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Foreign Policy by Accolade. Been There, Done That, Have the Dead Americans to Prove It.

Jimmie | October 10, 2009 | Comments (0)

I wanted to revisit a quote from a link I used in my last post, because it gives me a chance to rail against the Obama administration’s attempts to dial our foreign policy back to the realpolitik days of Carter and Reagan (yes, even Reagan). Here is the reaction of the State Department to President Obama’s Nobel Peace Price award:

“Certainly from our standpoint, this gives us a sense of momentum — when the United States has accolades tossed its way, rather than shoes.”

I suppose that all depends on who is tossing us the accolades and who is throwing the shoes, doesn’t it?

Of course, all the tossing just gives an excuse to the tossers (no relation) who want our momentum to swing back to the bad old days of realpolitik, when we prized the stability of “at least they’re our bastards” over freedom. You remember those days, don’t you, when our foreign policy pretty much consisted of keeping the bad guys walled off from us with sanctions and other bought bastards who were willing to keep the “Death to America” business down to a minimum so long as the cash and weapons kept rolling in?

I certainly do. I also remember the unintended consequences of our policy, consequences we probably could have predicted if we had thought about it hard enough. But we weren’t thinking much about consequences even as Americans died from them. We could only guess back then that the anger we were willing to live with as a product of “global stability” would metastasize into a murderous ideology intent on destroying us and everyone who treasures the freedoms the average Arab came to see as belonging to everyone but them. But by the time we figured it out we were sifting through the ashes of a few thousand dead in Manhattan and picking up body parts from the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. We have no excuse today. We know right now, without a shadow of a doubt, where realpolitik leads.

So, I have to ask, is the State Department’s reaction stunningly uneducated or brazenly cynical? In neither case should we find their “oh well, at least someone likes us” reaction acceptable.

(via memeorandum)