Our Rotten Foreign Policy Status Quo

Greater public scrutiny is no guarantee that monstrous policies will end, but it makes it harder for the government to maintain the status quo.

Perry Bacon probably speaks for many Americans that don’t follow U.S. foreign policy closely and are then shocked by how terrible it can be:

Like a lot of Americans, I don’t follow foreign affairs as closely as I probably should. I have generally assumed that the United States, particularly with Biden in office, plays a largely positive role abroad. Watching senior US. officials adopt a deeply flawed approach and then make misleading statements about it has made me more worried and skeptical of America’s actions in other parts of the world. If Team Biden is this disingenuous about what’s happening in Gaza, should I trust its words about Ukraine, Sudan or China?

Most Americans pay little attention to how our government acts around the world, but when people in this country are directly confronted with how dangerous and destructive U.S. policies can be they are often appalled. There are many cases where the cruelty of U.S. policies goes unseen by most of the public, and so those policies don’t meet with much criticism and opposition. The frequent use of broad sanctions to attack the people of other countries is one example of this, but we also saw how U.S. backing for the war on Yemen went on for years before there was significant pressure to end our government’s involvement. Greater public scrutiny is no guarantee that monstrous policies will end, but it makes it harder for the government to maintain the status quo.

The war in Gaza is shining a spotlight on just how morally and strategically bankrupt the U.S. approach to Israel and Palestine has been for decades, and it also shines a light on the crimes that our government enables through its support for client governments. It might be too much to hope that this wakes a lot of Americans up to the harm that our foreign policy does around the world every day, but there is no question that it exposes the rottenness of the status quo. There are occasionally moments when the public sees the extent of this rottenness and demands something better, and we may be witnessing something like that with the backlash against this war.

I suspect that a lot of people share Bacon’s assumption that the U.S. “plays a largely positive role abroad,” because this is what people want to believe about their government and this is what they have been told. To the extent that most foreign policy pundits acknowledge U.S. “mistakes,” they usually present these as unfortunate exceptions rather than treating them as part of a pattern. When people have grown up with the fairy tale version of U.S. “leadership” in which our government is a stabilizing force and the preserver of world order, it can be quite a shock to learn that the reality is very different and much uglier.

U.S. support for the war in Gaza discredits the administration’s foreign policy, but it also discredits the foreign policy establishment that Biden has represented for decades. The flawed approach he has had to this war is the product of decades of bad policy choices in the Middle East and false assumptions about the U.S. role in the world. Biden tied this war to the idea of America as the “essential nation,” and in doing so he reminded everyone how pernicious that idea is. Support for the war is an indictment of the president’s poor judgement, but it is also an indictment of U.S. “leadership” itself.