The Washington Post, July 21, 2024
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Mostrando postagens com marcador US Foreign Policy. Mostrar todas as postagens
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terça-feira, 23 de julho de 2024
Netanyahu goes to Washington in the shadow of Middle East disaster - Ishaan Tharoor, Anika Arora Seth (The Washington Post)
segunda-feira, 16 de agosto de 2021
'This is not Saigon' (no, it's worse) - Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu (CNN Meanwhile in America)
'This is not Saigon'
There is no end to the torment of the people of Afghanistan and Haiti. Both nations, desperately poor and plagued by violence, experienced brief glimpses of hope in recent decades, as foreign aid and muscle arrived with the hope of peace and rebuilding. But the agony of each deepened this weekend. Afghanistan is again largely under the boot of the Taliban as America’s 20-year misadventure ends in a rushed exit. And Haiti, hit by another murderous earthquake and still reeling from the assassination of its president, seems no better equipped to save itself than it was in 2010.
What was it all for?
The Taliban is back in Kabul. Afghans are once again sliding into a new dark age of repression and persecution of women. And the United States is beating a humiliating retreat, becoming the latest superpower humbled in Central Asia’s graveyard of empires.
The most immediate consequence of the militia’s blitzkrieg across Afghanistan is a political disaster for President Joe Biden who ordered all American troops out but failed to orchestrate an orderly withdrawal.
Pessimists have warned about a Saigon-style helicopter retreat from the US embassy for a while now. But most didn’t really think it could happen. Until Sunday.
It now looks almost impossible that the US will succeed in extracting all the Afghans who acted as translators and fixers and in other roles for its forces over 20 years — and who face an awful fate if they are left behind. Former President Ashraf Ghani’s flight and the melting away of Afghan forces trained with billions of US and allied dollars without a fight — finally exposed the myths that Washington had allowed it to believe about "success" in the country.
Ironically, those failures served to prove Biden’s rationale for leaving — that no amount of US blood and treasure could ever make Afghanistan a functioning, unified nation — at least the one dreamed of by US foreign policy planners. Like Iraq and Libya, Afghanistan has found out that in the modern era, America’s zeal to get into wars is only exceeded by its rush to get out of them, no matter the mess that is left behind. Also spare a thought for the families of Afghan civilians killed by misdirected US fire. Or the relatives of Americans and allied troops from Canada, Britain, Italy, Australia and elsewhere who perished or left limbs on Afghan battlefields.
America’s global reputation is meanwhile in for a shredding. The President who just toured Europe promising that “America is back” after the poison of the Trump years is presiding over a humiliating defeat. And Biden’s vows to fight for global democracy are now undermined by his own abandonment by a US-backed democratic government in Kabul.
It’s not all Biden’s fault. He’s just carrying the can for the messy exit. Four US administrations tried covert warfare, bombing blitzes, occupation, nation building, troop surges, counter-insurgencies and troop drawdowns on Washington’s arbitrary timetables. It all led up to today.
The question “what was it all for” is best answered by another one: Was US intervention ever going to end any other way?
domingo, 8 de novembro de 2020
Foreign Affairs: US election, American Foreign Policy, Biden diplomacy
THE U.S. ELECTION
In Foreign Affairs earlier this year, presumptive President-Elect Joe Biden set out a planfor restoring the United States’ position of global leadership. The essays below consider what Biden should do when he takes charge of U.S. foreign policy—and whether his vision of the country once again at the head of the table can, or should, be achieved.
quinta-feira, 14 de novembro de 2019
A degradação da Política Externa dos EUA por Trump - Max Boot (WP)
Trump’s corrupted foreign policy: Coddle the dictator, abuse the ally
The Trump administration’s corruption and degradation of U.S. foreign policy were on shameful display on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue on Wednesday.
In the White House, President Trump was fawning over Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a vicious anti-American dictator who has ethnically cleansed the Kurds in northern Syria, locked up his domestic critics and established close ties with Russia. “You’re doing a fantastic job for the people of Turkey,” Trump gushed. Of course he did: By Trump’s lights, this is how a leader should behave.
Trump even praised Erdogan for having “a great relationship with the Kurds,” which will come as news to them. The United States reportedly has drone imagery showing atrocities committed against Kurds by pro-Turkish militias in Syria; I’d hate to see how Erdogan treats someone he has a lousy relationship with. Once again Trump put his extraordinary gift for Orwellian doublespeak to use on behalf of an odious autocrat.
In the Longworth House Office Building, meanwhile, the House Intelligence Committee was hearing damning evidence of how Trump had mistreated a democratic ally threatened by another one of his favorite dictators—Vladimir Putin. The facts are incontrovertible: This summer Trump blocked military aid that Ukraine desperately needs to force its government to announce a sham investigation of Joe Biden. Ukraine eventually got its military aid, as Republicans repeatedly pointed out, but this only occurred after the whistleblower came forward. And while Trump did meet Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September, the democratically elected president of Ukraine still has not gotten the kind of White House welcome that the Turkish dictator has twice received.
In recounting this sordid story for a television audience, diplomats George Kent and William B. Taylor Jr. were utterly credible and totally devastating witnesses. They pointed out what an important ally Ukraine is and what a heavy price it paid in the lives of its soldiers when the military aid was withheld.
Republicans were left sputtering about crackpot conspiracy theories that blame Ukraine, not Russia, for 2016 election interference. Even if that’s true (and it’s not, as Kent and Taylor noted), how would that justify Trump soliciting a bribe? The Republicans talked so much nonsense because they could not challenge the damning evidence about Trump’s corruption of U.S. foreign policy.
At one point, committee counsel Daniel Goldman asked Taylor: “Have you ever seen another example of foreign aid conditioned on the personal or political interests of the president of the United States?” “No, Mr. Goldman,” the veteran diplomat testified. “I’ve not.”
But while Trump’s disreputable and dishonorable actions in Ukraine were unprecedented when compared with other presidents, they are utterly routine for this one. Trump recognizes no separation between public and private: He thinks “his” officials are there to serve him, not the U.S. government. He demands personal loyalty even at the cost of violating the law, and when he does not get it, he fires appointees such as James B. Comey as FBI director and Jeff Sessions as attorney general.
Knowing what we now know about how Trump operates, I cannot help but be suspicious of his motives in kissing up to Erdogan. According to NBC News, former national security adviser John Bolton recently said that “he believes there is a personal or business relationship dictating Trump’s position on Turkey because none of his advisers are aligned with him on the issue.”
Trump himself admitted that he has a “little conflict of interest” with Turkey because of the Trump Towers in Istanbul. A New York Times article spells out those conflicts by exposing the cozy links between Trump’s son-in-law and shadow secretary of state, Jared Kushner; Erdogan’s son-in-law and finance minister, Berat Albayrak; and Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, the son-in-law of Trump’s Turkish business partner, Aydin Dogan, who built the Trump Towers Istanbul and still pays Trump for the use of his name.
As a result of their “backdoor diplomacy,” the Times notes, “the Trump administration has balked at aggressively punishing a state-owned Turkish bank for evading American sanctions against Iran” and “also deferred legally mandated sanctions against Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for installing Russian missile defense systems.”
Eric Edelman, a former ambassador to Turkey and undersecretary of defense under President George W. Bush, told the Times that “Trump is replacing formal relations among nations in several cases with family-to-family relationship, or crony-to-crony relationships.”
Whether in Ukraine or Turkey or elsewhere, Trump invariably seeks to cut deals with the most corrupt cronies he can find. Zelensky’s misfortune is that he is trying to fight corruption while Trump is promoting it. Hence Trump’s outrageous attempt at blackmail. Unless Trump is removed from office by either impeachment or election, he will continue to corrupt U.S. foreign policy on a hitherto unimaginable scale.
domingo, 19 de maio de 2019
Book review: a politica latino-americana dos EUA nos anos 1960 - Thomas Allcock on Thomas C. Mann (DoState)
Foss on Allcock, 'Thomas C. Mann: President Johnson, the Cold War, and the Restructuring of Latin American Foreign Policy' [review]
Thomas Tunstall Allcock. Thomas C. Mann: President Johnson, the Cold War, and the Restructuring of Latin American Foreign Policy. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018. 284 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8131-7615-4.
Reviewed by Chris Foss (University of Portland)
Published on H-Diplo (May, 2019)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53794
In a 2012 essay on US president Lyndon Johnson’s Latin American foreign policy, historian Alan McPherson noted the lack of a full-length monograph on the topic. This is true no more, thanks to Thomas Tunstall Allcock. Thomas C. Mann focuses on both Johnson and Mann, who served first as Johnson’s chief Latin American adviser in the State Department, and then as undersecretary of state for economic affairs. Tunstall Allcock succeeds at synthesizing existing literature on the Johnson/Mann years with new findings gleaned from extensive primary source research. In contrast to McPherson’s contention that Johnson was a transitional president on Latin American policy between President John Kennedy’s sunny optimism and emphasis on development and Richard Nixon’s more realistic, cynical approach, Tunstall Allcock argues that Johnson and Mann continued Kennedy’s policies, infusing them with a mix of ideas from the New Deal and Good Neighbor Policy, under which they came of age during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.[1]
Often directly addressing critics of Mann, Tunstall Allcock paints him as a staunch anticommunist concerned with maintaining US interests who “also favored sustainable aid programs and regional integration initiatives” (p. 3). This view dovetailed with Johnson’s, for whom Latin America held a lifelong interest. Though he contends Johnson’s record in the region is “mixed” (p. 4), Tunstall Allcock eschews the idea that the Johnson/Mann years were regressive and ineffective. Kennedy partisans who saw Johnson as an imposter president claimed Johnson and Mann abandoned Kennedy’s policies, particularly his Latin American-oriented Alliance for Progress. Tunstall Allcock shows, however, that the Johnson administration “wedded New Deal ideals, aspects of modernization thinking, and traditional summit diplomacy to propose a new direction for hemispheric affairs” (p. 7) while still maintaining the Alliance.
Tunstall Allcock provides a brief biography of Mann that expertly displays his ideological approach and how it not only lined up with Johnson’s, but differed little from Kennedy’s. The author shows how Mann’s pre-Johnson career combined constructive achievements with an overriding commitment to US hemispheric security that carried over into his work with Johnson. Mann grew up learning Spanish and practicing law, credentials that qualified him for many years of Latin American duty during his Foreign Service career. Starting as an adviser to the Uruguayan government during World War II, Mann tried to hew to the Good Neighbor policy of nonintervention as often as possible, while aiding Latin American economic development. In the late 1950s his conviction grew that more should be done to diversify regional economies to avoid either communist revolution or US intervention. It might seem natural that he would mold Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, but Mann was seen as a Dwight Eisenhower-era holdover and was thus instead dispatched to Mexico, where he was ambassador until Kennedy’s assassination.
Johnson inherited an Alliance that Tunstall Allcock argues was already teetering due to bureaucratic squabbles and myopia. While nominally set up as a multilateral development fund for Latin America, from an early date it was clear that the Alliance was not a multilateral institution, as its funding was controlled by an impatient Congress, which regularly slashed Kennedy’s foreign aid budget. Influential adviser Walt Rostow’s one-size-fits-all modernization theory also hampered the Alliance, influencing policymakers preconditioned to view Latin America as a homogeneous region. Already by Kennedy’s death a new push for private investment in Latin America was underway, along with a shift away from a preference toward democratic governments to more support for anticommunist dictatorships. That did not protect Johnson and Mann from the wrath of critics who felt the new president did not live up to the Alliance’s promise. Press coverage of their Latin American policy hit an early nadir with the March 18, 1964, “Mann Doctrine” speech, reported with the headline “U.S. May Abandon Efforts to Deter Latin Dictators” (p. 82). Although the Kennedy administration had recognized Guatemala’s military dictatorship and was providing $1 billion annually to Latin American militaries in counterinsurgency funds used for internal repression (p. 87), the Mann Doctrine made it seem as though Johnson’s team had regressed in the region.
At the same time, the administration badly handled rioting in the Panama Canal Zone and a military coup in Brazil. In Panama, although Tunstall Allcock contends that “the skill and flexibility with which Johnson and Mann would steer the crisis to a satisfactory conclusion would be impressive” (p. 91), the United States was committed to security above all else. Reports that Johnson was ready to invade Panama if its government collapsed amid the rioting, combined with press leaks of contradictory early reports on the progress of talks between the US and Panamanian governments, suggested that Johnson and Mann did not have a clear strategy. In Brazil, Johnson welcomed General Humberto Castelo Branco when he was installed as president, believing military rule would be temporary. Short-term economic prosperity—fueled in part by Alliance aid—followed under a US-friendly regime. But Branco installed a repressive military dictatorship, confirming critics’ fears that dictatorships were acceptable to the Johnson administration. Tunstall Allcock counters that the coup was largely driven by domestic Brazilian factors. To the extent that the United States played a role, Kennedy’s CIA funded Brazilian state governors who opposed former president Joào Goulart. But he also notes that because Johnson hastily expressed public support for Branco, he limited US ability to restrain the military in the future, while providing “those looking for evidence that US support for democracy in the hemisphere was dead and buried … with a perfect example” (p. 115).
The 1965 US intervention in the Dominican Republic is oft-examined by historians of Johnson’s Latin American policy, but Tunstall Allcock adds a useful analysis. Johnson intervened in the civil war between military leaders and rebel supporters of the ousted president Juan Bosch because “domestic pressures and global credibility outweighed the importance of continuing to rebuild his administration’s reputation in Latin America” (p. 148). Mann contended the intervention was “self-defense” (p. 150), arguing that subversion by nonstate actors, even if it appeared to be in the name of a domestic revolution, justified US intervention. What was really nothing more than a civil war “was quickly subsumed into dominant Cold War paradigms” built on shaky justifications (p. 152). Tunstall Allcock adds a discussion of Mann’s visit to Santo Domingo to urge the warring sides to negotiate, arguing that he rejected a compromise plan hatched there by national security adviser McGeorge Bundy not because he favored military rule—as critics would later claim—but because he thought it was a bad plan that would lead to another coup or indefinite US occupation. He did himself no favors, however, in testimony to Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair J. William Fulbright, by taking a hard-line anticommunist tack. Fulbright accused the Johnson administration of lying and overreacting, and thus it was amid the Dominican crisis that the credibility gap opened which consumed the Johnson presidency. Even the triumph of Joaquín Balaguer over Bosch in fresh elections in 1966 involved deceit, as Johnson and Mann funneled CIA support to Balaguer. The author urges the reader to see Johnson as more than just an imperialist, that the president and Mann tried to hew a middle way between communism and a return to military rule. In the end, though, the Cold War security doctrine came first, and Tunstall Allcock rightly concludes that the Dominican crisis was disastrous for all parties.
If Tunstall Allcock’s focus on Mann is one of this book’s unique contributions to the historiography of Johnson in Latin America, the other is his analysis of Johnson’s post-Dominican inter-American policy: from 1965 to 1968, he contends Johnson was more engaged in Latin America than is commonly believed. At a conference in Rio de Janeiro in November 1965, Secretary of State Dean Rusk advocated for making some Alliance programs permanent. In 1967, Johnson—with behind-the-scenes support from the now-retired Mann—tried to make another big splash with a conference at Punta del Este, Uruguay. There Johnson pushed for multinational development projects and a hemispheric common market, and held bilateral meetings with Latin American leaders. In 1968, the United States achieved a coffee-price stabilization agreement Mann had long hoped for, and in July the president visited Central American leaders in El Salvador. These heads of state worried, though, that the US commitment to the Alliance was tenuous, and they were correct, as Congress slashed Johnson’s final Alliance aid request in half. Even so, Tunstall Allcock emphasizes that Johnson’s efforts “reflect a genuine, if flawed, attempt by a beleaguered administration to breathe some life back into” the Alliance (p. 203).
A continued emphasis on security over development stunted the Alliance in the Johnson administration’s waning years. Tunstall Allcock believes the United States invited the 1966 military coup against Argentine president Arturo Illia through its policy of orienting Latin American militaries away from external defense and toward rooting out internal subversion. When the Peruvian military deposed President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, Johnson suspended diplomatic relations only temporarily. When Omar Torrijos seized power in Panama, Mann advised Johnson to extend recognition after a brief delay, not wanting to jeopardize the Panama Canal renegotiations he had painstakingly started in 1964. In the end, for Johnson, “Latin America had proved another frustrating foreign policy challenge” (p. 212), representing “the last significant effort of an era characterized by the belief that the United States could further its own interests by encouraging Latin American modernization and economic development through various forms of aid and assistance” (p. 214). As his successor, Richard Nixon, stated bluntly: “Latin America doesn’t matter” (p. 214).
Thomas C. Mann is an enjoyable and informative read. In just 220 pages—many adorned with excellent illustrations—Tunstall Allcock provides broad and deep coverage, putting his own spin on well-worn historiographical turf, while highlighting Johnson and Mann’s hemisphere-wide strategy. Although Tunstall Allcock is sympathetic to his subjects, he is hardly a gadfly revisionist. The argument is carefully crafted and often repeated, emphasizing that while Johnson and Mann were more committed to the Alliance than their critics believed, they should still be taken to task for their shortcomings. Tunstall Allcock also does well to acknowledge other Latin American historians as his Beltway-centered work often draws on their multi-archival scholarship. The book also points toward exciting new directions in the literature of Johnson and Latin America. For instance, Tunstall Allcock analyzes Mann’s professional background and Latin American policy, but does not offer a comprehensive biography. In an era in which most prominent State Department employees are political appointees, a work highlighting a career Foreign Service officer would be welcome. More also needs to be written on the Johnson administration’s Latin American interventions beyond Panama, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. The Johnson team’s failure to prevent a military coup in Argentina, in particular, bears closer inspection, as it triggered economic instability, civil war, and brutal military rule that vexed Americans and Argentines for nearly two decades. Dustin Walcher’s forthcoming manuscript will hopefully close this gap, but as Tunstall Allcock’s all-too-brief discussions of Bolivia and Peru demonstrate, others remain.[2]
In all, Tunstall Allcock has crafted an excellent monograph that should be required reading for Johnson and foreign relations scholars. It is also timely, as President Donald Trump becomes further embroiled in Latin America. His support for Venezuela’s Juan Guaidó, on the one hand, harkens to earlier visions Washington once held for hemispheric uplift. On the other hand, Trump’s divisive anti-immigration rhetoric, mainly projected toward Mexico and Central America, reminds us of the legacy of Cold War-era presidential administrations that US security should matter above all else. Even with all the inter-American changes since the end of the Cold War, that doctrine—whether named for Mann, Johnson, or even Trump—has remained.
Notes
[1]. Alan MacPherson, “Latin America,” in A Companion to Lyndon B. Johnson, ed. Mitchell B. Lerner (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 400.
[2]. See David M.K. Sheinin, Argentina and the United States: An Alliance Contained (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); William Michael Schmidli, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy toward Argentina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); and Dustin Walcher, Containing Social Revolution: Argentina and the International Liberal Order, 1955-1969 (book manuscript in preparation).
Chris Foss is an adjunct history professor at the University of Portland and Tokyo International University of America. Foss received his PhD in US foreign relations history from the University of Colorado in 2016. His book manuscript, Facing the World: National Security and International Trade in the Pacific Northwest since World War II, will be published by Oregon State University Press in spring 2020. Foss has written for Oregon Historical Quarterly, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Passport, The History Teacher, and Oregon Encyclopedia. Foss is researching a manuscript on Edith Green, who represented Oregon’s Third Congressional District from 1955 to 1974.
Citation: Chris Foss. Review of Allcock, Thomas Tunstall, Thomas C. Mann: President Johnson, the Cold War, and the Restructuring of Latin American Foreign Policy. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. May, 2019. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53794
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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