Our Foreign Policy Calamity

Below is an article I wrote up for the BYU Political Review. You'll probably agree with me since I'm right.

Our Foreign Policy Calamity

It’s about time for our empirical, oppressive, interventionist foreign policy to come to an end. For the past sixty years, our government has been maintaining a foreign policy, that especially recently, has shaped a despicable perception of our country. The majority of the international community shares resentment toward our government’s neoconservative policies and our prideful actions in the international theatre. This is possibly one of the most important issues facing our nation today.
World War II was a war formally declared by the Congress and effectively didn’t last all that long. It didn’t last nearly as long as our involvement in Afghanistan or Iraq, and certainly not as long as the Vietnam War. It makes one wonder, why is that the case? I’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve become bogged down in no-win wars because we’ve gone to war for all the wrong reasons. We haven’t declared war since WWII. Arguably, we haven’t won a war since then, yet a lot of killing has been going on and a whole lot of money has been spent. Now if we’re going to follow the rule of law, the Constitution states very clearly that the power to declare war lies specifically with the Congress, not on the whims of a president. The president has no authority to send our country to war on his word alone.
I couldn’t imagine a foreigner seeing our country as anything other than an empire with the way we approach the rest of the world and other countries’ internal politics. We have assumed a moral superiority over everyone else and we’ve had no problem imposing our will on weaker states. Our foreign policy is that of an empire mainly because we have over 700 military establishments in over 140 countries. Hundreds of thousands of troops are stationed everywhere in the world, from Japan to Germany. I ask why? Why do we needlessly prop up military bases and station troops all over the world if not to impose our will and influence in sovereign nations?
Not only is this morally despicable, this maintenance is also bankrupting our nation. In order to maintain such an empire, we end up spending up towards 1 TRILLION DOLLARS on overseas adventurism alone… annually! All of this money is being spent outside of the United States. Think about what we could do with that kind of money! We could have the entire national debt paid off within a decade. We could fix the social security system and actually have money in that fund for the next generation. We could fix our crumbling infrastructure instead of maintaining Iraq’s or Afghanistan’s. Or even better, let the taxpayers keep the money in the first place.
Not only are we going broke from our foreign policy, we are actually much less safe because of it. There is no doubt in my mind that the main reason we are threatened from outside terrorists is because of our foreign policy. It’s not because we’re free and prosperous. It’s not because we give women the right to vote, or because we have freedom of religion. A great deal of other nations are very similar to us in this respect and yet they don’t face an equal threat of terrorism. This concept is described by the CIA as blowback. Blowback is defined as being the unintended consequences of the US imposing its will and influence in other sovereign nations.
A couple examples of this concept include the formation of al Qaeda against the US. During the Cold War, believe it or not, the United States armed and trained Osama Bin Laden and his men to rebel against the forces of the Soviet Union in the Middle East. Then when we established bases along the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, this angered al Qaeda; we had established our forces on their Holy Land. This is al Qaeda’s main reasoning for its actions of terrorism against the US. Another consequence of our blowback is the increasing threat of Iran. In 1953 our CIA took appalling steps to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Iran and put the Shah Dictator into power. This eventually led to the fundamentalist revolution and caused a great deal of strife for the Iranians. When our country takes actions like that against foreigners they don’t just let it go. Heck, we even allied ourselves and propped up Saddam Hussein up until his actions didn’t quite serve the US interest- then he became enemy of state number one.
It’s time we adopted a foreign policy of non-intervention. It’s time we lived within our means and treated all other nation states as equals. It is unnecessary to maintain all of these troops and military establishments abroad; we would be better off if we brought our troops home. We would be better off if our main focus was our nation’s infrastructure and our national security instead of policing the world and nation building. It’s time that our actions abroad starting reflecting the interest of the American people and not a neoconservative agenda.