Give Peace a chance

America doesn't have a peace party. 

What will Biden do??

     "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

                 JFK Inaugural speech, 1961

In post-war America of the 1950's and 1960's both political parties sought to be the voice of anti-communist containment. It was conventional wisdom. People with an anti-war orientation were marginalized--"beatniks" became "peaceniks"--people defined by having unconventional ideas. Peace? How weird! What oddballs.

Envisioning Peace

After 1968 partisan alignment began falling into place. Vietnam became Nixon's war to defend--a Republican war. Since the 1970's Democrats had a "peace wing" in their coalition to go along with their environmentalist, women's-rights, and racial justice supporters.  Democrats were always under the threat of being called "soft on communism," and later "soft on Muslim extremism."  Democratic leaders worked to demonstrate the charge was unfounded, with the result that their language and overall messaging might be a notch or two less bellicose than their Republican opponents, but policies and practice were largely similar. Democratic officeholders supported military interventions and they grew the Pentagon budgets. 

Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton are arguably more hawkish than Trump.

Herb Rothschild is a retired professor of English. He lives in Southern Oregon. He introduced himself to me as a peace activist, and he has been involved in the politics of peace throughout his adulthood. One of his projects is Vision Quilt; an example of one is shown here. Like most politically engaged people, he has multiple concerns: The environment, women's rights, racial justice, poverty. Those issues make him at home with Democrats. A foreign policy that leads to peace, though, is complicated and lacks a clear partisan champion. He wonders about Biden.

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild

In a recent Zoom gathering I was asked if I could think of anything good to say about Trump’s presidency. I responded that he was the first U.S. president in my lifetime who didn’t take us into a war.  Undoubtably, that's because Trump saw no political benefit to himself of a war. Had he deemed that it would, I’m sure he wouldn’t have hesitated. Nonetheless, I’m grateful.

Herb Rothschild

Some former presidents initiated wars because they deemed them politically beneficial. In 1965, fearing he would be charged with allowing another Cuba on his watch, Johnson sent troops into the Dominican Republic after its people elected Juan Bosch, too liberal for our liking. In 1983, Reagan sent troops to overthrow the leftist government of Granada two days after he was hugely embarrassed by a suicide attack on a U.S. military installation in Lebanon that killed 241 soldiers. George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan because Americans wanted to make someone pay for 9/11. More tragically, Johnson and Nixon perpetuated the war in Vietnam because they didn’t want to be saddled politically with the defeat.

Mostly, however, the motives of our invasions—and the list of them is appallingly long—haven’t been so personal. They’ve been conducted for the benefit of large banks and corporations. This has been especially so in Central America and the Caribbean, where we can easily impose our will. The 2003 invasion of Iraq demonstrated the risks of operating so blatantly beyond our well-established sphere of control. Before and since that debacle, presidents haven’t invaded countries in Africa, Asia and South America (Vietnam being the exception that instructed every administration except the arrogant fools gathered around George W. Bush). Rather, they’ve conducted what is known as “low intensity warfare.”

Much of such warfare is so low profile that it doesn’t even come to public attention. When four Army special operations soldiers were killed in action in Niger in October 2017, even many members of Congress expressed surprise that we had military operations there. Other military engagements, such as our air operations in Libya and our air and ground operations in Syria during and after the Arab Spring, are higher profile—at least Congress and major news media know about them. But even in those our military commitments (and losses) are too small to cause administrations to worry that the American people will punish them for failure (and the death and destruction we leave in our wake means nothing to the voting public). The warfare I’ve just described was standard operating procedure under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She was to Obama what John Foster Dulles was to Eisenhower—a dedicated U.S. imperialist, and she didn’t even have the Cold War ideological cover of anti-Communism.

I dwell on this history because at this point we simply don’t know what President Biden’s foreign policy will be beyond his commitment to our former alliances, especially NATO.

But to what purposes will the alliances be put? In particular, will we resume the encirclement of Russia by admitting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO? The U.S., years before, broke George H. W. Bush’s pledge to Gorbachev and admitted the former Eastern bloc nations into NATO, thus bringing it to Russia’s Baltic border. Understandably alarmed by the possibility of hostile troops along a much longer southwestern border, Russia reclaimed Crimea, its access to the Black Sea, which Khrushchev had impulsively declared part of Ukraine when Ukraine was still part of the U.S.S.R. It suited Obama/Clinton’s purpose to depict that totally nonviolent action as shocking aggression.

Because Trump’s relations with Russia were motivated by personal, not geopolitical motives, he handled them terribly, refusing to acknowledge, much less push back against, Russia’s cyber-attacks. A sad consequence is that Democrats have discovered they can make political hay out of the “soft on Russia” accusation, which for decades had worked for Republicans and hampered the creation of a safer world.

Biden’s appointments have indicated some continuity with the Obama years. So far, however, he has responded to the needs of working people rather than the interests of Wall Street, a significant and welcome departure. Let’s hope that in the conduct of foreign policy as well he’ll not only distance himself from Trump but also from Hillary Clinton. If not, whatever progress toward justice he makes at home will be outbalanced by what he impedes abroad.