by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On Tuesday night, right after the first episode of The
Contenders (an eight-part series about 16
different Presidential candidates, two per episode, that opened with Shirley
Chisholm’s run for the Democratic nomination in 1972 despite the dual handicap
of being Black and a woman, and John McCain’s candidacies in 2000 and 2008),
PBS showed an interesting one-hour program called American Umpire that presented a surprisingly compelling overview of
American foreign policy since our declaration of independence in 1776. The
surprise was due to the fact that the principal sponsors of the program were
two conservative think tanks, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and
the libertarian Cato Institute — and yet, despite a few factual errors and
hints of Right-wing bias, it was overall a fair-minded program whose bottom
line was a deep questioning of whether the U.S. should continue in its costly
role of being “policeman of the world” that we assumed after being part of the
winning side in World War II and then ending up in a 34-year Cold War with our
former World War II ally, the Soviet Union. American Umpire featured a wide array of guests, ranging from such
pillars of the foreign policy establishment as former Secretaries of State
George Schultz (under Ronald Reagan), Madeleine Albright (under Bill Clinton)
and Condoleeza Rice (under George W. Bush) to various journalists, historians
and others to present a broad picture of U.S. foreign policy’s past, present
and potential future.
The show argues that the first President, George
Washington, laid down three broad principles that would govern how the U.S.
conducted its relations with other nations that pretty much endured until
America’s entry into World War I shook them and World War II and the Cold War
shattered them completely. The first was neutrality: instead of participating
in other countries’ wars the U.S. would impartially offer its resources in
trade to anyone who asked. The second was nonintervention: the U.S. wouldn’t
get involved either in attacking or defending other countries, so we didn’t get
ourselves involved in the round robin of endless wars that had beset Europe for
centuries. The third was that the U.S. would not maintain a permanent
(“standing”) military; if we found ourselves at war we’d raise one ad
hoc on the basis of state militias — the real purpose of the Second Amendment, contrary to the
Right-wing crazies who have used it to enshrine an individual right to bear
arms, was so that when the nation was in danger and the militia recruiters came
a-calling, the people they recruited would have weapons with which to fight.
Though as the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military under the Continental
Congress during the American Revolution George Washington had been driven nuts
by the limitations of relying on state militias — including the fact that if
their terms of enlistment ran out in the middle of a battle they could go home
and, since they’d been credentialed by their individual states rather than any
federal government, he could do almost nothing to stop them; he also worked
incredibly hard to instill in them a common sense of purpose and level of
discipline similar to that of the British military they were fighting — as
President he shared the concern of a lot of his contemporaries that a standing
army and a democracy were incompatible: sooner or later the military would use
its monopoly on force to unseat the republican government and take over
themselves. (The history of the rest of the American hemisphere since it won
independence from Spain and Portugal is a sorry testimony to Washington’s
correct analysis.)
Indeed, it’s often occurred to me that the framers of the
U.S. Constitution would be astounded at the fact that the President’s
constitutional power of commander-in-chief routinely extends throughout his
term, from the moment he takes office until he leaves it four or eight years
later. According to the Constitution, it’s supposed to be Congress’s job to
decide when the U.S. is at war by making a formal declaration to that effect, and
then — and only then — the
President assumes his (or, maybe after this year, her?) role as
commander-in-chief of the army raised to fight the war Congress has declared.
(The whole idea that Congress declares war is, as Bush II attorney John Yoo
said of the Geneva Conventions, “obsolete and quaint” — so much so that the
last time Congress actually declared war was December 8, 1941, the day after
Japan attacked the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor.) The show made a few dubious
factual assertions; for one, it said the U.S. was the first country in the
world to unite previously existing republics into a federal system (it was
Switzerland, which declared independence and founded the Swiss Confederation in
1648, 140 years before the U.S. Constitution went into effect). More
importantly, it said that until 1917 the U.S. never directly intervened in another country’s war. That
may have been true in Europe and the rest of the eastern hemisphere, but it was
decidedly not true for the
western hemisphere, which under the Monroe Doctrine the U.S. essentially
declared its “sphere of influence” (much the way the Soviet Union regarded
eastern Europe as its “sphere of
influence” between 1945 and 1989) and claimed for itself the right to intervene
in the political and military affairs of any American country, ostensibly to
prevent its reconquest by the European colonial powers but actually to make
sure they weren’t governed by any leader, party or group that threatened U.S.
economic interests in the region.
The show quotes John Quincy Adams as saying,
“America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” but while he said
that he was also serving as Monroe’s Secretary of State and actually writing
what came to be called the Monroe Doctrine. In the 19th century, in
addition to fighting the Civil War, the U.S. intervened in Mexico in 1846-48
(and ultimately conquered two-fifths of the territory Mexico had inherited when
it declared and won independence from Spain), in Cuba and the Philippines in
1898, and in plenty of other places in what it considered its post-colonial
American sphere of influence. It also reached beyond the Americas and the
former Spanish colonies in the Pacific, establishing a military presence in
China in the late 19th century to ensure what was called the “Open
Door Policy,” so that instead of China being conquered and divided up among the
big European powers the way Africa and southern Asia had been, it would be
allowed to remain nominally independent but be subjected to economic
exploitation from all Western countries on an equal basis. Nonetheless, as the
program argued, the U.S. did
pursue a policy throughout the 19th century of noninvolvement in
European wars and avoided alliances with any one European country against
another. Then World War I began and, though for the first three years the U.S.
remained nominally neutral and sold arms and resources to both sides, there was
a subtle but unmistakable “tilt” towards Britain and France, and against
Germany, that got stronger with the sinking of the U.S.S. Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915 and reached a climax
in early 1917, when Germany’s declaration that they had a right to use
submarines to sink any ships taking weapons or anything else to Britain
prompted President Woodrow Wilson to ask Congress for a declaration of war and
put the U.S. firmly on the side of the British and French against the Germans.
Britain and France won the war, largely because American help came in time to
tip the balance decisively against the Germans and their played-out allies, Austro-Hungary
and Turkey — though, as this show points out, Wilson refrained from declaring
the U.S. formally “allied” with Britain and France. Instead U.S. troops fought
alongside British and French ones but under separate command and under the
mandate of a totally separate declaration of war against Germany.
After World
War I public sentiment in the U.S. turned overwhelmingly against future
involvement in Europe’s conflicts — the U.S. Senate rejected American
membership in the League of Nations (the international organization Wilson had
proposed and hoped would settle international disputes peaceably from then on)
and Republican Warren G. Harding, who famously (and malapropistically — the
word he meant was “normality”) promised “a return to normalcy.” As President,
Harding called an international conference in Washington, D.C. in November 1921
— his speech at its opening on November 12 was recorded on Victor and is
available at https://archive.org/details/WarrenG.Harding-OpeningOfLimitationOfArmamentsConference;
it’s astonishing in that Harding’s arguments against war — not only the loss of
life and the destruction of property but the enormous amounts of money wasted
in the production of armaments that could be used for improving the lives of
ordinary citizens — sound more like the rhetoric of a radical peacenik than a
Republican President. During the 1920’s, as American Umpire shows, under American leadership the major powers —
Britain, France, Japan — actually not only signed disarmament treaties but
actually destroyed some of their own ships and other military equipment to get
their arms down to the limits specified in the treaties. Then the Great
Depression of 1929 hit and international tensions escalated, and Germany in
particular was taken over by the Nazis (who had actually manipulated the German
government because they did so much better when the German economy was tanking,
and so much worse when it was doing well, they deliberately sabotaged the
German government’s negotiations to reduce the crippling burden of reparations
payments the Germans owed to France under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that
officially ended World War I), but as the makers of American Umpire, director James Shelley and writers Elizabeth Cobbs
and John Mikulsak, use 1930’s newsreel footage to point out, even under the
growing threat of fascism in general and Nazism in particular, American public
opinion remained strongly isolationist throughout the decade.
The show points
out that the U.S. Congress passed no fewer than five neutrality acts, each
stronger than the one before it, and President Franklin Roosevelt reluctantly
signed each one even though (a point they don’t mention) he was fully aware of the danger the Nazis
posed to the U.S. and had carried on a secret correspondence with Winston
Churchill, in which the letters on both sides were signed, “Former Naval
Person” (since during World War I Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty
in Britain and Roosevelt had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the U.S.).
Ultimately the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Hitler
declared war on the U.S. a day later (which made Roosevelt heave several sighs
of relief because he’d been able to get a declaration of war against Japan but
it was uncertain he could have got one against Germany, which hadn’t directly
attacked us, until Germany obliging declared war on us first). The U.S., of course, ended up on the winning
side of World War II along with Britain and Russia, and Russia set up its own
“sphere of influence” in eastern Europe and — at least according to the
historical analysis of this program; other sources differ — attempted to foment
Communist revolutions in Greece and Italy, leading President Harry Truman to
proclaim the so-called “Truman Doctrine” that from now on the U.S. would intervene anywhere in the world where “freedom” was
threatened — i.e., wherever Communist revolutions, whether Soviet-backed or
home-grown, arose and fought against the kinds of conservative capitalist
governments the U.S. wanted established throughout the world. The U.S. formed
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and a whole slew of interlocking
alliances that eventually encompassed virtually the whole non-Communist “free”
world, and also assumed the principal burden of protecting western Europe from
any threat of a Soviet attack. The U.S. also decided that Germany and Japan
would no longer be trusted to have powerful militaries of their own, and
instead we would assume the
burden of their defense budget. At the same time the U.S. also decided that the threat not only of the Soviet Union
but also China, after Mao Zedong (or however we’re spelling his name this week)
and the Communists won their
revolution in 1949, required that we build up Germany and Japan as buffer
states, under non-fascist but safely conservative governments.
The result was
that from the 1950’s to the 1980’s West Germany and Japan built up their
economies, vastly expanded their production of consumer goods, and successfully
marketed them to American consumers — which they could do at least partly
because, without the burden of maintaining a military establishment, they could
put more of their national budgets into developing their civilian economies for
both domestic consumption and export. Flash-forward again to the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and its
eastern European “sphere of influence” in 1989 — presented in this film, as in
most American reportage, as the unambiguous triumph of capitalist democracy
over Communist dictatorship — and to a growing critique of American foreign
policy from the libertarian Right and, in this year’s Presidential campaign, by
Donald Trump, to the effect that it’s time for the U.S. to back off the task of
defending the rest of the world and insist that other countries, particularly
places like western Europe and Japan that are cleaning our clock economically,
to pay more of their fair share for their own defense. This show attempts a
serious and sober-minded presentation of an idea that when Trump talks about it
talks, as my husband Charles has said, like a “protection” racketeer in a
1930’s gangster movie: “Nice little country you’ve got here. It’d be a shame if
anything ‘happened’ to it.” While all the former secretaries of state
interviewed in the program recite the usual American elites’ party line that
the U.S. has to be the world’s
policeman and international stability would collapse completely if we withdrew
or cut back our defense spending the way the libertarians and Trump are
proposing (though Trump is also promising a huge military buildup even though
it’s unclear exactly what he wants to do with a much larger version of a U.S. military that is already bigger
than almost all the other militaries of the world combined), it’s clear that Shelley, Cobbs and Mikulak
seriously believe that the time has come for the U.S. to make its next sweeping
re-evaluation of its role in the world and back away from being the world’s
policeman and maintaining the network of military bases the late Chalmers
Johnson said was the bulwark of America’s version of an empire.
This debate,
such as it is, is being played out in the context of a Presidential campaign
that, even more than usual, is about trivialities — Hillary Clinton’s e-mails
and her personal health, Donald Trump’s swaggering style and the degree to
which it’s getting in the way of his winning an election even in an era in
which overwhelming numbers of Americans are hungering for “change” without much
idea of just what sort of “change” they want. To the extent the campaign is
about issues, it’s about domestic issues — particularly the so-called
“recovery” from the 2008 recession, whose benefits have gone almost totally to
the 1 percent — and the threat of terrorism, though quite a few Americans have
retreated to a neo-isolationist position and really don’t care what happens in
the rest of the world except to the extent that it looses terrorists to kill
Americans on our own soil. You’ve got a foreign-policy establishment unshakably
committed to maintaining America’s military pre-eminence in the world, a
counter-argument from both the
Left and the libertarian Right that we’re spending more than we need to on
so-called “defense” that helps other countries to the detriment of the U.S.,
and a confused political system that doesn’t know how to respond except by
throwing up as the two major-party Presidential candidates a woman who’s part
and parcel of the Establishment and a man who seems to think in temper
tantrums. This year’s election — and the issues American Umpire is raising — will largely be determined by whether
the American people so desperately want change they’re willing to take a chance
on Donald Trump, of all people, to deliver it; or whether they’re so scared by
him they’re willing to vote for the ultra-Establishment candidate on the
Shakespearean principle that we should “rather bear those ills we have/Than fly
to others that we know not of.”
