FOREIGN RELATIONS

Americans have largely been disinterested in foreign relations for most of our history. As a result we are a pitifully informed populace when it comes to how the rest of the world views the U.S. Our bent as a nation has been to leave foreign relations to the experts and not be concerned. The events of 9/11 have changed all of that. Now we must understand what our government is trying to do and how we are directly impacted by it. Though it would be nice to go back to the good old days, we now see that there never were any really good old days, just days that we were blind to what was going on in the world.

Just as we want “good” for our citizens, so we must also desire good for the rest of the world. Likewise, just as we recognize that man has inherent conflicts within himself with regard to good and evil, so must we see that governments are also a dichotomy in there desires and needs. So how do we proceed in the world?

If we use both the carrot and the stick, we would see that a balanced foreign policy must include recognition of the ways of man when he is unfettered and free. Let’s look at Iraq for example. Prior to the British putting Iraq It was obvious that once you overthrew the repressive Hussein regime that the groups would naturally revert to there prior state. This same reversion to prior ethnic groups occurred in Yugoslavia after the fall of the Soviet Union. together as a country they were three separate ethic groups.

Therefore we need to try and discern the natural pattern of the world if all peoples had free association and democratic input into there future. This is difficult to do but essential to understanding what directions we want to push diplomatic relations. If we discern the natural order of peoples, we will build lasting policies while taking in to account our own interests in the world.

If we recreated the events of post 9/11 we see other directions that might have made more sense while also taking into account our long term interests. For example, it is clear that the peoples of Afghanistan had a desire to be free as seen in the 20 year struggle with the USSR. However, there was also a struggle after the Taliban took over. If we had gone into this conflict with the understanding of there struggle, we might have a taken a different approach. Instead of focusing only on getting rid of the Taliban, we would have focused on setting up a massive investment into AfghanistanIraq. We could have made a very successful Islamic state in a small way in which we would have built a great reputation around the moderate Islamic world. infrastructure and avoided going into

It is unnatural for a people group to desire freedom when there very existence, in regard to their view of the world (including their religious views), are built upon a strong man principle. God ordains that there is to be government of all peoples, even if it is dictatorial in nature. For us to displace government with no government (chaos) is not only against the natural order of things, but it is a vacuum that cannot be tolerated in God’s ordering of the world. In Iraq, we did not create an environment for government but instead tried to replace a strong man with “no man”. The training of a people to understand and enjoy democracy requires that we do the heavy lifting of establishing an educated populace in the art of compromise and reconciliation. These cultural norms are not evident in the Islamic world and would have been more meaningful had we dealt with the initial elimination of the old regime by demonstrating justice through an equal distribution of wealth to all members of society. Further, had we kept the military intact and used them to rebuild both the infrastructure of the country as well as gather and destroy all arms, we would have shown the average Iraqi how to deal with members of all three cultures with dignity, not just distrust.

Our real aim should be to make friends with whom we can draw upon. To do this we need to look not only at our interests but the interest of those who desire to be free. It is impossible to know what we have to deal with at any given time but it is important that we know who we are and what friends we have made in the world.