Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her

by Dinesh D'Souza

  Let’s assume America has enough warheads left to destroy a dozen Chinese cities and a dozen Russian cities. America can strike back, to be sure, but if it does, the Russians and the Chinese have an additional 150 warheads each with which they can level every American city. The point is that America is now deterred from striking back, because it fears a completely devastating second strike that would basically end America as we know it. These are not wild speculations; they are precisely the “war games” that the Pentagon has played since the dawn of the nuclear age. The Cold War is over, but the logic of deterrence has not changed. So Obama’s plan for self-disarmament is far more dangerous than people realize.

  Another way Obama curtails America’s global influence is that he undermines our allies while enabling our adversaries to consolidate their power. Obama’s brusque treatment of England and Israel I have covered in earlier books and won’t revisit. Here I want to focus on how Obama has been diminishing American power in the Middle East. While Obama slashes America’s nuclear arsenal, he has done virtually nothing to curb Iran from getting nuclear bombs. Recently Obama agreed to reduce sanctions against Iran in exchange for Iran agreeing not to move further on its nuclear program. Since Iran’s word means very little, this seems like a way of consolidating Iran’s progress, helping its economy by lifting sanctions, and allowing Iran to move ahead on its nuclear program by stealth.

  Obama’s attitudes toward allies and enemies can be seen in two glaring double standards that have defined his foreign policy. While Obama refused to back the democracy movement in Iran in 2009, doing nothing to assist the Iranian people to rid themselves of our common enemies the Iranian mullahs, he staunchly backed the democracy movement in Egypt and helped get rid of our ally President Hosni Mubarak. Obama then cheered the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and provided aid to its government, even though Egypt was now in the hands of the largest organization of radical Islam. In the process of backing the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama alienated the Egyptian military. When the military ousted the increasingly repressive Brotherhood government, Obama’s policies ensured that the military, which previously had been heavily supported by the United States, now looked at America with suspicion.

  In the same manner, Obama supported the removal of the dictator Muammar Qaddafi in Libya on the pretext of “genocide” even though, at the time, only 250 or so people had been killed in the uprising in that country. By contrast, Obama for months refused to help the rebels fighting to get rid of dictator Bashar Assad in Syria’s much bloodier civil war in which well more than 125,000 men, women, and children have been killed by government forces. Obama has been content instead to let Syria’s ally Russia take the lead, reaching an agreement with Syria to eliminate its stockpile of chemical weapons. Obama has used this agreement as a pretext to continue to deny aid to the anti-Assad rebels. What then is the main difference between Qaddafi and Assad? The main difference is that Qaddafi was a dictator who had at least partially reformed from his anti-western ways and was doing business with America while Assad is an enemy allied with Iran.

  As a consequence of Obama’s actions, what America does in the Middle East now hardly seems to matter. In Asia, the Obama administration has done nothing to cultivate India, South Korea, and Japan as allies to check the growing power of China. Consequently India, South Korea, and Japan are building alliances with China for their own self-protection. While Russia bullies its neighbors, such as Ukraine, Obama does little more than growl like a toothless tiger. Everywhere—even in South America—the United States seems impotent or at best uninvolved. Obama is now little more than an international totem; in a sense, he has made himself irrelevant. This is not weakness; rather, Obama is implementing his larger objective of diminishing American power and ending American hegemony.

  Obama is not alone in wanting America to play a more modest role in the world. There are many conservatives who agree, for instance, that America over-extended its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, that “nation-building” in these countries was an impossible task, that we should never have invaded Iraq in the first place or what we should have done in Afghanistan and Iraq was swiftly topple the regimes there and then just gotten out, ideally leaving behind a pro-American regime, whether democratic or not, in the two countries.

  The difference is this, however: conservatives don’t want America overextended because they want to protect American interests. Conservatives want America to be strong and powerful, and believe that unnecessary foreign entanglements have the effect of eroding America’s economic and military strength. Conservatives distinguish between America’s vital interests and foreign expeditions that are unnecessary and wasteful. By contrast, Obama and the progressives don’t want America to be self-interested. They do not seek to conserve America’s strength and power. They oppose American intervention in places like Iraq precisely because America has strategic and commercial interests there. Progressives prefer interventions in places like Haiti and Rwanda where America has nothing much to gain. They want the American giant cut down to size so that he can no longer be a force for global rampage and pillage. Moreover, many progressives contend that America should make amends and pay reparations for the harm it has done and the wealth it has stolen.

  Given that the Obama administration—with the aid of Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of state—has been scaling back America’s influence and redistributing power away from this country to the rest of the world, it’s worth examining their premise: Is America a force for global rampage and pillage? Does America owe reparations to other countries? Germany, for instance, has taken steps in the past half-century to eradicate the legacy of Nazism and to restore to Jews who fled Germany their ancestral property and possessions. This, however, was not reparations to Jews as a group but to specific Jews whose possessions were taken. The reparations, in other words, were to actual victims.

  My family lived for generations under British rule; should I submit a bill for reparations to the British government or to the queen? I could do that—the British are actually paying reparations to Kenyans tortured during the Mau-Mau uprising, for example—but I’m not sure that in my case it would be fair. The British were not the only invaders who conquered parts of India. Before the British, India was invaded and occupied by the Persians, by the Afghans, by Alexander the Great, by the Arabs, by the Mongols, and by the Turks. Depending on how you count, the British were the seventh or eighth colonial power to invade India. Indeed ancient India was itself dominated by the Aryan people who came from the north and subjugated the dark-skinned indigenous people.

  If reparations are due on the basis of conquest or domination, then the list of people needing to pay reparations is virtually endless: Should Normans—or Romans—pay reparations to the English? Should the Persians, Macedonians, Muslims, Mongols, Arabs, Chinese, Aztecs, Mayans, and innumerable others pay reparations to all the peoples they conquered or enslaved? Those of us living today are taking on a large project if we settle on a rule of social justice based on whose ancestors did what to whom. The conquest ethic was too pervasive historically for its effects to be reversible without creating new victims and new forms of injustice.

  In any case, what does any of this have to do with America? America started out not as an empire but as the colony of an empire, and fought an anti-colonial war to gain its independence. Jefferson termed America an “empire of liberty.”5 He said this not to promote American empire, but rather to insist that, if America be termed an empire, it would be an empire unlike any previous one. While other empires extended their influence in the name of acquisitiveness and power, America would extend its influence on behalf of liberty. America, in other words, would be an empire that promoted self-rule rather than foreign rule. In 1821, John Quincy Adams—then secretary of state—asserted that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” adding that America is a friend to liberty everywhere but the custodian only of her own. We see here the distinctly un-imperial
objective of American foreign policy. Unlike virtually every other empire, America seeks to eschew conquest and show others the way of liberty and national independence.

  This reluctance—and this objective of promoting liberty—extends throughout the twentieth century right up to the present. America was certainly reluctant to get into World War II. Even this “good war,” to defeat Nazi expansionism, was one in which America refused to intervene. Sure, Churchill wanted America to help Britain, and President Roosevelt was sympathetic, but still the forces of non-interventionism were too strong. Only when Japan attacked America directly at Pearl Harbor did America get into the war. Certainly America’s motives had nothing to do with looting or theft. America was protecting itself, and the best way to do that was to defeat the totalitarian alliance of the Nazis and the Japanese. While America’s motives were certainly self-interested, America’s actions also helped the world by ridding it of two expansionist tyrannies, that of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Who can deny that the world was better off because of what America did? One shudders to think what may have transpired had America not gotten involved, or had there been no America to get involved.

  After World War II, America reconstructed Germany and reorganized the Japanese system so that today both countries are capitalist democracies allied with the United States. Our former enemies are now our friends. This is worth remembering not only as an unrivalled example of American munificence—it is very rare in history for a victorious nation to level its enemy and then rebuild it—but also as an example of how America can use its power to advance both its ideals and its interests. Consider the Marshall Plan. Admittedly it was in the long-term interest of America to have trading partners in Europe. Even so, there is something incredible in the idea of America investing to rebuild not just the nations of Europe but of its former enemies Germany, Austria, and Italy. Instead of taking what it could from a defeated opponent, a victorious America instead helped Germany become a postwar economic powerhouse. This is the very opposite of theft—it comes close to a rare case of philanthropy.

  Germany and Japan benefited not merely from American financial assistance but from the adoption of American ideals and American-style free institutions. We hear from President Obama that democracy cannot be imposed at the point of a bayonet. Obama writes in The Audacity of Hope that “when we seek to impose democracy with the barrel of a gun” we are “setting ourselves up for failure.”6 Some progressives say there is something contradictory in attempting to force other countries to be free. Yet we imposed democracy at the point of a bayonet on both Germany and Japan—we forced both countries to establish free institutions—and the results have been excellent.

  After the war, America actively pushed for the dissolution of European empires, in particular the British Empire. In the Suez crisis, for instance, America backed the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser over the British. Both publicly and privately, America sought self-government for the nations of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, just as it had for South America with the Monroe Doctrine. This liquidation of European power is precisely what James Burnham termed the “suicide of the West.” In the sense just described, America did indeed aid the suicide of the West. America’s willingness to push its wartime ally Britain to jettison its worldwide colonies was especially brave considering that America was starting to fight a cold war with the Soviet Union. Many of the newly independent nations declared themselves “non-aligned” states that were often socialist or even pro-Soviet.

  Nevertheless, the United States and its Western allies won the Cold War, as Margaret Thatcher put it, “without firing a shot.”7 The remarkable success of this victory, achieved without the usual carnage that accompanies war, has caused many to forget what enormous resources, what determination and patience, and what intelligent strategy, went into defeating the Soviet empire. Again, America fought the Cold War primarily for reasons of self-interest. We didn’t want to be at the receiving end of the Soviet Union’s nuclear missiles. Russia still has a lot of missiles, but they are less menacing than they used to be when the trigger fingers on the other end belonged to the grim members of the Soviet Politburo. So Americans can breathe a little easier, the people of Russia and Eastern Europe are vastly freer and better off, and Russia, while still dangerous, no longer poses an expansionist Communist threat to the peace and security of the world. America’s role in the Cold War, far from being a case of imperial looting, was one of protecting ourselves while extending liberty to a sizable fraction of humanity, both inside and outside Russia.

  What, then, of more recent involvements, from America’s alliance with unsavory Middle Eastern dictators to its role in Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions? Many progressives point out that America has long allied with dictators like the Shah of Iran and the Saudi royal family in order to maintain access to oil supplies. By doing this, we become part of the “gang of thieves” exploiting the people. We even allied for some years with Saddam Hussein, before turning against him. During the Soviet War in Afghanistan, the United States supplied weapons to Osama bin Laden. These facts seem to suggest, on America’s part, an amoral mercenary foreign policy, a vindication of the progressive allegation that America’s actions are motivated by power-seeking and theft.

  Progressives are certainly right that America makes these alliances to protect its self-interest. In the Middle East, that self-interest is oil. Now America is not stealing and has never stolen that oil—we purchase it at the world market price. America, however, seeks to avoid hostile regimes or instability in the region that might cause a disruption in the oil market. Progressives don’t seem to realize that there is nothing wrong with this. Some years ago I debated a leftist professor who harangued me, “Mr. D’Souza, will you admit that the main reason America is in the Middle East is because of oil?” I replied, “I certainly hope so. I cannot think of any other reasons to be there, can you?” The audience laughed. My opponent looked sullen. I could see he wasn’t convinced. And in a sense he was right. The question he was wrestling with was not self-interest per se. Rather, he was asking: In protecting America’s self-interest, are we making the overall situation in other countries better or worse? This is a legitimate question.

  In order to answer it, we must consider the central principle of foreign policy—the principle of the lesser evil. This principle says it is legitimate to ally with the bad guy to avoid the worse guy. The classic example of this was in World War II. The United States allied with Stalin—a very bad guy—because another bad guy, Hitler, posed a greater threat at the time. In the same vein, the United States was right to support the Shah of Iran, and when under Jimmy Carter we pulled the Persian rug out from under him, we got Khomeini. The Shah was a pretty bad guy, a dictator who had a secret police, but Khomeini soon proved himself a far worse guy. American and Iranian interests would have been better served if Khomeini had been prevented from coming to power. During the 1980s, the United States briefly allied with Saddam Hussein. This was during the Iran-Iraq war. Again, Saddam was the bad guy and Khomeini was the worse guy.

  When America provided arms to Osama bin Laden, he was part of the mujahedeen, a Muslim fighting force seeking to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. The mujahedeen could never have succeeded without American aid. Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. It was a spectacular triumph of American foreign policy. Of course no one knew that bin Laden and his minions would subsequently make America their main target. We see here a danger of “lesser evil” thinking: lesser evils are still evils. The bad guys you support today may turn against you tomorrow, as bin Laden did. Bin Laden may have been a “good guy” in fighting the Soviets, but he remained a “bad guy” seeking the eventual destruction of both the Soviet empire and what he took to be its American equivalent. So was America wrong to back the mujahedeen? No. At the time, radical Islam was not a major force in the world and we did not know bin Laden’s intentions. Foreign polic
y does not have the privilege that historians have—the privilege of hindsight. And even in hindsight America was right to do what it did.

  What went wrong in Vietnam, and more recently in Afghanistan and Iraq? In Vietnam, America miscalculated its self-interest. Of course the South Vietnamese were threatened by the North. Of course Vietnam would be worse off if it went Communist. But America committed large numbers of troops because it believed its vital interests in deterring Communist aggression were at stake. In fact, America had no vital interests in Vietnam; it was a drain on American resources rather than an intelligent use of them. So Vietnam was a stupid war, but it was not a wicked war. America had no intention to rule Vietnam, or to steal the resources of the Vietnamese people; America had no colonial designs on Vietnam. Still, Vietnam was an irresponsible use of American power—on this the progressives are right.

  The Iraq War, undertaken by George W. Bush, was also a mistake. I supported the war at the time, because I believed the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs). In retrospect, that proved to be false. I don’t understand how a country can invade another country based on the suspicion that they have WMDs. We should not have gone in unless we knew they had WMDs. Having said that, the Bush administration assiduously sought to rebuild Iraq after Saddam’s ouster. The problem was that this proved to be a difficult and costly enterprise. Far from stealing from Iraq, America returned to the Iraqis the keys to the oilfields, and invested hundreds of millions of dollars in restoring order and commerce to that country. Far from acting like a colonial occupier, America’s intention from the beginning was to get in and get out.