Since the release by WikiLeaks of a batch of 91,000 classified reports on the Afghan war, comment about it made headlines throughout the world, although likely nobody had had enough time to read them. Like many people, I browsed through the material, sorted out by: type, category, region, affiliation, date, and severity. The first impression I had is that even for the US Congress, it would take some time before investigators could understand the scope and the gravity of some released items. Indeed, not all of them are interesting and some seem even trivial, albeit the events they describe went unreported by the media. But as it is the case in any war, the military documents would normally not be unveiled before 40 or 50 years: that is a period of security.

Nevertheless, whatever investigators and researchers are going to discover now about the US war behaviour, we already know a little about it. Broadly speaking, nobody is innocent, although in the USA there is still a “myth of innocence” plaguing the debate about foreign policy.

Most of the difficulties the US faces in MENA region, Africa, and even sometimes in Europe, might be rooted in the image America projects of itself. There is no question the Americans cannot win the war against terrorism, pacify and stabilise the countries where they invested their energy and sacrificed the lives of their children, and contribute to the peace efforts and the economic growth of the planet, without changing that image they project of their power, which makes them untrustful and frightful sometimes even to their allies.

From the ongoing American debate about the right direction to give to foreign policy, maybe can we induce a way to put the picture straight.

First, if such a debate is necessary, it’s better to be undertaken without illusions about the past. For as it has been remarked, beyond the obvious difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a growing feeling even among American writers that their nation has become “too militaristic, too idealistic, too arrogant an empire.” How to change the image America projects of itself? Is this debate as old as the very birth of the American nation, as it has been sometimes suggested?

It was James Schlesinger who stated once that the Americans were propelled to a position of global dominance although they were not prepared for it. Thus, they would rarely venture outside except in two cases: either when they are attacked or when they see emerging forces they consider dangerous (Nazism, Japanese imperialism, Soviet communism, or radical Islam) .

For other observers, this cannot be true. It is the “myth of innocence,” they contend. The United States has always been spreading its power beyond the soil of the continent — commercially, culturally, and geopolitically. Robert Kagan for instance denies completely that the US had been a “status-quo power”: “the impulse that leads us to involve ourselves in others’ affairs,” he said, “is neither a modern phenomenon nor a deviation from the American spirit. It is integrated into our American DNA.”

Both views are right only to a certain degree.

Actually, the United States projects the image of a dangerous power not because of its expansionism, but mainly because its liberal republicanism was frequently seen as a threat to the conservative order in the Middle East, as well as in Europe itself. Many examples prove it: Lebanon (1958, 1982-1984), Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995-1996), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (1991, 1998, 2003), etc…

The point is the liberal ideology adopted by America since its birth as a nation seems to be the source of American expansionism. During the 18th and 19th centuries, liberalism was the most important factor behind trade and territorial expansion: The rights of the individual were elevated above those of the State: property, privacy, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all people.

It was the task of the government to preserve these rights. That is why US leaders had only one choice to make: that of supporting their fellow citizens when they claimed trading rights, land or sea, sometimes at the expense of foreigners. Therefore, maybe is it right to assume with Kagan that the most important foreign policy stance in the history of the United States was not George Washington’s farewell to the Monroe Doctrine but the Declaration of Independence that placed these values at the heart of the American nation-state.

In this perspective, Americans have since the beginning assessed the world by the standards of liberalism, or more precisely, according to these “truths” regarded as “self-evident,” namely that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it and to institute new Government (…)” etc.

Yet, at the same time, this was no hindrance from supporting undemocratic, illiberal, corrupt States, sometimes when the US administration judged it more reasonable to have a controllable enemy than a chaotic friend. Although such a rationale was understandable between States, it was not so in the eyes of local populations. The outcome is utterly perplexing, since moral criteria was sometimes completely dismissed out of hand, and nobody in the US administration or in public diplomacy was able to explain and persuade local populations of the benefits of accepting injustice and tyranny.

Here is the core of the problem: this inconsistent, paradoxical image of the US foreign policy should be replaced by a new one, less naïvely attached to the “innocence myth,” and more willing to accept American share of responsibility in the world disorder: Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine included.

Initially published by:

The Gulf Today, July 31, 2010