Is there any discipline in which firsthand experience can be
more useful than abstract academic knowledge? There may be a number of them;
I'm not sure how many. But I am certain of one discipline where firsthand experience
will trump academic training most of the time. That discipline is foreign
policy.
Thus, the following question: Can three academic giants of
foreign policy agree on something, and yet be challenged by someone whose
credential is that he lived what they are talking about but never studied the
discipline formally? Yes it is possible; and that's what I'll try to do. The
three giants are Kori Schake, Condoleeza Rice and Tunku Varadarajan, neither of
whom grew up in a colony, or developed a firsthand experience for how a native
population reacts to various forms of foreign presence in its midst. I did; I
lived in countries at the Horn of Africa from the age of one to the age of
fourteen. I soaked the local cultures as well as can be.
What prompted this discussion is that Tunku Varadarajan
wrote an article under the title: “Will China Impose a New World Order?” and
the subtitle: “When Pax Britannica gave way to Pax Americana, the transition
was peaceful. A repeat is unlikely, says the author of 'Safe Passage,'”
published on Feb. 10, 2018 in the Wall Street Journal.
I spent 7 years –– between the ages of 7 and 14 –– in the
French colony of Djibouti .
We lived in an exclusive district where the native Somalis were not allowed to
live. My siblings and I went to private schools where native kids were allowed
to enroll as long as they attended all the lessons, which included the daily
catechism. Whereas Djibouti ,
known at the time as French Somaliland, was a quiet and idyllic place, we
occasionally heard of discontent in other places of East Africa, including Somalia that
used to be under British and Italian controls.
This was the time that I learned about the views the locals
held regarding the various colonial masters. Two of those stories stuck in my
mind and have remained fresh to this day. One is that the French meant it when
they said they wanted to educate the people they colonize. In fact, I attended
a French school in Djibouti .
Before that, I attended a French school in Ethiopia (briefly an Italian colony).
As to Somalia
which was under British and Italian control, I was aware that more French
schooling was done there than English or Italian. Schooling the locals is one
reason why most Africans respect the French more than they do the English to
this day.
The other story I used to hear sounds more like a metaphor
than a real occurrence, but it shows what the locals thought of English
hypocrisy, especially when it came to the rule of law and the administration of
justice. The story went like this: They set up a hanging post to execute
someone. When they brought him to the post, they discovered he was too tall for
it. And so the judge told them to go find someone shorter and hang him instead.
This was not meant to make people laugh. It was meant to reflect the disgust
they had for the British sense of justice and fairness.
Now in my old age, I read various Arab and African
publications, among other things. I sense that the attitude of the people
hasn't changed towards what they call the “West.” What is different between now
and then, however, is that a new player has appeared on the scene. These are
the Chinese whom the Arabs and Africans admire even more than they did the
French. Why is that?
The Chinese are in those countries as business people that
came to partner with the locals at running mutually beneficial enterprises.
Unlike the Westerners, they were not colonial masters at any time in the past,
and do not exhibit tendencies indicating they still think of the locals as
subjects of an empire that is no longer there. The Chinese respect the locals,
and get respect in return.
What is wrong with the foreign policy academics in the West
is that they study and teach from books that were written during the Cold War.
They see things through the prism of security. Thus, they think and talk in
terms of security pacts and security alliances. While the Chinese go around the
world to do business with others, the Americans go behind them to tell the
others they must join America
in a defense pact to be protected from the Chinese. Increasingly, the people in
the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and even Latin America
are rejecting what is beginning to sound like baseless American demagoguery.