The Enemy of My Enemy

While a long-term appreciation of American foreign policy is of little help while America is at war, it is of great importance in trying to anticipate future crises. A key problem in American foreign policy that marks it off sharply from domestic policy is the small number of players involved in shaping policy. Large corporations of course play a huge role in the shaping of most key government policies in America, domestic and foreign. But in the area of domestic policy, public involvement is great enough to provide some countervailing power. In foreign policy, by contrast, public interest and knowledge is slight. For example, in a Gallup poll in 1983, 80 percent of Americans indicated they would be opposed to their government intervening to support military opponents of an elected but communist-leaning regime in Nicaragua. But, asked subsequently if they were aware that their government was intervening in Nicaragua at the time, only eight percent answered affirmatively.

The result of the minimal interest of the broad public in foreign policy is that American corporations can influence foreign policy-making without much concern for countervailing power. Eisenhower was not exaggerating when he spoke of a"military-industrial complex" in the country that wielded unchecked power. And what objectives does corporate America promote regarding foreign policy? On the evidence of the twentieth century, the two inter-related objectives of the corporations have been to compel foreign states to maintain an"Open Door" to American investment and trade, on the one hand, and to eliminate communist and other nationalist elements opposed to the"Open Door," on the other. This has often led to foreign policy initiatives in which, despite the American people's belief that their nation serves as a beacon of freedom and social justice in the world, American governments have firmly sided with fascists and religious crazies.

What is striking in terms of American foreign policy over the past seven decades is how often America has chosen to regard as friends those with whom it would eventually have to go to war. Too often, this has been because of a willingness to form friendships purely on the basis that"my enemy's enemy is my friend." For much of the twentieth century, that simply meant allying with almost anyone who seemed to be militantly anti-communist.

An early example was America's attitude to the Hitler Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s. America's corporate elite and many congressmen were openly pro-Hitler, whom they congratulated for having banned Communists, Socialists, and trade unions in Germany, and for saber-rattling at the Soviet Union. Henry Ford's loud and anti-Semitic support for Nazism is best remembered but the more restrained public support of such companies as General Motors, IBM, and Coca-Cola which had large operations in Germany, is equally noteworthy. The genuine anti-fascists in the U.S. such as Franklin Roosevelt recognized the futility of trying to win congressional support for a tough policy in dealing with Hitler as he rearmed Germany, particularly since most conservative politicians in Britain and France also focused on Hitler as someone who might destroy Soviet power. Only when Hitler seemed bent on destroying Britain, America's major trading partner, as much as the Soviet Union, did the American elite gradually recognize that they had waited too long to contain a monster.

But after the war, the United States government again focused on communism as the enemy and made common cause with often quite thuggish forces in an effort to combat not only communists but socialists and nationalists who were not prepared to accept an"Open Door" to American traders. American governments sanctioned the overthrow of elected governments in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), Dominican Republic (1965) and Chile (1973) because they were too leftist. In countries such as South Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines, American governments tolerated repressive military dictatorships because they regarded the alternatives as threats to American capital.

The view that"the enemy of my enemy is my friend" brought America to the embrace of Osama bin Laden and his zealot friends in the 1980s as the U.S. sought to arm whatever groups had some chance of playing a role in ousting the Soviet Union and its Afghan Communist allies from Kabul. Despite the American denunciation of the Soviets as a foreign invader, the Pentagon seemed to see little problem in arming bin Laden and his mainly non-Afghan warriors. The Islamic fundamentalism of this group was hardly something that American officials could identify with. But they seemed to be impressed by the fact that Islamic fundamentalists were as fanatical in their anti-communism as the American elite itself, and assumed, quite shortsightedly, that any threat the fundamentalists posed was only to the communists.

It was not as if the United States had no inkling of what havoc fundamentalism might cause them. The fundamentalist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran had held America's diplomatic employees in that country hostage for a year. But, instead of recognizing that the anti-communism of Islamic fundamentalism, like that of Nazism, was an insufficient basis for an alliance, America's leaders rushed headlong to embrace it outside of Iran. As for Iran, the American response was in part to arm Iran's enemies, again on the grounds that"my enemy's enemy is my friend." Throughout the long and bitter Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the United States and some of its allies cheerily sold arms to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In 1990, those weapons were turned against America's friend, Kuwait, and the Gulf War ensued in early 1991.

It is not enough to base a foreign policy on economic advantage for American corporations. Nor is it enough to forge alliances on the basis of"the enemy of my enemy is my friend." American foreign policy has to be refashioned to genuinely support democracy throughout the world and to support a fairer distribution of the world's goods. But that won't happen unless the American people become more concerned about foreign policy and more willing to demand that their government uphold democracy rather than the"Open Door" as the goal of American foreign policy.