Those “Oh my god, the Bush era is over” moments are getting fewer and farther between now as the Obama administration settles in.
The easy-to-accomplish changes have happened, and now the hard work has set in. Congress fought bitterly over the economic stimulus plan, and a second nominee for the Commerce department has dropped out before confirmation hearings.
But in the car Friday morning, I had one of those moments where I pounded the steering wheel and cheered for the voice on the radio again.
The voice this time belonged to the new director of national intelligence, retired four-star admiral Dennis Blair. And what he said was, “The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications.”
The director of intelligence, the person in charge of keeping the United States safe from external threats, said that the economy is the biggest security concern.
In other words, this administration and its intelligence officials understand that the primary danger to people is that they won’t be able to eat, or feed their kids. That crime is bred from poverty and desperation as much as from fundamentalist ideologies.
This marks a major shift in the thinking of our government and by inference, a major shift in how it deals with the world:
Obama spoke along these lines on the campaign trail, pledging to increase foreign aid, but it is more than refreshing to hear it said by the chief intelligence officer. If the U.S. Government’s priority is not fighting a war on some nebulous enemy that, we are repeatedly assured, hates our way of life, but instead helping people have the basic necessities of life, it will breed far more goodwill than any violently created outpost of “democracy” that we could’ve created.
The economic crisis is leaving people in bad enough shape in the U.S., but its ripple effects around the world, Blair noted, can lead to much more frightening instability.
Yes, this is still using a specter of threat to motivate support for aid spending and for domestic economic spending. I would much rather see concern for poverty for the sake of the people dealing with it, not because it makes the U.S. safe from “terrorism.” But this shift in rhetoric is another move toward shifting the center and shifting the way we talk about security threats.
Reframing economic issues as security issues gives them new significance in our military-fetish society. Since the days of Reagan we’ve been dealing with a bomb-first-ask-questions-later foreign policy. The economy? It could take care of itself. Poor people just needed to get off the welfare rolls and get jobs—just ask Bill Clinton’s welfare reform. Crime rates going up? Just throw ’em in prison. Never mind the people in other countries who are starving, or even the people in our own country.
Hurricane Katrina was a turning point in this thought process, at least for most of the world. We saw Americans dying in the streets while their rich president flew over in Air Force One and furrowed his white brow in concern. Though stories in the media talked about looting, suddenly people could see and understand why you would have to steal when your kids couldn’t eat.
The economic stimulus bill that passed Congress last night signaled a shift in thought on the domestic policy front, and coupled with Blair’s words on Thursday, they outline simply the difference between this administration and the previous ones.
One could read Blair’s speech as a pitch for stimulus spending, but it’s bigger than that. The stimulus bill gives more money to the departments of Agriculture and Transportation, Health and Human Services, and even the Environmental Protection Agency than Defense, according to ProPublica’s breakdown.
But that is on the domestic front. A similar shift in priorities in foreign relations would mean more aid dollars flowing to health programs and educational support, not military aid.
And if news reports from India and China are any indication, such efforts cannot come a moment too soon. Resentment against elites turns rapidly to resentment against the U.S., and who can blame people?
Douglas Redker of the New America Foundation, speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said:
“It is understandable for the US, like other countries, to turn our focus inward and address the domestic impact of the current economic crisis before considering the more strategic global implications of our response.
But it is imperative that we not send a signal to the world that we are now solely focused inwards. If we assume that we can try to right our own domestic ship and deal with international issues later, then we are almost certain to find that other, more creative, aggressive and opportunistic actors will step in and try to fill any vacuum created by a lack of attention on our part.”
Blair’s words reflect an important first step in acknowledging the importance of such focus, and the legislative body’s participation in the discussion puts added muscle behind his words.
Poverty isn’t sexy, and building infrastructure doesn’t make for nearly as glamorous a photo op on the nightly news as war does. But the economic crisis, as Blair noted, is global, and it requires global solutions. Understanding that not every problem can be solved with military action is a good start, and acknowledging our interconnectedness and the need for cooperation to solve this problem is a move in the right direction.
“This marks a major shift in the thinking of our government and … a major shift in how it deals with the world” (colon omitted).
Hopefully, that interpretation of remarks by Dennis Blair will prove to be correct.
But here I would place a caveat, namely, that immediately after 9/11, neocons in the Bush administration made similar arguments that purely local economies/societies, rather than U.S. foreign policy itself, provided the impetus for terrorism.
In making those arguments, the neocons were knowingly trying to preserve American strategic goals (to control oil-producing and oil-transit countries that are Muslim-dominated) by shifting the blame for terrorism onto purely local poverty/misgovernment.
The neocons recommended violent regime change and forced “Westernization” by the U.S. armed forces, with the results now known.
The fact that Dennis Blair also identified economic rather than strategic causes for terrorism reinforces my suspicion that the Obama administration’s policies will not differ substantially from the neocons’ playbook. Obama himself recently called for 10,000 additional U.S. troops to be stationed in Afghanistan. And although I haven’t carefully followed Obama’s foreign policy statements, I don’t recall hearing him announce any radical changes to U.S. strategic policy in Muslim-dominated oil-producing and oil-transit countries.
I apologize if my commentary here seems trollish. But I googled Dennis Blair’s commments cited in your column to an article in the online L.A. Times, and nowhere in that article is Dennis Blair cited as having called for changes in U.S. strategic policy in Muslim-dominated oil-producing and oil-transit countries.
Simply to call for efforts to soften the impact of the global economic crisis in Afghanistan and the Middle East might represent a modification of the neocons’ strategy, but not, so far, a major shift. Please keep in mind that the neocons also were initially enthusiastic about using U.S. military “Civil Operations Officers” to Westernize the cultures, economics, and politics of Afghanistan and Iraq. So far, Dennis Blair’s comments seem to be calling for something similar, but not for a major shift.
I am not trying to knock the Obama administration’s approach to terrorism. I realize that, given the military situation in Afghanistan, any U.S. administration will have limited room to change U.S. tactics. I also realize that the global economic crisis is already having a destructive impact not only in oil-producing/oil-transit countries but in China as well, an impact that could, as Dennis Blair pointed out, destabilize the national governments in those countries. But, at least as reported in the online L.A. Times article, Dennis Blair did not call for substantially changing America’s currently militarized approach to terrorism. He was concerned only that the global economic crisis could disable the aforesaid national governments from assisting the U.S. in pursuing America’s current militarized strategy in fighting terrorism. So it seems that Dennis Blair prefers to continue maintaining military control over oil-producing/oil transit countries, whether through U.S. forces, NATO forces, or through local military proxies, including Israel. But foreign military control is exactly what provokes terrorism.
That is what concerns me about Obama’s policy — he seems determined to continue the U.S. foreign policy that actually provokes terrorism. I realize that he has few immediate options. But if the U.S. is to start winning the war against terror, we have to start by radically reassessing U.S. foreign policy in oil-producing/oil-transit countries, which means finding alternatives to military control of those countries by the U.S. or by U.S. military proxies.
Again, I apologize if my comments here seem trollish. I also apologize for the length of my comment. But I have yet to be convinced that the Obama administration will implement the necessary changes in U.S. foreign policy that could remove the root cause of terrorism, which is U.S. foreign policy itself.
As a final aside: Please note that your link (4th paragraph) to D. Blair’s comments needs to be corrected. Your link actually connects to a Global Comment article in GC’s October 2005 archive that does not mention the subject of Blair’s comments. Perhaps I should have read the GC October ’05 article more carefully, but it looks like the link needs to be fixed.