#374: What Foreign Policy?

Foreign policy will not have much impact on the outcome of the 2012 presidential elections. But from the point of view of our faith tradition, that only means the candidates are ignoring some very high stakes.

Pundits covering the last presidential debate seemed surprised by how often the two candidates agreed on US foreign policy--but often that only meant they were united in disagreeing with Catholic Social Teaching on international relations.

Fifty years ago this week, Americans--and the world--were terrified by the Cuban missile crisis.  I had just started high school, and I remember three things from  October 1962.

 First, I was painfully self-conscious of the cast on my arm that I still wore after putting my hand through a window in August.  Second, the Jesuits running the school kept us praying daily for the success of the just-opened Second Vatican Council.  Third was the eerie, surreal sensation of standing outside our building at lunchtime on Friday, October 26 (50 years ago TODAY!), surrounded by my new classmates, all of us scanning the skies for the first sign of a nuclear attack and collectively holding our breaths as we prayed the Soviet ships would turn back before they were fired upon by the US vessels blockading Cuba.

Like many of my 1962 peers, I had read my share of nuclear disaster novels: On The Beach, Red Alert, Seven Days In May, Alas Babylon, etc.  I had also read John Hersey’s Hiroshima.  All these gave me horrifyingly graphic ideas of what a nuclear attack would mean.  My one consolation was the knowledge that, because we all lived in a major metropolitan area, we would not suffer: an instant after the first blinding flash we would all be dead.

Small wonder, then, that the Council Fathers gathered in Rome went out of their way to stake out the Church’s official position on nuclear weapons:

Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation….The arms race in which an already considerable number of countries are engaged is not a safe way to preserve a steady peace, nor is the so-called balance resulting from this race a sure and authentic peace. Rather than being eliminated thereby, the causes of war are in danger of being gradually aggravated. While extravagant sums are being spent for the furnishing of ever new weapons, an adequate remedy cannot be provided for the multiple miseries afflicting the whole modern world. Disagreements between nations are not really and radically healed; on the contrary, they spread the infection to other parts of the earth. …Therefore, we say it again: the arms race is an utterly treacherous trap for humanity, and one which ensnares the poor to an intolerable degree. –Gaudium et Spes #80

Fifty years since that October, how far have we progressed?  The US nuclear arsenal is bigger and more powerful than in 1962, there are more nuclear powers than ever, North Korea has recently joined the club, and the threat of rogue nuclear attacks is far greater now than ever before.

And where do our candidates stand?  They agree: Iran must not acquire nuclear weapons! Iran!  As if the world is safe from the nuclear threat as long as we prevent one particular nation from acquiring them.  As if we are perfectly comfortable living with the nuclear capabilities of North Korea, Pakistan, China, India, Israel, and even France--but could never survive a nuclear Iran!

The fact that the US opened the nuclear Pandora’s box, the fact that only the US has ever committed a nuclear attack, the fact that we maintain the largest arsenal, the fact that we still threaten to use it even as a first strike, the fact that our nuclear history has triggered a competition among nations to acquire the “prestige” and “security” we already enjoy by possessing nukes, the fact that today Iran lives under the threat of an Israeli nuclear attack--both candidates seem blind to all these facts. They can only see that a nuclear-armed Iran would suddenly make nuclear weapons dangerous!

And this blindness does not end with nukes.  On issue after issue that Catholic Social Teaching (CST) considers critical to better international relations and a peaceful world, the candidates were either off the mark or else simply silent.

On Nukes: The only other comment was the notion that we must maintain our alliance with Pakistan because they have 100 nuclear warheads.  Sounds to me like acquiring nukes is the surest way to buy America’s friendship.

On Iran’s Leadership: One candidate proclaimed we must indict their president for international crimes and genocide--without mentioning that, because the US refuses to join the International Criminal Court, we cannot indict anyone.

On Military Spending: the candidates have argued over budget deficits and national debt, and disagreed over spending money the military itself never requested. But neither candidate has proposed any serious reduction in our military spending--the kind of reduction, for example, that would shrink the military’s slice of our budget pie.  

 At a time when both sides target “entitlement” programs as fair game for reduced spending, military spending remains a “sacred cow”--even though it dwarfs the spending of all our allies combined. 

The Catholic Church calls arms manufacturing and sales a major obstacle to attacking world poverty, and Dwight Eisenhower warned against the military industrial complex more than 50 years ago, but that complex remains above scrutiny by our political leaders.

Endless War: Both candidates backed drone warfare.  President Obama orders it, and Governor Romney approves of it.  This means the US attacks on foreign soil will continue no matter who becomes President. 

Drones allow us to kill without risk to ourselves, so they have opened the door to attacks that violate Catholic Just War rules in several ways: their wars are undeclared, and not in self-defense, drones often kill civilians (including one 16-year-old American citizen), and their long-term damage to America’s reputation may well outweigh their benefits.  Yet our President continues to personally approve assassination attacks by drones, and so will the next President--no matter who he is.

Rights Violations: In 2008 Obama promised to close Guantanamo, and also campaigned against US policies of torture and rendition.  In 2012 both candidates are silent on these matters, and worse: the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) and the Obama administration’s expanded “kill lists” mean that more people, including US citizens, are having their civil and human rights violated--another breach of Catholic Social Teaching.

Peace?  Both candidates give lip service to peace: it became Romney’s mantra in the last debate, and Obama has received the Nobel Peace Prize.  But neither one offers a credible strategy to achieve it.  CST has repeatedly insisted that the “absence of conflict” falls short of true peace, but now both sides assume that even absence of conflict is not a realistic goal. They argue that terrorism is here to stay, and our vast military power must adapt to combat it.  No one wants to ask why this has happened, or how to end it.  They admit “we cannot kill all the bad guys,” but nonetheless they keeps swatting at the ever-growing swarm--never talking about how to drain the swamp that breeds them.

Immigration:  This often gets treated as a domestic issue, but by definition immigrants arrive from foreign lands.  As so much of the Third World falls further and further behind us, are we surprised that their people flock to advanced economies in the US and Europe?

As early as the 1970s, CST argued that North-South relations (that is, between rich and poor nations) were more critical to the global future then East-West relations (that is, the Cold War).  But American leaders turned a deaf ear, and today we suffer the results--both terrorism and unmanageable immigration--because we failed to use US influence to shape a fairer global culture over the last 40 years.

Now CST stresses that people migrating to escape poverty and oppression are exercising a human right, even if they break the law by doing it.  I keep waiting for a candidate to address our immigration problem in the framework of human rights.  But it’s not happening in 2012.

Resources.  Underlying much of this, of course, is the real US elephant in the international room: we Americans are 6% of the world’s population, yet we consume 40% of the world’s resources.  Even Europeans, who live extremely well by global standards, use only 25% of the energy (per capita) that Americans use.  In short, we are the resource pigs of the world, and we have been for decades, and we show no signs of reforming our gluttonous ways. 

Aside from the ecological damage this does, the consequences on world relations are profound: we proclaim ourselves as the “Number One” model for the world, and our pop culture encourages everyone to admire, envy, and imitate us.  Yet we ignore the truth: the earth’s finite resources can never support our wasteful “American way of life” for all of the world’s five billion people.  That is the real math that does not work. Yet this election has been silent on this.

In sum, a real foreign policy that reflects the values of CST would begin by acknowledging that, while our freedoms and our wealth make us admired and envied, our endless war-making and gluttonous way of life and disregard for human rights make us the rogue elephant that attracts the natural, inevitable attention of big-game hunters who feel compelled to attack the threat we represent to them.

 In the years since World War II we have achieved a kind of global hegemony that reminds us of the historic rise of many great empires.  Catholic Social Teaching embodies a wisdom that cautions us to beware the pitfalls of empire.  It offers a wiser path to avoid the fall of our own empire.  But our leaders are not listening.

 Fifty years after the Cuban missile crisis, our world is no more secure, peace is no nearer, and another generation must grow in the shadow of violence.

I am reminded of the 1963 words of Martin Luther King: “Our Scientific Power has outrun our spiritual power.  We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

Those words happen to echo perfectly the vision of Vatican II: “While man extends his power in every direction, he does not always succeed in subjecting it to his own welfare."

We need leadership that can match our power with new wisdom. Are we getting it?

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2012