For people living in a country founded by the people, for the people and of the people, the elites of the United States are extraordinarily ignorant of how to deal with the average guy on the enemy street. In the last sixty years, we have seen pro-democracy demonstrations in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, China and the entire Arab world, among other places and we seem to have developed a knack for pretending they don’t exist.
The latest muddle in Libya was just the latest in a long line of blunders. When the Libyan rebels ignored President Obama and asked George W. Bush to send fighter planes, you know that we’ve dropped the ball. By the time the President responded – and responded tepidly – he only succeeded in alienating whoever ultimately wins.
Simply put, we have no sense of how to turn a foreign populace to our (and their) advantage. Oh, we may fund a Radio Free Europe, but that is easy for a hostile government to jam or explain away as propaganda. No one in Washington seems to understand that the average human being everywhere is a thinking, autonomous individual, usually with a conscience, often with a chip on his shoulder against his own government. And when that human being starts getting pushed around by his government, the ideals on which the US was founded start looking mighty attractive. The whole concept of America has universal appeal, except, it seems, to the American elites who don’t seem to have a clue what this country is all about or why the rest of the world (except for the dictators) wants to emulate it. This remains the most potent weapon in America’s arsenal and we don’t just fail to employ it, we undercut it at every turn.
This is hardly a Cold War phenomenon. For instance, we knew from the British reaction to the Blitz that a bombing campaign has the effect of rallying the targeted population around its government. So it was with Germany. But by early 1942, we knew all about the extermination camps, something that the average German didn’t know except via the rumor mill (always a source that is easy for even a good person to ignore). Suppose, at the end of every bombing raid, however, a single bomber poured out leaflets with the photos and details of the death camps, informing the bombed civilians that we were only bombing them because their government was evil. That would have provided a wedge between the German people and the Nazi gangsters who ran their country, instead of binding them both against a common foe.
It isn’t only wartime and hostile occasions that the shortsightedness of our foreign policy works against us. Our foreign aid is the single most potent weapon against us in Afghanistan. American foreign aid is structured in such a way that, according to estimates, fifty percent of the money allocated to it never leaves Washington, D.C.; the rest is retained for “contract administration” by the handful of mega-corporations (run, inevitably, by retired USAID officials) that get the contracts. It doesn’t take the average Joe in a foreign land long to realize that the program isn’t run for his benefit, that the crumbs that finally make it to his country are so inadequate that the funded project is usually an insult. Even by the time I arrived in Afghanistan in early 2004, the Afghans had become so disgusted with the international foreign aid community that Minister Bashardost, whose ministry was in charge of foreign aid, ordered 1500 entities of the international aid community out of the country.
Presidents Reagan and both Bushes have tried to reform the system but had to back off after concentrated media campaigns against them. The only “reform” that has been implemented in the last fifty years was the Clinton Administration’s decision to terminate the engineers and building inspectors of USAID, relying instead on the contractors themselves to certify the completion of a building in order to get paid. This has produced, inevitably, slabs of concrete in remote corners of Afghanistan which show up on the records in Washington DC as fully functioning clinics and schools.
No one, repeat, NO ONE, in Washington or academia has the foggiest clue how to make use of a foreign population to improve America’s standing in the world. Democrats, with their love of dictators and their phony populism masking a fear and hatred of middle class and working class people have a top down focus that rewards the richest in the name of “the people” and benefits no one else. Republicans, with their refusal to rock even a sinking boat, are content to rearrange the proverbial deck chairs.
There was, however, one senior official who had a solid sense of how to “turn” a foreign population. General John R. Deane was the US Military Liaison to the Soviet Union for most of World War II. He was one of those rare individuals who, in Kipling’s words, “could walk with kings nor lose the common touch.” Indeed his very engaging memoir of his time in Moscow, Strange Alliance, published in 1946, provides the reader with astute personality observations of everyone from Joseph Stalin to the old woman who cooked for Deane.
General Deane went further than mere observation in his book. The last section proposed a strategy which may very well have avoided the Cold War and caused the collapse of the Soviet Union much earlier than it actually did. Deane’s strategy involved a three part approach to dealing with the USSR.
First, Deane proposed what we now call containment (Deane called it “Restraint”), i.e., maintaining enough military force to discourage Russian adventurism. Since Deane’s book was in bookstores eight months before George Kennan’s “X” article which is widely credited with proposing the containment theory, there is a very good case to be made that Kennan borrowed the idea from Deane.
Deane didn’t stop there. He also proposed a continuing dialogue with Soviet leadership, but one based on a realistic and culturally sensitive relationship. Having negotiated with the Russians for more than two years, Deane knew that you had to be tough, you had to demand a quid pro quo, you couldn’t make concessions with the expectation of accumulating good will. None of this was peculiar to the Communist mindset; it had always been necessary when dealing with Russia.
Finally, Deane recognized that the more interface between the United States and the average Russian, the more we would weaken the Soviet leadership’s hold over the Russian mind. Exposure to everything from US consumer goods to educational programs to citizen exchanges all would have the effect of weakening Communism.
Tragically, Deane wasn’t listened to. Only the first leg of his strategy – containment – was implemented (and he wasn’t even credited with that).Instead of a sort of Warm Peace we could have had, we had the Cold War, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, 25 years in which the fabric of America and the Free World was strained to the breaking point. It wasn’t until Richard Nixon that the third leg of Deane’s strategy was implemented with Pepsi and blue jeans reaching Moscow and détente becoming the buzz word du jour. It wasn’t until Ronald Reagan replaced Western style diplomacy with tough negotiations and a demand for quid pro quo that the second and final leg of Deane’s three part strategy was initiated. The Soviet Union toppled within the decade.
Today, Deane has been forgotten. No one in academia is thinking about how to employ the desires and aspirations of foreign populations in a way that would undermine those who seek to hurt us. The US is no longer the industrial powerhouse it was when it won World War II. It is no longer a unified country with shared goals and common ideals. All we have is our highest aspirations, but that is all we need. It is possible to use the population of hostile governments the way a black belt in judo uses his opponent’s bulk to his own advantage. But among Western intellectuals, there is no one trying to figure out the moves.
If we are to thrive in the next century, someone will have to start thinking it through. Where is the General Deane of the 21st Century?
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
