“Does anyone have a plan?” Here’s how we fix decades of overseas neo-conservative adventurism
Author: Patrick Smith is Salon’s foreign affairs columnist. A longtime correspondent abroad, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune and The New Yorker, he is also an essayist, critic and editor. His most recent books are “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century” (Yale, 2013) and Somebody Else’s Century: East and West in a Post-Western World (Pantheon, 2010).
"We have accepted the horrors of American exceptionalism for too long. Here's a progressive foreign policy blueprint
“Tell me, what exactly is ‘an authentically progressive foreign policy.’”
That is the request of a reader responding to last week’s column in the comment thread that follows it. The reference is to my observation that any such policy would probably prompt the policy cliques—the deep state in the column’s terms—to subvert the political candidate who dared advance it.
I do not think this is a reasonable request. Nor do I think Mark Twain and the other anti-imperialists who rose against the Spanish-American War would. I am certain the late Chalmers Johnson would not: His final book was “Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope.” Or William Appleman Williams, who titled his last book “Empire as a Way of Life.” Or the late Gabriel Kolko, the leading revisionist among Cold War historians. Or the late William Pfaff, the distinguished columnist and author of—his last book—“The Tragedy of Manifest Destiny.”
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And it is a lot more important to do so. Any progressive foreign policy worthy of the designation must, must, must be anti-imperialist, know itself as such and let all others know it as such, too.
The reasoning here is simple.
First is definition. No foreign policy that does not take America’s withdrawal from its now-preposterous imperial overreach as its starting point can possibly compute out as progressive. Shutting down the empire is the sine qua non—the foundation stone on which all else rests. All the talk of the reluctant imperialists, “If not us, who?” Forget it: self-justifying rubbish.
“However ambitious President Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch,” Chalmers Johnson wrote in “Dismantling,” a few months after Obama took office. “Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it.”
Substitute any name you wish for Obama’s and the point stands.
Second is the power of language. Naming the gorilla is transforming. Listen to Bernie Sanders, whether or not you like him. When he says “socialism” or “universal health care” he changes the conversation. There are two fewer taboos to turn public discourse into cotton wool. It is the same in the case of foreign policy."
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/28/does_anyone_have_a_plan_heres_how_we_fix_decades_of_overseas_neo_conservative_adventurism/