Fool’s Gold of U.S. Foreign Policy

Fourteen trillion dollars is a lot of money. That is the size of our national debt. Someone said recently that if it were in five-dollar bills placed end to end, they would almost reach the moon. That’s what the USA owes the world, from the newest born to the oldest still with us: $45,000 each! Yet we’re at war in Afghanistan wasting billions on what? Fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda apparently. If we are the greatest military machine the world has ever known and they are a bunch of “desert derelicts” (quoting Mark Steyn’s delicate words in America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It), after a hundred months of conflict, why is President Obama “winding it down”? Isn’t it because we can’t afford it? In other words, thirty-six years since the end of the Vietnam War, haven’t we lost again?

I am sure President Obama doesn’t wish to see it that way. Motivated by pressure from the military-industrial complex, whose only interest is its own profit and expansion, “benign imperialism”—or what George W. Bush proclaimed as “ensuring democracy”—is the fool’s gold of our foreign policy. Worse still, it is the cornerstone of our self-made slide into an unimaginable economic black hole, brought on by our shameless waste of resources and feigned ignorance of our own internal corruption. Come to think of it, hasn’t weaponry become the only substantial export we have left?

As Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies said on the PBS News Hour only two nights ago (6/21/11), “It’s time to leave Afghanistan totally now.” Surrounded by committed warmongering male think-tankers from the Center for New American Security and the Center for American Progress, it seemed fitting that it was the female among them that was the only advocate for peace.

We must be aware that we are the greatest manufacturer of munitions the world has ever known. Is this how we wish to be remembered? Not long ago we could afford this arms-manufacturing behemoth because US manufacturing also created exports for the world. Now we may feed ourselves, but we certainly don’t clothe ourselves or create wealth by making much else. We have given up domestic manufacturing; we decided, instead, to consume. We gobble up all that the world thrusts in our trough. And how do we manage this? We issue credit. If Nixon told us a dollar is as good as gold, does it matter if it is a paper dollar or just our scribbles on paper?

We do have other strengths, of course. The massive medical-pharmaceutical complex comes to mind, even though “healthcare for profit” is a contradiction in terms (20 percent of us have no health insurance coverage whatsoever). Wall Street and a few massive banks are doing well enough, propped up as they are with taxpayer bailouts. Software giants, such as Microsoft, IBM, and Google; enormous sales enterprises, such as Wal-Mart; and food distribution giants, such as McDonald’s and Coca Cola, are known the world over, for better or worse. At the same time, Hollywood’s media industries are distributing largely dumb-downed dollops of the barbaric, inane trivia they call entertainment to the masses.

All these, and much more, cater to the country and the world. But do they add wealth? Of course they do, but enough to pay off the national debt? Get us over the upcoming baby-boom hump? Cover the dollar outflow of our trade imbalance? Not likely, based on their performance right now. With little manufacturing among these giants we are not bringing

home the bacon. What’s left of Big Business appears massive, but manufacturing and service sectors are much smaller. Making products, particularly for export, has been (for the last century) the major source of the nation’s wealth. It has meant jobs at home and income from abroad. Instead, many businesses, even with labor-intensive back-office revenue streams, are outsourcing most of their labor overseas. What remain of US labor interests is being marginalized. Our wealth is pouring out of the country while unemployment here at home grows. It’s time to bring it back.

We begin by abrogating, slowly and carefully but with absolute determination, all international trade agreements we have signed. With equal care and deliberation, we add tariffs on all incoming manufactured goods. This will encourage American business to begin relying on quality manufacturing here at home. For that to be realized, local manufacturing must be given free rein to rebuild, with total cooperation among all parties—government, business, and unions. In addition, we must organize a massive internal reconstruction of our national infrastructure—transit systems, bridges, dams, solid waste disposal systems, roads, drinking water, wastewater, hazardous waste, navigable waterways—all graded D by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2007. Crowded schools and traffic-choked roads are our way of life. It’s time to take care of ourselves, instead of meddling in the affairs of the Middle East. Besides, the skills lost by American workers will now be regained, basically paying for this national reconstruction, as demonstrated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s.

Furthermore, this is unlikely to be necessary ever again if done right the first time. Every one of us must be the beneficiary; no one must be left out. Moving away from reliance on others—whose only value was cheap prices and the creation of profits for the fortunate few—will not be easy, but the long-term gains will be immense. We will begin again to take pride in a secure economic well-being that will remedy many of our current national maladies while slowly absolving ourselves of a debt well beyond our present means ever to pay off. To make sure we get it right this time, immediately stop all wars. Channel the savings resulting from cutting defense spending into the recovery of the domestic economy, that is, the infrastructure of peacetime America’s space, energy, aeronautics, metals, transportation, housing, textiles, and electronics industries. By giving full support, within strong regulatory guidelines, to domestic production incentives, we could soon again become proud of the “Made in the USA” label. Promote research and development programs, particularly in clean energy projects, which are funded now at disastrously low levels. Exclude defense industries from this money flow. The logic will follow: if you know how to stimulate one section of the private sector, you can equally well stimulate another. Better still, we will stop shipping whatever wealth we thought we had to others everywhere else.

The buck stops here, at America’s shoreline. This will generate the reindustrialization of America. It means more than the equitable distribution of profits, it means re-creating national wealth. It is preposterous to continue our present policy of industrializing Asian countries at the expense of our own. Since transnational industrialists hold no allegiance to any nation, they naturally seek the cheapest source. When those are offered by countries whose national policies are geared exclusively to industry, our competitiveness is diminished since our national policies have been exactly the opposite, with our specialty being weapons of war. Because the quality of their goods is exceptional, and unbeatable from the standpoint of cost, we can do one of two things: give up and rely on their resourcefulness—hardly the American way—or turn around and recapture the industrial edge. Only we can reclaim our legacy.

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To learn more about Jim Knapton’s new book, Changing Our World: Solutions for a Future, visit his website at http://www.ottolinepublishing.com/. You can send him mail at info@ottolinepublishing.com.