perverse pleasure in ignoring Chinese advice and resisting Chinese pressure. All of that preferential treatment bought Beijing precious little influence in return.
Certainly the U.S. government can do more to push Israel in the direction of respecting basic human rights. But by itself, the United States has limited influence over Israeli decision-making.
Israel similarly ignores U.S. advice and seemingly U.S. pressure as well. In 2010, I described Israel as a “rogue ally” of the United States because it went behind the back of the Obama administration in an attempt to buy out North Korea’s nuclear program for a billion dollars. That was only one of many such examples of Israel’s flouting of its ally’s preferences.
For instance, Israel built a nuclear weapons program in secret and ignored pressure from the Kennedy administration for inspections. It pushed forward with an aggressive settlement policy in the West Bank despite concerns from the Obama administration. And it more recently ignored similar criticisms from the Biden administration about the expansion of these settlements.
Israel has acted this way because it has calculated that it can do pretty much anything without jeopardizing U.S. assistance. It has even cultivated spies within the United States—Jonathan Pollard was only the most prominent—and still Washington has delivered several billion dollars a year.
The problem, then, lies not only with Israel. The United States has not made serious efforts to back up its recommendations—and its threats—with serious costs. As a result, prior to the latest outbreak of violence in the region, some prominent mainstream figures like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof began to talk of conditioning U.S. aid and even phasing it out.
But frankly, as Tariq Kenney-Shawa wrote in The Nation back in August, such U.S.-imposed conditions would not likely have changed Israeli policy. “Because even if the U.S. conditioned or outright cut the funding it provides to Israel on account of its treatment of Palestinians, it would likely not be enough to deter Israel’s increasingly extremist leaders,” he wrote. “Only by conditioning U.S. aid alongside more assertive punitive measures such as divestment and sanctions can the U.S. effectively pressure Israel to bring an end to occupation and apartheid.”
Certainly the U.S. government can do more to push Israel in the direction of respecting basic human rights. But by itself, the United States has limited influence over Israeli decision-making, whether Likud or Labor is in charge. The bottom line is that Israel is a wealthy country that doesn’t need U.S. largesse—the essence of Kristof’s argument—and so it can “go rogue” more effectively than the comparatively impoverished North Korea.
By all means, let’s continue to press the Biden administration to demand an immediate cease-fire, to pressure the Netanyahu government not to invade Gaza, and to call for new negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. But let’s not be naïve about how much influence the Biden administration could have even if it unambiguously committed to those positions.
What Role Can America Play?
Sometimes, like the proverbial stopped clock, the United States does the right thing with its foreign policy, like the current support for Ukraine. More frequently, it makes terrible decisions, like providing unconditional support for an increasingly right-wing and human-rights-abusing Israel. The conventional progressive approach to U.S. foreign policy is to campaign for Washington to abide by the ideals it (often) professes about democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.
But let’s face it: a United States that suddenly “sees the light” will still not be able to determine outcomes on the ground. That’s a reality of a post-Cold War era characterized by the “rise of the rest” and the limits of military power.
At the same time, the decline of U.S influence should not feed the narrative that anarchy has been loosed upon the world. The choice is not between a U.S.-led world and a Joker-led world. The United States should build up global institutions even as it relinquishes its supremacy. It’s not America that ideally should be saving Ukraine and constraining Israel. That should be task of international institutions committed to human rights and the rule of law. The decline of U.S. power isn’t a problem; it is a call to global action.
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What Would Statehood Mean for Puerto Rico’s Criminal Justice Reforms?
If Puerto Rico is being boxed into statehood, will Congress commit in writing not to infringe on the progressive values and practices long established in Puerto Rico’s constitution and laws?
Jul 28, 2023
In a matter of a year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned decades of precedents and critical policies that took years of blood, sweat, and tears to build momentum for. The right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies during pregnancy, the use of race as a factor in college admissions despite the value of diversity in educational settings, the establishment of a constitutional right for businesses open to the public to deny service to protected classes.
In the criminal justice context, this ultra-conservative judicial activism continues to roll back basic protections under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution. Indeed, just years ago Justice Sonia Sotomayor raised a clarion call against the court’s allowance of an unconstitutional detention by police to be justified, after-the-fact, by the existence of an outstanding warrant—something no police officer can determine by simply looking at you, unless, presumably, you’re Black or Latinx.
And this simply summarizes what the judiciary alone has done. Congress is constantly entertaining ways to limit the rights of the accused in this country.
The details of what the United States will commit to—or not—when it comes to this politically expedient push for statehood matter.
Why do rollbacks like these matter for Puerto Rico when Congress is considering status options that include statehood?
Amid some leaders urging that Puerto Rico be leaned on to become a U.S. state and that this can somehow magically solve the problems that Americans created over centuries, Puerto Ricans should be asking tough questions about the implications of annexation, or statehood.
I am a son of Puerto Rico. I am also the former president and general counsel of LatinoJustice PRLDEF, formerly the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. I’ve defended civil rights, racial justice, and the right of Puerto Ricans to fair self-determination for my entire career. The pro-statehood messaging around Puerto Rico’s future fails to address the fact that the ways Puerto Rico and the U.S. operate in many spaces are dramatically different.
Puerto Rico is clearly confronting a web of issues stemming from U.S. colonialism. But as history and practice show, the Puerto Rican people have been leaders in spaces like criminal justice.
Since 1980, Puerto Ricans who are incarcerated are allowed to vote and they avidly exercise that right from their prison cells. With over 6,500 of 11,500 prisoners registered to vote in Puerto Rican elections, candidates campaign for their votes in a Caribbean archipelago where democracy is not eliminated through incarceration.
In Puerto Rico, capital punishment was abolished in 1929 and enshrined in its first-ever constitution in 1952. History tells us that the first persons ever executed by the government were enslaved Africans in 1514—killed for leading an uprising. But that is no more, as the command that “The death penalty shall not exist” is the law.
Puerto Rico also has a constitutional right to bail. Since its constitution of 1952 the protection is clear: “Every accused shall be entitled to be admitted to bail.” Apparently, it is the only place in the Western Hemisphere that establishes a fundamental right to bail in all cases. Even fear-mongering by its opponents has been rejected by the public as recently as 2012 and previously in 1994.
In part, Puerto Rico’s traditions stand in contrast to those of most states because it patterned its own Bill of Rights not after the U.S. Bill of Rights but after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Predictably, given its colonial status, these policies create tension with the colonizer especially given where Puerto Rico stands on capital punishment, which the federal government insists has no bearing on it seeking the death penalty in Puerto Rico’s federal courts. This big footing is part and parcel of colonial dominance since 1898, with this year marking the 125th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico.
Now, this is not to say that there are not severe systemic racial and criminal justice problems in Puerto Rico, where the police department has a federal monitor, deservedly, where a femicide crisis and violence against transgender residents have no end in sight, and where prison conditions are deplorable.
But if Puerto Rico is being boxed into statehood, will Congress commit in writing not to infringe on the progressive values and practices long established in Puerto Rico’s constitution and laws? Will Members of Congress deny the right-wing forces in the island that would be willing to sacrifice these legal protections in exchange for statehood?
Currently, the Puerto Rico Status Act (PRSA) is being pushed in Congress as a remedy to its colonial status. Consider history in a Caribbean country where the legislature, government agencies, schools, and courts—and all those who come before them—conduct business in Spanish, 24/7. Prior to Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and other states being tracked into the union, Congress included English language requirements in the enabling acts they passed. The U.S. immediately imposed an Americanization policy in the early 1900s to force Puerto Rican schools to teach in English—after decades of disaster and failure Puerto Rico finally restored Spanish as the medium of instruction. Yet the PRSA dodges what Puerto Ricans would be subjected to in crucial matters like language, criminal justice, and taxes.
As a lawyer and as someone deeply concerned about the present and future of Puerto Rico, it’s a big red flag when major issues like these are left out of the conversation and not clearly stated. And I must ask why? And who does this serve? Because it’s not Puerto Ricans, justice, or human rights.
While we witnessed the Supreme Court roll over hard-fought battles to extend “America’s promise,” we were reminded that nothing can be taken for granted. The details of what the United States will commit to—or not—when it comes to this politically expedient push for statehood matter. Puerto Ricans, here and there, need to take heed and demand answers, not the void that this legislation offers.
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