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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Thu Apr 29 2010 - 22:20:41 EDT
U.S. Fighting Losing Battles Against National Self-Determination
By Mark Weisbrot
The Guardian.uk
Sunday, Apr 11, 2010
Of all the misunderstandings that guide U.S. foreign policy – including
foreign commercial policy - perhaps the most important and long-lasting is
the failure to recognize or understand what national self-determination
means to most people in the world. Or why it might be important to them.
Our leaders seem to have learned very little since their disastrous war in
Vietnam, which ended 35 years ago.
The cynical would say that America’s leaders do understand these things,
but don’t care. However that would not explain why President Obama would
go to Afghanistan and humiliate President Karzai, in a way that was sure to
alienate the government that Washington wants to work with, and its
supporters.
Karzai reacted angrily: “In this situation there is a thin curtain
between invasion and cooperation-assistance,” he said last week. He also
warned that the insurgency “could become a national resistance.”
Of course, Washington’s problem with the Afghan government does not
really have so much to do with corruption, as Obama lectured Karzai about
– just look at the billions of dollars that the U.S. government continues
to slather on corrupt governments all over the world, from Pakistan to
Colombia. It is more that Karzai wants to negotiate a peace agreement with
the Taliban insurgents, while Washington – especially the Pentagon -
wants to pull off something it can claim as a “military victory” before
that happens. It remains to be seen how many people, including civilians,
will die needlessly before the Afghan government’s preferred strategy of
negotiations is allowed.
But the problem is much more general and extends to U.S. foreign policy
throughout the world. Washington claims to support “democracy,” but
democracy without self-determination is a very limited form of democracy.
It is a great irony that Latin America, for example, had more
self-determination in the realm of economic policy from 1950 to 1980, when
much of the region lived under dictatorships, than it had after formal
democracy became widespread. Not surprisingly, the region’s economy grew
enormously faster between 1950 and 1980 than it has in the last 30 years,
when “Washington consensus” economic policies became the norm.
Fortunately the Latin American electorate did not conclude from this
experience that dictatorship was better than democracy. Instead, over the
last decade they decided that they needed more democracy, the kind that
includes national self-determination and economic policy-making that
benefits their own countries and also the majority of their citizens.
Bolivia took control over some of its most important natural resources –
especially hydrocarbons – and now has an extra 20 percent of GDP that the
government has been able to spend for economic and social development. (For
comparison, 20 percent of GDP is the average amount of the entire federal
budget in the United States over the last 40 years). Bolivia also now has
an independent foreign policy, where it can play a leading role on issues
of great importance to the country, such as climate change.
In 2001 Argentina defaulted on its massive foreign debt and changed its
economic policies, getting rid of the Washington-controlled IMF in the
process. There is no question that they were also better off for this move,
with the economy growing 63 percent in the ensuing six years. Venezuela is
another example of a government that was able to grow very rapidly after
getting control over its national oil industry in 2003, and to greatly
expand access to health care and education. It has also used its oil wealth
to help other countries in the hemisphere (including the poorest, Haiti,
where it has apparently pledged more money than the U.S. government for
relief and reconstruction; and the richest, the United States, where it has
donated tens of millions of dollars annually in the form of discounted
heating oil to low-income Americans). Ecuador’s left, nationalist
government has doubled spending on health care, got rid of a third of its
foreign debt through default, and has refused to cave to U.S. pressure on
the multi-billion lawsuit of Ecuadorians against oil giant Chevron for
pollution of ground waters. There are numerous other examples that could be
cited from “pink tide” governments that now govern most of Latin
America.
Of course, national self-determination also matters in countries that do
not have democratic governments. China has had the fastest-growing economy
in world history over the last three decades, pulling hundreds of millions
of people out of poverty despite widening inequality. As economists Nancy
Birdsall, Dani Rodrik and Arvind Subramanian have noted, this would not
have happened if China had pursued “a garden-variety World Bank
structural adjustment program in 1978 instead of its own brand of heterodox
gradualism.”
And Vietnam, another country ruled by a communist party, has also had one
of the world’s fastest growing economies since it got rid of the American
troops 35 years ago. Over the past three decades its income per person has
more than quadrupled.
The hope is that these countries will become more democratic as they
increase their living standards and education. But in any case they still
illustrate one of the reasons – which is not intelligible to most of
Washington – why people might care so much about national
self-determination.
By facing off squarely against one of the most important political forces
of the 20th and 21st centuries, Washington is not only placing itself on
the wrong side of history. It is guaranteeing that the United States will
be involved in any number of “long wars,” indefinitely, and generally
slowing the pace of economic and social progress in the world.
The Guardian.uk