Am I the only one who is bewildered by the $1 billion in foreign aid President Bush has proposed for Georgia?
I was even more bewildered to learn that last year Bush gave $63 million to Georgia, a country the size of South Carolina. Gosh, I didn’t know the U.S. economy was doing so well we could hand out millions of dollars in a heartbeat!
The title of this post wasn’t just to catch your attention but to allude to a well-known American theme of comparing drug addiction to the Devil and Hell. Well, for about 100 years, the United States has fallen pray again and again to an addiction of its own-international interference.
This country was founded on the principles of non-intervention as its official foreign policy,which means to avoid all wars not related to direct territorial self-defense.
George Washington advised the country to avoid “foreign entanglements”. Thomas Jefferson favored “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.” John Quincy Adams wrote that the US “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
We’ve certainly strayed far from the philosophies of this nation’s founders. But where exactly did we go wrong? Most historians claim it began with the Monroe Doctrine, a Presidential agenda laid out by President James Monroe in 1823 that declared that Europe stay out of the affairs of the newly independent nations of the Americas, and that the U.S. would not get involved in the conflicts between European nations. The powers of western Europe were warned not to attack any nations in the New World, as any such incident would be interpreted by President Monroe as a direct threat to the United States.
Even though the U.S. at the time didn’t have the military muscle to back up their words, Europe obeyed the Monroe Doctrine, especially as these countries were losing their former colonies in the Americas and became much more interested in further colonizing Asia and Africa.
The Doctrine was viewed initially viewed in the U.S. as the country’s moral opposition to colonialism. But the Monroe Doctrine was used by subsequent Presidents as a license to intervene in the affairs of Latin America or any country in the Western Hemisphere whenever they so pleased, resulting in the U.S. ironically becoming a colonial power itself.
As European powers backed off, the Monroe Doctrine was used to support the concept of Manifest Destiny which declared the United States should be expanded all the way to the Pacific Ocean at the expense of Mexicans and Native Americans. After the Civil War, Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine was used to expand the U.S. beyond North America. Manifest Destiny was invoked when the U.S. invaded Hawaii and when going to war with Spain in 1898, the U.S. justified the temporary capture of former Spanish colonies Cuba (until 1902), the Philippines (granted independence in 1946) and the permanent seizure of Guam and Puerto Rico. Manifest Destiny was considered necessary in order to enforce the Monroe Doctrine.
As you can see, interventionism can be very much like a drug, especially when one nation is unopposed by far away rivals, and whose immediate neighbors are comparatively poorer and weaker.
Washington’s addiction to interventionism continued in the first half of the 20th Century, primarily in Latin America. The details of instances of U.S. intervention is too long to describe here, but I’ll give you a brief list:
- Cuba-1898-1901, 1906-1909
- Haiti-1903, 1915-1934
- Mexico-1914-1916
- Dominican Republic-1903-1905, 1905-1941
- Nicaragua-1909, 1923-1928
- Panama/Colombia-1903
There was a brief period in which the U.S. attempted to kick their interventionism habit. During World War I, the U.S. declared war against Germany on the grounds that they were interrupting international shipping routes. When World War II erupted in Europe, Americans refused to participate, even refusing to sell weapons or equipment to any country involved in that conflict. The effort for the U.S. to mind its own business ended when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Since 1945, foreign intervention has become as American as apple pie. And you thought baseball was our national pastime!
I could go on and on giving more examples of American intervention upon foreign nations, whether or not the U.S. was invited to intervene. But the examples are numerous enough for you to find on your own.
Foreign intervention has proven time and time again to not be the key to establish diplomatic relations (interventionism is not the same as diplomacy), fight enemies, open trade markets, gain allies, or even combat domestic issues, as in the case of the War on Drugs. If anything, intervening in the affairs of foreign nations has only created more problems for the U.S., not fewer.
The greatest example I can offer on how problematic our current foreign policy can be is the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Terrorist attacks by Osama bin Laden, a man whose Al-Qaeda group was trained in military tactics by our CIA 20 years ago when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. A man who was angered by the presence of U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia to protect the oilfields because for some reason the Saudi Royal Family does not want to hire and train their own army to do this. A man who uses U.S. support for Israel who attacks Palestinians and invades Palestine whenever they please as an excuse for his hatred of the United States.
Interventionism has a heroin-like grip on American foreign policy and has moved the United States worlds away from the non-interventionist beliefs of the men who founded this country.
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