US and morality – a critique of US foreign policy

Even before Donald Trump loudly proclaimed ‘America first’ as the guiding principle of the country’s future policies, this was and remained the underlying consideration of US foreign policy under his predecessors. The Trump doctrine, if one can call it that, is more Twitter-based and much louder than before. As a superpower, the US cherished this self-belief that it was motivated to do good in the world. And when things went wrong in the real world as the US saw it, it was ‘obliged’ to restore its ‘moral’ imperative.

Even Henry Kissinger, considered US’ master strategist by some, fell for this aphorism. He wrote in his book, Diplomacy, “No nation has ever imposed the moral demands on itself that America has. And no country has so tormented itself over the gap between its moral values, which are by definition absolute, and the imperfection inherent in the concrete situations to which they must be applied.”  It is this moral dimension –“messianic” belief as Kissinger puts it — that has cost the US so much in political and economic terms.

Taking this on face value and decrying its high cost, Donald Trump would want the US to stop being a do-gooder and charge its allies for defending them. If they don’t want to, let them defend themselves even if it would mean countries like Japan and South Korea to go nuclear, though he is making necessary adjustments as he goes along, even to the point of, at times, repudiating his original position on NATO, for instance. Which is no longer, considered obsolete.

But returning to the ‘moral’ imperative of US policy, Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations under the Obama administration, made a case for further strengthening it as the guiding principle of the US policy. She made this point in an article in the New York Review of Books, drawn from a lecture at the American Academy in Berlin: “What happens to people in other countries matters to the welfare of our nation and our citizens. The sooner we recognize that reality, the better off we will be.” In other words, the US was obliged to correct the global moral deficit as and when it occurred, and that there was no real contradiction between US strategic interests and moral imperative. Trump is making his own modification as he goes along, notwithstanding glaring contradictions now and before.

Was it this self-belief, and the constraints it supposedly imposed on the US as Kissinger perceived it, which ‘saved’ Vietnam and Laos from even greater destruction during the sixties’ war that killed nearly 2 million Vietnamese, with unexploded US munitions still littering the countryside and maiming people going about their normal lives? Laos was the collateral damage in the larger scheme of saving the region from communism. And what collateral damage!

During the first and only Laos visit by any US President, Barack Obama admitted that the United States had dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on this small country during the height of the Vietnam War—more than it dropped on Germany and Japan together during World War II. This made Laos, per capita, the most heavily bombed country in human history.

As Obama acknowledged, “Villages and entire valleys were obliterated. Countless civilians were killed.” He didn’t formally apologize on behalf his country for the destruction it wrought on this little country, but indirectly admitted US responsibility by announcing that the US would double to $30 million a year for three years its aid to Laos to find and dismantle the unexploded ordinance (UXO) scattered throughout the country. The US desire to rid Vietnam and Laos of communism was so ‘morally’ overpowering that any price it inflicted on its enemies was worth them paying for it.

Despite this and many other examples of confusing morality and strategy, the self-belief that the US was motivated by a desire to do ‘good’ for the world continued to persist. Noam Chomsky, who has been an annoyance all through for being America’s conscience, in a sense, when most Americans have felt self-righteous, takes issue with this self-image in his book, Who Rules the World?

Kenneth Roth, in his review of the book for the New York Review of Books, while taking Chomsky to task for selectively picking on the US, has this to say about its intervention in Chile not many years ago: “Americans are rightly appalled by al-Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001, which killed some three thousand people, but most Americans have relegated to distant memory what Chomsky calls ‘the first 9/11’—September 11, 1973—when the US government backed a coup in Chile that brought to power General Augusto Pinochet, who proceeded to execute three thousand people.”

Why did the US allow it to happen? Because, as Roth paraphrases, “As with the US actions in Cuba and Vietnam, the US-endorsed overthrow of the socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende was meant, in the words of the Nixon administration quoted by Chomsky, to kill the ‘virus’ before it ‘spread contagion’ among those who didn’t want to accommodate the interests of a US-led order.”

And the “virus” Chomsky writes, “was the idea that there might be a parliamentary path toward some kind of socialist democracy.” Chomsky elaborates, “The way to deal with such a threat was to destroy the virus and inoculate those who might be infected, typically by imposing murderous national-security states” in its backyard, as well as elsewhere in the world where US primacy and dominance was considered necessary. 

Indonesia’s case is instructive in this respect where the Suharto regime, reportedly acting on CIA intelligence to hunt out alleged communists, killed half a million or more people during 1965 and 1966. Kenneth Roth, in his review, quotes Chomsky who described how this “staggering mass slaughter” was greeted with “unrestrained euphoria” in Washington’s corridors of power.

Noam Chomsky, in his book, goes on to offer example after example of US hypocrisy. In the Middle East, for instance, Israel has carte blanche when it acts in contravention of US and international policy against occupation and expansion of settlements in the Palestinian territory. It has now reached a point now that an internationally agreed solution of two states formula is essentially invalidated because any Palestinian state will be unviable after Israel’s constant nibbling of its territory. In any case, under the Trump administration, Israel is now free to do as it pleases.

Kenneth Roth’s main criticism of Chomsky’s book is that, “His book is mainly a critique, as if he cannot envision a positive role for America other than a negation of the harmful ones he highlights.” Roth concedes its positive side, though, when he writes that, “Yet imperfect as the book is, we should understand it as a plea to end American hypocrisy, to introduce a more consistently principled dimension to American relations with the world, and instead of assuming American benevolence, to scrutinize critically how the US government actually exercises its still-unmatched power.”

If only Chomsky could stir America’s conscience, he would have achieved more than his life’s intellectual input. But, under President Trump, the level of volatility, in the name of ‘America first’, is frightening.