You cannot try a medicine on a patient, and when it proves
ineffective or detrimental, decide there was not enough of it and administer a
higher dosage. That doubling down on failure would be the most reckless thing
you can do to a patient. What you should do instead is go back to square one
and rethink your entire strategy.
This is exactly what America should be doing concerning
its relations with the rest of the world. That's because from the beloved
Republic that the world used to look up to, America has squandered all that
goodwill in a period of time considered a blink of an eye in the lifespan of a
nation. And the worst part is that some people continue to counsel America to do
more of what hurt it badly in the first place.
An article will help us shed some light on this matter. It
came under the title: “The dark dilemma of modern globalism” and the subtitle:
“Neither globalist nor isolationist understands effective world engagement.” It
was written by Clifford D. May and published on July 26, 2016 in The Washington
Times. May uses the issue of globalism as a springboard to discuss America 's
role in the world. He runs the discussion in such a way as to flesh out both
the conservative and the progressive sides of the debate while hinting that he
is a centrist, standing between the two extremes.
However, he suddenly takes a sharp turn to the Right and
starts articulating a point of view considered to be of the extreme Right. Here
is how he does that: “I can't imagine any conservative calling himself a
globalist.” And he proceeds to expand on the talking points that make up the
conservative narrative. This includes President Obama's decision to withdraw
from Iraq ,
which he criticizes because it had tragic results, he says. To prove it, he
cites the false evidence that “al Qaeda in Iraq had been decimated by the [W.
Bush] surge”.
He repeats that assertion without saying how it was arrived
at. What he omitted saying, in fact, is that wars that last several months or
years go through cycles of intense fighting followed by lulls. And so, the
people who claim that the surge had worked, point to one of the lulls and say:
“See; the surge has worked.” In saying so, they try to give the impression that
the temporary period of quiet meant the war had ended.
And these people don't stop here because they go on to say
that Obama made the mistake of withdrawing from Iraq . They say this much despite
the fact that the natural thing to do at the end of a war is to pack your gear
and go home. The way they see things, however, is that Obama should have kept
the troops in Iraq
to play the role of peace keepers and nation builders.
Is there a parallel to that? Do they point to a precedent
that might reassure the world and the American public they know what they are
talking about? Yes, they do point to precedents. Look at Korea , they say; don't we have a
beautiful situation there? And the listener is stunned by this logic.
Undeterred, they go on to explain that there is also Afghanistan – apparently
not bothered by the fact that this war has gone through hundreds of cycles over
a fifteen-year period, and there is no end in sight. Still, Clifford May and
those of his ilk would have loved to repeat in Iraq the scenario of a perpetual
war in which building the nation proves to be an impossible task.
President Obama was wrong, he says, and there must be a
better way for America
to proceed in the world. He explains the way he has in mind with these words:
“It recognizes the need for American engagement and American leadership … The
only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for Americans to persuade
themselves that what happens abroad doesn't concern them”.
It is not surprising that the writer has reached those
conclusions despite the obvious reality that everywhere America has
meddled in the affairs of others after the Second World War, things went
horribly bad. Vietnam was a
disaster that the French handed to America because they wanted someone
to do the work they would not do themselves.
As to America 's
interventions in the Middle East , they came
about as a result of Jewish insistence that there is a need for American
engagement and leadership in that region. To that, they add a flattery to the
effect that what's necessary for evil to triumph is for Americans to be
unconcerned with what happens abroad.