When foreign policy becomes domestic policy

Nation states around world broadly use 3 justifications to pursue foreign policy

Nation states around the world broadly use 3 justifications to pursue foreign policy that is otherwise devoid of reason, vision and popular support. Those 3 justifications are security, dehumanisation of others and too much humanisation of some. I will get into the details of what they mean but the most recurring pattern in all of those is that whatever is being done abroad using any of these justifications, it is reflected right back on domestic soil.

The United States has pursued a dangerous and self-harming foreign policy for much of the period after World War II in the name of national security. First it was the communists and then the Jihad. Today, it might be Russia and China more than Jihad. During the Cold War, uttering support for the word communism was sinful. There was more freedom of speech for other issues such as calling the Soviet Union an evil empire than there was for issues such as sanitising the idea of communism. So much was the obsession with the Soviets that the Americans didn’t mind limiting their own freedom of speech and at times even civil liberties.

After 9/11, the American global war on terror became so extreme that the constitutional law professor president started violating the very constitution more than those who never taught the virtues of the sacred document. Obama spied on American citizens. He ordered the assassination of American citizens without the due process of law using dubious and ludicrous legal justifications for those murders. The things that were done to the people of Afghanistan and Iraq started to reflect on American soil. Privacy rights were lost when Obama converted America into a kind of surveillance state, which would make Stalin and Hitler fringe.

The dehumanising of other people is a time-tested method. America killed countless people using drone strikes around the world. And the official story that followed always labeled the dead as ‘suspected militants’. When people are dehumanised, then any brutality done to them can be justified using this rationale. This too got reflected inside the homeland. Americans such as Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, members of the American Civil Liberties Union, Journalists such as James Risen, Whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and many others tried to tell their fellow Americans that America wasn’t the moral force of the world that it advertises itself to be and that we were actually killing innocent people and merely labeling them as terrorists. They told the American people that their government was responsible for the torture of the detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan and that their government was spying on the entire lives of the Americans. Snowden had to go into exile. Risen lost his job at The New York Times. Medea is a regular target of anyone that hates the truth in America. The actions that America practised abroad on other people started to be practised on American soil as well.

Then there is too much humanising. Americans are told to humanise the Israelis more than just mere human beings but rather as the chosen ones that need American help all the time. Americans are more Israeli than the Israelis themselves. Anyone that doesn’t follow in those locksteps become the target of the most vicious propaganda campaign by terrorist organisations such as the AIPAC and are removed from whatever prestigious office they hold. The presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard had to leave their jobs because their only crime was that they didn’t stop the students from expressing their support for Palestine and their critique of Israel. Those actions by the students constitute textbook free speech. Yet, whatever Israel does to the Palestinians and the American support of Israel reflects on American soil in the form of limiting American freedoms.

Cruel American foreign policy comes with a price and the price is usually exactly the replication of that very cruelty at home.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 25^th, 2024.

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