The Forgotten Foreign Agenda

The days of the antiwar liberals are long past. President Clinton's offensive foreign policy strategy is accountable for almost one-third of the casualties in Yugoslavia's civil war. His pilots have bombed a Chinese embassy. He has ordered an attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory that a Dateline NBC report suggested may have been merely a civilian facility. His sanctions have killed more than a million innocent Iraqi civilians through malnutrition and easily preventable diseases.

Even more troubling, however, is that the killing of this magnitude has become business as usual, especially on the campaign trail. While Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Sen. John S. McCain (R-Ariz.) trumpet this bipartisan massacre--claiming that this places foreign policy "above politics"--their complacency abdicates the opposition party's duty to provide the nation with a choice. Consequently, most important foreign policy issues will be removed from the debate in the upcoming general election.

The Clinton administration's foreign policy is as extraordinary for its reliance on lethal force as for its complete inability to inspire any kind of vocal antiwar opposition. Despite the impression cultivated by mainstream media, McCain and Bush agree on many of their issues. They equally support America's blank check security guarantee to Taiwan. Both have come out in support of NATO's expansion. McCain has spoken in favor of the Bosnian and Kosovar campaigns while Bush one-ups him with his vague promises to lend "support" to "the Baltics, the Caucasus Central Asia and the Ukraine" by "promoting regional peace." And neither seems to have any qualms about the humanitarian implications of America's interventionism.

For instance, the Yugoslavian air campaign is portrayed by both camps as, if anything, not aggressive enough. While Bush laments the president's decision not to use ground troops, McCain bemoans that "most Americans cannot see the connection between our security and Mr. Milosevic's crimes." Never mind that these crimes, according to a recent U.N. report, resulted in only a tiny fraction of the casulaties claimed by Secretrary of Defense William S. Cohen.

Neither of the two leading Republican presidential candidates appear to have lost as much as a wink of sleep over the million or more deaths caused by the Iraqi embargo. Bush and McCain both support enforcement of the sanctions, and McCain even openly demands the overthrow of Saddam's regime. One can only wonder how Bush and McCain can display such callous attitudes toward such blatant misinformation and destruction of innocent human life.

Because of the Republican frontrunners' positions, it seems the American people won't have any foreign policy choices in the general election. Regardless which party wins, America will administer multiple Balkan protectorates, give out war guarantees as easily as they would popcorn and starve millions of innocent foreigners because they won't install the stooges of Uncle Sam. Although the next American president will have to pass judgement on whether or not it is in our interests to make Latvia a member of NATO, the electorate will not be able to express an opinion on this matter. It seems parties are prepared to nominate dyed in the wool internationalists.

It makes sense that no candidate, in this day and age, would want the label of "isolationist." But Republicans have fallen a long way since Ronald Reagan's reign, when intervention was at least employed as a means to a worthy end--the destruction of the Soviet Union. Today, Republicans endorse crusade after crusade, each time undertaking a newly permanent international commitment that results in more, rather than less, human suffering. Republicans have been intoxicated by a new internationalist machismo that offers one final claim to greatness by the leaders of the post-Cold War era. But eleven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it appears that the Evil Empire is now us.

Steven R. Pirairo '02 is an economics concentrator in Leverett House. He is a contributing writer for the Harvard Salient.