US Should Return to a Foreign Policy that Seeks Peace

By JASON SIBERT

By the time this story is published, President Donald Trump will most likely be on the way out of office.

Regardless of whether this prediction is true or not, our country needs to take a serious look at its foreign policy and the way it interacts with the world. Trump ran on the promise of making America great again. However, his foreign policy failed to look at a strain of policy that existed at one time in our country’s history. While Trump hasn’t shown the tendency to deploy American troops to combat zones as much as other presidents, his foreign policy style has made the world a less orderly place because of the administration’s tendency to withdraw from treaties and alienate the rest of the world via tariff wars and insults.

Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan penned a book titled “On the Law of Nations” (1990) on an admirable foreign policy tradition that played an important role in our history. The 1900 Supreme Court case of the Paquete Habana declared that “international law is our law,” and this idea has manifested itself in more than just legal cases. In 1890 the First Pan-American Conference established an arbitration system that Secretary of State James Blaine hailed as the “new Magna Charta.” In 1897 Secretary of State Richard Olney negotiated a five-year arbitration agreement with the United Kingdom to resolve all differences not settled by diplomacy. In 1899, Czar Nicholas II convened a great peace conference at the Hague with the United States in attendance. William Jennings Bryan, a pacifist, served as President Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State. His tenure as Secretary of State brought 20 treaties that worked for the advancement of peace. We see a similar ideology at work in a series of nuclear arms control treaties to control the use of nuclear weapons in the Cold War and post-Cold War period.

Hopefully, a new administration will work with methodology of a Bryan and not of a Trump. The states of Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a territorial dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh area since the end of the Soviet Union, a point of concern in the quest for a law-driven and peaceful world. Turkey’s growing influence in the conflict is a problem in an area where Russia has a lot of influence. Russia’s involvement represents a front in the Russian/Turkish geopolitical tensions caught up in the political systems of Syria, Libya, and Ukraine. The conflict is a toxic brew because Armenians still remember the massacres of large numbers of their people under the Ottoman Empire in World War I. Luckily, Russia is calling on all sides to deescalate. A new administration should see a point of cooperation between the US and our geopolitical foe Russia in this conflict. A treaty simmering tensions in the region would increase our prestige and soft power (non-military) around the world.

This summer, six nuclear-capable B-52H Stratofortress bombers, representing approximately one-seventh of the war-ready US B-52H bomber fleet, flew from their home base in North Dakota to Fairford Air Base in England for several weeks of intensive operations over Europe. The Stratofortress was designed for one purpose – to cross the Atlantic or Pacific oceans and drop dozens of nuclear weapons on the now defunct Soviet Union. Some, like writer Michael T. Klare in his story “The Nuclearization of American Diplomacy,” have questioned the validity of this mission. American officials say the purpose is to prove to North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies that we are committed to their defense.

Tensions between the US and Russia are high now. Belarus is a point of tension, as strongman Alexander Lukashenko recently declared victory in a presidential election widely considered fraudulent by his people and much of the international community. Belarus has experienced recurring anti-government protests. Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that his country might intervene there if the situation “gets out of control,” while US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has implicitly warned of American intervention if Russia interferes.

Although the public is unaware of it, the recent display of nuclear force is the greatest since the end of the Cold War. A diplomatic win, with the cooperation of Russia, in preventing a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, could lead to an effort to draw down the nuclear arsenals of both the US and Russia. Most would agree that nuclear weapons are much too dangerous to be used for deterrence. As Klare stated, such a strategy will heighten tensions between our country and its geopolitical competitors and deter them from producing peaceful overtures. How do we return to the diplomacy of Secretary of State Bryan?

Jason Sibert is the executive director of the Peace Economy Project in St Louis. Email jasonsibert@hotmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2020

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