Since 9/11 Americans have chosen to stake our domestic tranquility and the preservation of our liberties on our ability – under our commander-in-chief – to rule the world by force of arms rather than to lead, as we had in the past, by the force of our example or our arguments. And we appear to have decided that it is necessary to destroy our constitutional practices and civil liberties in order to save them. This is a trade-off we had resolutely refused to make during our far more perilous half-century confrontation with Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union.
Powerful words indeed. Spoken by Charles W. Freeman, Jr., whose biography includes being Richard M. Nixon's principal interpreter during his visit to the People's Republic of China in 1972, U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia under George H.W. Bush, and Assistant Secretary of Defense, international security affairs, 1993-94 in the Clinton Administration. That bio alone should make you want to continue reading.
The quote is from a text of a speech entitled Diplomacy and Empire, given February 9 of this year to DACOR (Diplomats and Consular Officers, Retired) in Washington DC. Notice of it came across a Quaker list serv to which I subscribe.
Freeman is very blunt in his assessment, and no diary, even one far more well-crafted than I can hope to make this, can do justice to what he offered in that speech. Let me at least offer some sense, in the hope that you will
- go read the whole speech
- pass it on as widely as you can, especially to any Congress critters or their staff members with whom you have ongoing contact.
Freeman notes that the problem of dealing with actions of non-national entities is quite ancient, and refers to the burning of Ostia, destruction of a fleet, and kidnapping of two senators and their staffs by a league of Pirates in 68 BCE. He quotes a recent book by Robert Harris, which explores how Pompey took advantage of the understandable horror at what had happened. Here I offer part of the paragraph where he quotes Harris and offers some additional words
Rome panicked. Mr. Harris comments that: "What Rome was facing was a threat very different from that posed by a conventional enemy. These pirates were a new type of ruthless foe, with no government to represent them and no treaties to bind them. Their bases were not confined to a single state. They had no unified system of command. They were a worldwide pestilence, a parasite which needed to be stamped out, otherwise Rome – despite her overwhelming military superiority – would never again know security or peace." In response to these imagined menaces, Pompey (self-styled "the Great") persuaded a compliant Senate to set aside nearly 700 years of Roman constitutional law, abridge the ancient rights and liberties of Roman citizens, and appoint him supreme commander of the armed forces. With due allowance for a bit of pointed reinterpretation, if not revisionism by Mr. Harris, most historians regard this incident and its aftermath as the beginning of the end of the Roman republic.
Any sentient being capable of reading will of course see the immediate parallel with our own time, which is of course why Freeman uses the historical example.
I do not know how extensively I may quote from a speech offered on a non-subscription website w/o violating copyright, but I do know that the speech was carefully crafted, and to do it justice you need time to read it carefully, from the beginning. Remember that Freeman was a diplomat, and was speaking to others like himself, people who had served diplomatically. Thus his expression might be dismissed as biased to the diplomatic point of view. He does however offer a great deal of historical context for the arguments he makes. I will not share all of those.
But let me share two paragraphs which I think speak very much to the current situation, not only what has happened in Iraq and may happen in Iran, but to the policies of this administration in general:
When war is not the extension of policy but the entrenchment of policy failure by other means, it easily degenerates into mindless belligerence and death without meaning. Appealing as explosions and the havoc of war may be to those who have experienced them only vicariously rather than in person, military success is not measured in battle damage but in political results. These must be secured by diplomacy.
The common view in our country that diplomacy halts when war begins is thus worse than wrong; it is catastrophically misguided. Diplomacy and war are not alternatives; they are essential partners. Diplomacy unbacked by force can be ineffectual, but force unassisted by diplomacy is almost invariably unproductive. There is a reason that diplomacy precedes war and that the use of force is a last resort. If diplomacy fails to produce results, war can sometimes lay a basis for diplomats to achieve them. When force fails to attain its intended results, diplomacy and other measures short of war can seldom accomplish them.
Freeman not only argues from historical context, but points out that the approach we have been taking, whether justified from the right or from the left, has actually been counterproductive to the goals we have ostensibly sought. As an example, read this paragraph:
The moral argument put forward by both left and right-wing proponents of aggressive American unilateralism is that, as a nation with these unexampled elements of power and uniquely admired virtues, the United States has the duty both to lead the world and to remake it in our image. But our recent confusion of command and control with leadership and conflation of autocratic dictation with consultation have stimulated ever greater resistance internationally. Thus the aggressive unilateralism by which we have sought to consolidate our domination of world affairs has very effectively undermined both our dominion over them and our capacity to lead.
Freeman covers a wide range of material. He deals with our economy and our attempts to use our economic power to obtain other goals. I thought I was fairly aware of national policy, but the next ( of two) paragraph I will offer brought me up short, as if someone had slapped me across the face:
Over the past decade, we have adopted unilateral sanctions against some 95 countries and territories. Most recently, we have worked hard to shut down banking in the occupied territories of Palestine, severely curtail it in Iran, and prevent the use of the dollar in Sudan's oil trade. The nobility of our motives in each case is not the issue. But, if we assert the right to confiscate dollar-denominated wealth, and to do without due process or legal recourse and remedy, it should not surprise us that people begin looking for ways to avoid the use of our currency. There is now an active search on the part of a growing number of foreign financial institutions for ways to avoid the dollar, bank-clearance procedures that touch New York, or transactions with US-based financial institutions. Adding oil traders to the list of the dollar-averse increases the incentives for them to find alternatives to our currency.
Our ill-considered abuse of our financial power may thus have put us on the path to losing it. The dollar accounts for much of our weight in global affairs. American investors are now increasingly hedging the dollar and going heavily into non dollar-denominated foreign equities and debt.
By now you should have a sense of why I think this speech is so important, and deserves much wider dissemination than it has had. Freeman lays out a series of things which we should accomplish, but I will let you read them in his own words.
And I will end as he ends, offering the diary no further analysis or commentary of my own, because Freeman's words need no gloss or explanation:
Guantánamo, AbuGhraib, the thuggish kidnappings of "extraordinary rendition," the Jersey barrier, and an exceptional aptitude for electronic eavesdropping cannot be allowed permanently to displace the Statue of Liberty and a reputation for aspiration to higher standards as the symbols of America to the world. To regain both our self-respect and our power to persuade rather than coerce the world, we must restore our aspiration to distinguish our country not by the might of its armed forces but by its civility and devotion to liberty. The best way to assure the power to cope with emergencies is to refrain from the abuse of power in ordinary times.
All the world would still follow America, if they could find it. We must rediscover it to them. That, not bullying behavior or a futile effort at imperial dominion, is the surest path to security for Americans.