United States citizens, as a rule, don’t care about foreign policy. It’s that thing out there, away from directly affecting our daily lives. Trump, while he was still campaigning, said he was going to end the “forever wars.” Like so many of his promises he reneged on this too. Foreign policy is a place that is totally controlled by the deep state: the war machine and diplomatic corps. From Eisenhower’s famous military industrial complex speech at the end of his presidency to the present, that deep state of military contractors, armed forces, diplomatic corps and our government, all believe that our massive military strength can take the place of peaceful diplomacy in negotiations for other country’s natural resources. Basically, our diplomacy is, “give us what we want or we will dismantle your government to our taste and starve you until you give in.” Nobody but United States’ citizens believes that we’re in other countries to implement democracy. This is bi-partisanship at its ugliest.
We have no right to intervene just because we don’t like their leaders. As an example, I give you Venezuela. The great majority of our government officials, Republican and Democrat, officially supported a non-entity, Juan Guiado, as our pick for president of Venezuela. All three of Vermont’s liberal legislators, Senators Leahy and Sanders and Rep. Welch, voted for this abomination. Somehow these three Democrats believe that we have the right to pick Venezuela’s president. It doesn’t matter what you think of their leader, it’s their leader. We have no right to intervene any more than they have a right to intervene in our elections. (As an example of our government’s hypocrisy, look how we complained of Russian meddling in our own election.)’
IMMORAL FANTASY
The corporate press is part of this immoral fantasy. The norm for the mainstream press is that dozens of countries joined the U.S. in condemning the real President Maduro and support Juan Guiado. That was probably true: but dozens of countries? There are 167 countries on the surface of the Earth. So only U.S. client states went along with us. Even the opponents of President Maduro in Venezuela despise Juan Guiado. They know he’s a U.S. puppet and they want no part of him after a century of western corporations’, led by our government, meddling in their country to the detriment of the Venezuelan people.
But, to different degrees, this could be said about many American countries: including Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Haiti, etc. for the last 150 years. And now the military approach to politics has come home. The Trumpists, even though they despise our government and call the corporate press fake news, believe that all leftists should be violently disposed of, even those who are United States citizens. Foreign policy poison, as with other viruses, doesn’t conform to human-made boundaries.
To stop the madness that imperial foreign policy entails, we, as citizens, must be aware and stop our government from treating other peoples as tools for our ravenous dependency on their resources. We must embrace democracy in all its forms and respect the decisions of other cultures to embark on their journeys toward more humanity. As we have seen quite recently, our house is made of glass.
Lehman lives in Warren.
