What in the World are We Doing?
Terry H. Schwadron
Nov.9, 2017
With President Trump in Asia, rattling sabers while looking for trade deals for the United States, the question still unsettles: What exactly are Americans looking to do in the world?
Beyond the North Korean crisis or the seemingly permanent problem of eliminating terrorism threats, what is the vision? And are we thinking, preparing, staffing towards achievement of those long-term goals or are we doomed to deal day to day with threats? Do we only identify our aims in terms of dealing with one enemy or another?
Terrorism is great for that purpose. It’s ever-changing face, location, personality and multi-headedness will guarantee that Americans can never “win” outright. There will always be threats. Just this weekend, we heard for the first time that Americans were bombing sites in Somalia, where rebel groups apparently have merged with the generalized “terrorism” troops, under whichever ISIS/Al Quaeda/anti-West flag they have adopted.
A recent column by New York Times writer Thomas L. Friedman offered me a different way of thinking about all this. The basic thrust was this: Trump is unable to connect the dots between cause and effect, and thus has Americans always dealing with the effects of terrorism. His militaristic bent is all about defeating an increasingly diverse and spreading enemy, an outcome that, as the New York one-man truck massacre in New York show, again last week, seems increasingly difficult even to define, to say nothing of defeat.
It seems to me that American policy in the past, even when it gave way to war, was to spotlight the American experience in a welcoming, prosperous, and relatively peaceful alternative to the conflicts and oppressiveness found in parts of the world where terror is more common. Through foreign aid, rebuilding efforts, outreach of various sort, there was an idea, however poorly achieved, that by showing good example on the one hand, and offering aid on the other, that trying to improve people’s situations would carry the natural byproduct of terrorism prevention, or at least isolation.
The Trump position of American First in all things, elimination of aid, destabilization of diplomatic efforts across the board and stubborn insistence on “winning” differs from that position, held by both Republican and Democratic predecessors.
Friedman took on the Niger situation for explanation. As he said, it is too easy to just see the topline events — that four U.S. soldiers were killed in an apparent ambush that came about in a general effort to pit our military “advisors” to local troops tasked with subduing would-be terrorists. Friedman, who spent time in Niger producing a National Geographic documentary as well as writing columns, basically outlines an argument that says narrowly militaristic American policy is worsening the situation there, not improving it by literal elimination of enemy troops.
“Niger highlights a much larger problem — just how foolish, how flat-out dumb President Trump is behaving. Trump is a person who doesn’t connect dots — even when they’re big, fat polka dots that are hard to miss. Rather, he thinks inside narrow little boxes built from his own simplistic impulses and applause lines — and that tendency is leading us into a web of contradictions abroad. Niger is a perfect example,” Friedman wrote.
The column outlines the failure to look at the deeper cause problems in Niger — growth of the desert, along with population explosions and poor local governance. Basically, the argument is that there has been widening collapse of small farms, an important building block all over Africa, leading to rising numbers of economic migrants, tribal conflicts and extremism. A high birthrate, a changing warming climate with less rainfall, and forced migration have created conditions ripe for terrorism. “Parts of sub-Saharan Africa are already at heat levels that Paris was supposed to prevent by the end of the century — and the region is heading for a four-degree rise, which will lead to the collapse of even more small farms and lead to a mad scramble of refugees toward Europe, competition for food and more unemployed males ready to join ISIS for $50 a month,” Friedman argues.
Indeed, UN officials are talking about more conflicts and food riots that, when mapped, cluster around Niger and neighboring countries.
American policies ignore those factors, or outwardly deny them (think climate change) and fail to deal with the underlying economic and community changes.
Focus on military efforts with elimination of global contraception programs, climate change control, research and science, and aid reductions are “just stupid, reckless and irresponsible — and it evinces no ability to connect the dots or think without a box.”
It is a pattern we see elsewhere, as I have written previously. We are eliminating the physical center of the ISIS caliphate, but there appears to be no plan. We are abandoning Kurds who helped us, we are creating competing Iraqi and Syrian factions, we are stuck with Russian presence in the region and we are antagonizing Iran seemingly without a plan. We are not the neighborhood good guy, in the view of many. In our own hemisphere, we are provoking Mexico and Central America rather than helping with the causes of illegal immigration, we are pushing against a Cuba that has seemed open to change, we have threatened Venezuela just for being something we are not.
That’s the issue I see in an Asian trip. If there is a long-term plan beyond dealing militarily with North Korea, or calling China on bad trade tactics, or selling everyone more American-made guns and weapons systems, it is a little difficult to figure out. And even if it were clear, we have reduced the ability of a foreign service to execute.
The experience in Niger should be teaching us to ask more questions, not to utter more slogans.
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