"The United States does not have friends, it has interests" snapped John Foster Dulles, the stern and powerful secretary of state for the Eisenhower administration, 1953-59. This retort was given in response to the remark that the United Kingdom and the United States had a "Special Relationship." Dulles' quip was met with indignation and rebuke from both sides of the Atlantic.
Yet there is a powerful idea behind Dulles' retort. America's long-term interests should guide foreign policy, not warm feelings about any of the many countries with which we have had long-term alliances and open immigration. Still, the reality is that the pursuit of "interests" competes with several other conflicting notions of the goals of foreign policy, including helping friends even when not obviously in our interest.
Variations on "Balance of Powers," a phrase with many historical references, directs that foreign policy responds to shifts in power among leading competitors. It's a bit like a chess board with six sides. Advocates of this approach say we need to move to check the growing prominence of the Chinese presence in international affairs. Russia must be kept in its reduced status both by arming all nations on its eastern borders and developing a strategy to counter Russia's current foray into Middle Eastern conflicts. A Russian perspective following the same thesis would have it investing diplomatically and militarily in Syria, even if not in its own interest.
A third notion, the antithesis of Dulles' approach, vests the United States with a missionary obligation to be the policeman of the world and to spread "democracy." Accordingly we seek the overthrow of regimes that do not measure up, but not always.
U.S. policy has vacillated among these objectives. Compare our loving embrace of Saudi Arabia's fiercely totalitarian regime with our stubborn insistence that Syria's Assad-led government be overthrown. Iraq's Saddam Hussein was our closet ally in its poisonous gas-fueled war with Iran. Too bad he didn't get the message that if he moved on Kuwait we would throw him out.
With rare exceptions -- (maybe Israel and Great Britain?), surely Dulles had it right. Moral outrage is not necessarily the best guide in addressing a foreign policy issue. President Obama "red lined" the government of Syria for using poisonous gas in suppressing internal unrest and revolution and threatened more. Russia stepped in with other U.N. Security Council support and, with us, negotiated a deal by which Syria promised not to do it again and let us take all their chemical supplies away from them. That should have been enough, but morality required that we could have nothing more to do with the Syrian government until it got rid of its leader Mr. Assad.
Awakening (again) to history
In the 19th century, when the United States first started paying attention to foreign policy, the nation-states of Europe as we now know them, were still getting firmly established. The Balkans, the area of southeast Europe roughly from Constantinople to Budapest, known to politics as the "Balkan Powder Keg," consisted of close to a dozen extended ethnic groupings. In a preindustrial age parochialism was standard. Each regional culture was distinctive, including linguistic differences. Memories of inter-group conflict or outright combat, handed down from generation to generation with embroidery were integrated in sustaining folklore. Bitter grudges, weird to the American observer, survived into the 20th century as a reason even for war.
Historians will argue for some time over the American Bosnian military intervention in the wake of the collapse of Yugoslavia. Was it a mistake? Did the fact that they were killing each other affect our interests? Did debate over foreign policy choices delay intervention unnecessarily?
Before World War I, peace in the Balkans was kept by the overarching power of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, based in Vienna. Further to the east from Constantinople to Baghdad, bumping up on the historically independent empire of the Persians (Iran), peace was imposed by the Ottoman Empire over yet another selection of tribes or clans. These divisions only began with an Arab-non-Arab split and an Islamic Sunni-Shiite split sometimes compared with the Protestant-Catholic split of Europe's 16th century.
The First World War brought an end to both empires and prefaced a reach of new parties for imperial power over these areas. Russia, though handicapped by its defeat in the war, went for the Balkans, and France and England liked the areas we now think of as Egypt, Palestine and Iraq (British) and Lebanon and Syria (French). National lines were set up with little to no reference to ethnicity or tribal precincts.
It's more complicated than that, but that will do as a prefatory history to the disastrous, uninformed and deliberate invasion of Iraq by Bush Two who, in the name of democracy, threw out the Sunni government of Hussein, its army and administration, giving governance of the country to the clans and cliques formed around the Shiite branch of Islam because the Shiites outnumbered the Sunnis.
What next?
So what happens? The Kurds to the north of Iraq form their own de facto government, exciting Kurds in Turkey with the prospect of a Kurdistan. The frustrated Sunnis ally with their brethren in eastern Syria. Syria, like Iraq, had previously been ruled undemocratically and ruthlessly by yet another Islamic minority, most recently directed by a British-educated Arab ophthalmologist named Assad, not well-educated politically. The alliance tries for a separate country west of Baghdad. Overmatched by regular troops, terrorism and religious extremism become better tools. Financial and other material support comes from Sunni elements in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates. So we got ISIS.
Fed by the Sunni Iraqi soldiers whom we never incorporated into the reorganized Iraqi army, ISIS presents a strong, anti-American presence dominant in western Iraq and eastern Syria fed on devotion to the establishment of a fantastic, extremist religious empire to be called a caliphate. Their hostility to America leaves any comparable hostility of Shiite Iranians far behind. American and European tourists can walk around in Iran but would be beheaded if they showed up in ISIS territory.
The Syrian government remains the strongest military presence resisting ISIS. But we won't help them because of their immoral leadership. Russia steps in on the kind of policy justification the U.S. usually exercises. Like our invasions, it will be popular at home, for a while.
Which style of American foreign policy do you want to adopt? Or as a leading senior American diplomat once advised the author, unless you are certain, do nothing.
John Havelock, a White House Fellow in the Johnson administration has long been an observer of public affairs.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com.