In a brilliant op-ed published in the New
York Times, the Quincy Institute's Trita Parsi explained how China, with help
from Iraq, was able to mediate and resolve the deeply-rooted conflict between
Iran and Saudi Arabia, whereas the United States was in no position to do so
after siding with the Saudi kingdom against Iran for decades.
The title of Parsi's article, "The US is not an
indispensable peacemaker", refers to former Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright's use of the term "indispensable nation" to describe the US
role in the post Cold War world.
The irony in Parsi's use of Albright's term is that she generally
used it to refer to US war-making, not peacemaking. In 1998, Albright toured
the Middle East and then the United States to rally support for President
Clinton's threat to bomb Iraq. After failing to win support in the Middle East,
she was confronted by heckling and critical questions during a televised
event at Ohio State University, and she appeared on the Today Show the next
morning to respond to public opposition in a more controlled setting.
Albright claimed, "..if we have to use force, it
is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand
tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see here
the danger to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are
always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy and the American way of
life."
Albright's readiness to take the sacrifices of American
troops for granted had already got her into trouble when she famously
asked General Colin Powell, "What's the use of having this superb military
you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Powell wrote in his
memoirs, "I thought I would have an aneurysm."
But Powell himself later caved to the neocons, or the "fucking
crazies" as he called them in private, and dutifully read the lies they
made up to try to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq to the UN Security
Council in February 2003.
For the past 25 years, administrations of both parties have
caved to the "crazies" at every turn. Albright and the neocons'
exceptionalist rhetoric, now standard fare across the US political spectrum,
leads the United States into conflicts all over the world, in an unequivocal,
Manichean way that defines the side it supports as the side of good and the
other side as evil, foreclosing any chance that the United States can later
play the role of an impartial or credible mediator.
Today,
this is true in the war in Yemen, where the US chose to join a Saudi-led
alliance that committed systematic war crimes, instead of remaining neutral and
preserving its credibility as a potential mediator.
It also
applies, most notoriously, to the US blank check for endless Israeli aggression
against the Palestinians, which doom its mediation efforts to failure.
For China, however, it is precisely its policy of neutrality
that has enabled it to mediate a peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia,
and the same applies to the African Union's successful peace negotiations in
Ethiopia, and to Turkey's promising mediation between Russia and
Ukraine, which might have ended the slaughter in Ukraine in its first two
months but for American and British determination to keep trying to pressure
and weaken Russia.
Neutrality
has become anathema to US policymakers. George W. Bush's threat, "You are
with us, or you are with the terrorists," has become an established, if
unspoken, core assumption of 21st century US foreign policy.
The response of the American public to the cognitive
dissonance between our wrong assumptions about the world and the real world
they keep colliding with has been to turn inward and embrace an ethos of
individualism.
This can range from New Age spiritual disengagement to a
chauvinistic America First attitude. Whatever form it takes for each of us, it
allows us to persuade ourselves that the distant rumble of bombs, albeit mostly
American ones, is not our problem.
The US
corporate media has validated and increased our ignorance by drastically reducing foreign
news coverage and turning TV news into a profit-driven echo chamber peopled by
pundits in studios who seem to know even less about the world than the rest of
us.
Most US
politicians now rise through the legal bribery system from local to state
to national politics, and arrive in Washington knowing next to nothing about
foreign policy. This leaves them as vulnerable as the public to neocon clichés
like the ten or twelve packed into Albright's vague justification for bombing
Iraq: freedom, democracy, the American way of life, stand tall, the danger to
all of us, we are America, indispensable nation, sacrifice, American men and
women in uniform, and "we have to use force."
Faced
with such a solid wall of nationalistic drivel, Republicans and Democrats alike
have left foreign policy firmly in the experienced but deadly hands of the
neocons, who have brought the world only chaos and violence for 25 years.
All but the most principled progressive or libertarian
members of Congress go along to get along with policies so at odds with the
real world that they risk destroying it, whether by ever-escalating warfare or
by suicidal inaction on the climate crisis and other real-world problems that
we must cooperate with other countries to solve if we are to survive.
It is
no wonder that Americans think the world's problems are insoluble and that
peace is unattainable, because our country has so totally abused its unipolar
moment of global dominance to persuade us that that is the case. But these
policies are choices, and there are alternatives, as China and other countries
are dramatically demonstrating.
President Lula da Silva of Brazil is proposing to form a
"peace club" of peacemaking nations to mediate an end to the war in
Ukraine, and this offers new hope for peace.
During his election campaign and his first year in office,
President Biden repeatedly promised to usher in a new era of American
diplomacy, after decades of war and record military spending. Zach Vertin, now
a senior adviser to UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield wrote in 2020
that Biden's effort to "rebuild a decimated State Department" should
include setting up a "mediation support unit… staffed by experts whose
sole mandate is to ensure our diplomats have the tools they need to succeed in
waging peace."
Biden's meager response to this call from Vertin and others
was finally unveiled in March 2022, after he dismissed Russia's diplomatic
initiatives and Russia invaded Ukraine.
The
State Department's new Negotiations Support Unit consists of three junior
staffers quartered within the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations.
This is the extent of Biden's token commitment to peacemaking, as the barn door
swings in the wind and the four horsemen of the apocalypse - War, Famine,
Conquest and Death - run wild across the Earth.
As Zach Vertin wrote, "It is often assumed that mediation
and negotiation are skills readily available to anyone engaged in politics or
diplomacy, especially veteran diplomats and senior government appointees. But
that is not the case. Professional mediation is a specialized, often highly
technical, tradecraft in its own right."
The
mass destruction of war is also specialized and technical, and the United
States now invests close to a trillion dollars per year in it. The
appointment of three junior State Department staffers to try to make peace in a
world threatened and intimidated by their own country's trillion-dollar war
machine only reaffirms that peace is not a priority for the US government.
By contrast,
the European Union created its Mediation Support Team in 2009 and now has 20
team members working with other teams from individual EU countries. The UN's
Department of Political and Peace Building Affairs has a staff of 4,500,
spread all across the world.
The tragedy of American diplomacy today is that it is
diplomacy for war, not for peace. The State Department's top priorities are not
to make peace, nor even to actually win wars, which the United States has
failed to do since 1945, apart from the reconquest of small neocolonial
outposts in Grenada, Panama, and Kuwait.
Its actual priorities are to bully other countries to join
US-led war coalitions and buy US weapons, to mute calls for peace in
international fora, to enforce illegal and deadly coercive sanctions, and
to manipulate other countries into sacrificing their people in US
proxy wars.
The
result is to keep spreading violence and chaos across the world. If we want to
stop our rulers from marching us toward nuclear war, climate catastrophe, and
mass extinction, we had better take off our blinders and start insisting on
policies that reflect our best instincts and our common interests, instead of
the interests of the warmongers and merchants of death who profit from war.
