Ideas For Democracy:  Goal #18

Foreign policy and the frustration theory of war.

 

Citizens who want real democracy will actively support this policy and vote for trustworthy candidates who actively support this policy.

 

IFD - policy:  I believe the American people should be more directly involved in both making and being aware of what our foreign policy actions actually entail.  The Federal Government has been acting strangely contrary to democratic principles over the past twenty years at least, and possibly for an even longer period.  We do not want to be like the citizens of Germany, who in 1945 were placed in the position where they had to make the claim that the "didn't know" their government was roasting civilian men women and children and turning them into fertilizer.  If the U. S. A. is a democracy, then that means we know what our government is doing at home and abroad.  If we do not know what our government is doing, then we are not a democracy.  It has been extremely disturbing to many American citizens that our government has used territory in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to deprive persons arrested on suspicion of terrorism so that those persons can be deprived of civil rights.  The contrived excuse for this imposition of cruel and unusual punishments, without trial or counsel, is that the persons involved are "enemy combatants" and the territory where they are imprisoned is not the United States of America.  This is not good government, and not democratic government.  This kind of behavior is like voter suppression and shooting unarmed civilians seven times on the grounds they were "resisting arrest."  These types of contrived excuses to defend behavior that is the behavior of tyrants should not be tolerated by the American people.  Executives and legislators who defend this behavior should be dismissed or removed from public office.

 

 

Create a new international institution:

If I were elected President of the United States, my primary foreign policy program would be to promote reform and re-design of the United Nations Organization, or possibly design a new Board of International Standards of Government and then dissolve the United Nations Organization.  The new or transformed institution would have a representative structure similar to the General Assembly of the United Nations, but would be an institution of Government rather than a treaty organization.  The United Nations is inherently deceptive because it is called the United Nations, but is actually the United Nations Organization and the members are not organized into a government institution they are signatories to a treaty.  That treaty is nothing more nor less than the treaty that was offered to the nations of the world by the five large, industrial and heavily armed nations that were deemed to be the victors of World War II:  the United States of American, Great Britain, France, Russia (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and China.  These five nations are the permanent members of the Security Council of the United Nations Organization, and they proposed, in 1945, to be the council of nations that would monitor the security of the planet, and exercise a form of international police power intended to prevent the continuance of hostilities that might rise to the intensity and scope of World War II.  Since the formation of the United Nations Organization in 1945, the intensity of war has continued to occur, but usually restricted in scope to a smaller territory.  Also, since 1945, the same five nations that are the permanent members of the Security Council have manufactured and sold arms and explosives throughout the world enabling small nations to engage in extremely destructive and inhumane forms of warfare.  In other words, the Security Council nations have done a totally unsatisfactory job of reducing the destruction of warfare on Earth.  Basically, what the five nations of the Security Council have accomplished is to preserve their military and economic dominance over the rest of the nations and tribal societies on the planet.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it appears that the Five Giants may get some competition from Brazil and India, and possibly from Indonesia.  Whatever.  But, the unfolding of our economic future is complicated and rendered chaotic, even becoming a cause of future wars, because the Five Giants, especially the United States and China, have caused enormous environmental harm that threatens not only to diminish access to potable water and breathable air, and agricultural soils, but also to destroy our most important food sources, cause mass extinctions of economic plants and animals, and quite possibly cause the extinction of the human species.  THEREFORE, the United Nations Organization might as well be called the United Incompetents Organization.  The UNO has simply enabled the Five Giants to avoid direct confrontation while conducting their separate but sometimes combined foreign policies of economic imperialism over the smaller nations and tribal societies.  The United Nations Organization could be credited with controlling the size and scope of warfare since 1945, but it did not control the voracious and mindless exploitation of the poor by the rich and powerful nations.  The UNO has failed and needs to be replaced by a real organization, not just a treaty, that is vested with authority by all the voters of the planet.  This is a key strategy in the formation of a new international government entity, which I propose to be named the Board of International Standards of Government, or something similar.  Industrial and financial interests must be subordinated to the exercise of self-government.  This new organization should begin, I propose, by a worldwide referendum asking the voters of all nations "Should the nations of the world transform the UNO into a planetary institution that establishes and enforces fair and just standards of government for all nations, states and tribal societies on Earth, while exercising all due respect for every form and tradition of human self-government?" 

 

If the majority vote "Yes," then the new institution would not have a ridiculous "Security Council" pretending to protect the world from harm, but would have a legislative body that appoints officers to accomplish the work of the institution.  There would be a police power that could be authorized by the international legislative authority to use armed force, when necessary, to enforce the established "standards of government."  In other words, wherever there is a government entity engaging in inhumane or prohibited practices, the police force of the institution could bring pressure to bear.  In most cases, just the threat of intervention, such as, for example, the threat to have the Board police enter the United States to protect the rights of African-Americans, would probably motivate the Americans to clean up their act rather than be subject to a disciplinary invasion.  A disciplinary police invasion could also be sent into China to stop their industries from suffocating and sickening their citizens with poison gases in their atmosphere.  Or, they could be sent into central Africa to protect women and children from the cruel violence of insane criminals pretending to be a political revolution.  In any case, although some people will deem this suggestion to be outrageous, and a "surrender of sovereignty," the point that everyone needs to keep in mind is that the current UNO is a no longer valid.  World War II is over and there is really no legitimate reason why these Five Giants should be allowed to behave like the Five Thugs that rule the world by using their size and industrial war machines to dominate and rape the world.  The peaceful discussions that takes place in the General Assembly are a façade that covers the ongoing tyranny of the Five Thugs over international commerce and banking, and their industrial destruction of the economic resources of the planet.  A democratic government on a planetary scale will be accomplished when each nation has one vote, and there are no nations privileged to choose their level of compliance with the customs and laws of human civilization.  The same standards of behavior would be expected from every nation, large or small, rich or poor, dark or light.

 

The Frustration Theory of War  and Foreign Policy:

Much has been written on why nations go to war.  My lifetime of study and observation suggests to me that the most common motive of people who start a war is frustration.  By this I mean the ordinary human feeling or emotion of frustration that arises from political and social conflict or from economic pressures, or from fear and an inability to communicate with a prospective adversary or opponent.  This kind of national frustration or tribal frustration develops in a manner that is similar to the personal frustration of an individual who needs employment (economic success) in order to be self-supporting, but cannot get hired for work.  Many challenging emotions can evolve:  fear, anger, resentment, insecurity and hatred and self-hatred that finally leads to a plan of action to lash out with blame and violence.  The question we need to explore is:  "What kinds of experience lead to national frustration, or to the frustration of a culture or ethnic group?"  That question is not difficult to answer.  The economic, social and political conditions that can produce national frustration are more or less obvious.

 

Following World War I, the national frustration of Germany was obvious, but ignored on the grounds that Germany needed to be punished for its role in the war.  This is how the two world wars now look like one war that was interrupted and then re-started.  During the decade of the 1920's the German currency was devalued to bizarre levels, making it virtually worthless.  There were food and fuel shortages, and widespread despair due to the percentage of adult males who were permanently disabled by wartime injuries, including gassing which was one of the wartime injuries of Adolph Hitler.  The German economy was in a shambles even before the Great Depression.  The entire German culture was embarrassed, debilitated, suffering oppressive poverty and shame.  That frustration was the key motivation that drove the German people to their readiness to follow any political organization or any charismatic leader who promised to erase their shame and restore German confidence, power and glory.  World War II was caused originally by extreme frustration, but the psychological energy of that frustration was then transformed into its opposite of extreme narcissism, anger, resentment and hatred.  The German people followed a leader whose mission was to punish the world for insulting and oppressing their nation.  The psychological tool used to bring out the worst of human behaviors was the device of making a minority group the burden that had to be removed in order to enable the nation to be truly German, healthy, and proud again.  Racism was the treatment for the disease of shame and fear of inferiority and failure.  For the German people to be weak, helpless and submissive was absolutely intolerable, and so they chose instead to be psychotic in their determination to be dominant over others, to express their strength through violence, and to claim superiority over all other people.  An entire nation behaved like a paranoid schizophrenic, and they had allies among neighboring cultures who also had burdens of poverty and disappointment and who therefore were prepared to join in blaming minority groups for their embarrassment.

 

The frustration of the German culture was similar to the frustration of an individual male who wants but cannot achieve social and economic competence.  He is classified by his cultural and ethnic heritage as an employee, but no employer will hire him.  His access to any legitimate social or economic or scientific test of his competence is closed off.  He is pre-identified as a slug or a criminal, his labor not worth a day's pay.  He is unemployed and therefore denied access to money but overwhelmed with bills that need to be paid:  rent, food, clothing, transportation.  He is driven into an underground economy, an illegal  sub-economy that imitates the income and expenses of a normal household in the legal economy.  This is the current experience of a strangely high percentage of African-American males in the United States of America.  The culture of the United States is embarrassed because it cannot control the world with its armed forces.  First the people of Vietnam demonstrated the principle printed on the vehicle registration plates of the State of New Hampshire:  "Live Free or Die."  The Vietnamese showed the United States and the world that they would fight until the last Vietnamese citizen was the only one alive.  They would never allow a foreign power to control their government.  The behavior of the Vietnamese in the second half of the twentieth century was an effective match for the behavior of the Americans in the second half of the eighteenth century:  they would not allow themselves to be dominated and controlled by a foreign power.  They killed 50,000 Americans but the Americans killed 2,000,000 Vietnamese.  The Americans had achieved a military goal of significant proportions, the kill ratio of 20 to 1.  This is something the American political establishment wanted, to demonstrate to the world that it is not a good idea to go into battle with the United States.  But, the United States could not win the war politically because the Vietnamese sent the message that surrender was not possible, would not occur.  The Vietnamese informed the American military that if they wanted to kill every living citizen of Vietnam, they were ready for that outcome.  There would be no military victory so long as a single Vietnamese citizen was alive.  You do not have the choice of forcing us to accept your terms.  Our terms are live free or die.  And so the American military persuaded the foolish politicians that the two choices that had unfolded for them were to either withdraw from the war or kill every living Vietnamese.  The United States could have killed every living Vietnamese, but the Americans understood that if they did that the United States would be defeated beyond recovery.  That gratuitous violence and evil would extinguish the credibility of the United States and its place among civilized nations.  So we left the battlefield instead of committing political suicide.  But that created an embarrassment and a shame that was never healed for the proud warriors of the United States. 

 

How do we use our Department of Defense?

While fighting this military battle, the populace of the United States was still fighting its own civil war over its history of racism and slavery.  The seeds of frustration were sown deep, and they sprouted into the twenty-first century.  The bad habit of propping up foreign dictators with American military forces corroded the credibility and effectiveness of American leadership.  The armed forces came to be used to protect foreign investments instead of protecting the American territory and population.  The threat of foreign enemies was effectively exaggerated as was the moral righteousness of the American cause continually exaggerated.  The American culture became narcissistic, claiming that the American people and the American nation were "exceptional" even though American history was stained by genocidal wars with native tribes and the peculiar institution of American slavery.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States of America is frustrated.  Even though the Soviet Union has retreated and reorganized, the United States still cannot control the world with its armed forces.  After creating and fighting the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, American culture succumbs to fear and anger at minority groups, blaming Muslims and African-Americans and Mexicans for its problems.  This anger and irrational resentment blossoms even though each minority group has made a generous contribution to the wealth and economic success of America.  The Muslim countries have provided oil for energy.  The African Americans have been good citizens persistently seeking to be included in the national economy.  The Mexicans have come to America willing to work for lower wages without benefits and without the rights of labor that would apply to an American citizen.  America is repeating the pattern of German frustration during the 1920s.  Americans enjoy the greatest physical security of any people on the planet, but they act afraid and angry and have spread their Department of Defense across the planet as though the enemy is everywhere.  But the enemy that has succeeded at corroding the foundation of the American monument is domestic, not foreign.  America is dying from a disease that began internally, and for which the American people refuse treatment.  The United States of America is frustrated, and that makes all the nations of the world nervous.  The central goal of our foreign policy is to disarm any potential adversaries.  Not a good sign, and not a practical strategy.  To insist on disarming a potential adversary is an act of aggression, a declaration of war. 

 

America's internal terrorists:

The United States of America is in serious trouble, because we have taught the world to live free or die.  They are ready, and the question is are we willing.  We are the only nation in the world that has used nuclear weapons against an adversary in a theater of war.  This, the nations of the world may very well see as the source of American "exceptionalism:" our willingness to kill.  We appear to be the permanent pioneers, prepared to take what we want by force.  If the United States of America wants to be secure, what it needs most for its security is accurate information, especially accurate information about itself.  There is nothing more dangerous to the United States than defects in self-knowledge.  Our failure is not now and never was a deficiency in technology, but a deficiency in history.  We are doomed if we do not know who we are.  The United States is very rich, very powerful, and very frustrated.  For all the power that we have, we appear to be unable to control not only the world outside, but also the world inside.  Armed to the teeth, protected by the two largest oceans and two stable neighbors, we are afraid of peasants with sticks and stones.  While employing excessive surveillance to resist terrorism, we are devastated by wind and rain and fire.  Proud of our ability to kill an enemy from the comfort of a chair at home, we are going to be destroyed by chemicals, germs and prions … and our own unresolved history.  The American employer is still looking for slave labor.  Social change is like a hurricane.  It cannot be stopped.  Don't build your house in the path of the hurricane.  Jesus advised us not to build a house on sand.  So what do we do?  We build on sand at the seashore.  Someone once said that "freedom" means you can do what you want, and the fatal flaw in the American character is that they believe this. 

 

A real solution:  reduce national frustration:

We have learned much from the anthropologists, biologists and historians of our times, if we have been paying attention.  Not only can warfare be attributed to national or tribal frustration, but we can identify the source of the frustration when we look for it.  Usually the frustration of a nation or ethnic group has arisen from economic losses or economic changes caused by technological change.  Sometimes the frustration arises from ethnic or religious conflict also.  But the intangible conflicts, the conflicts of ideology and between cohesive ethnic groups may not rise to a state of war if each group is able to maintain its traditions, pride and independence.  Tribes and nations will often tolerate some economic hardships, if they are believed to have been caused by nature.  However, people are less likely to tolerate the perception that they have been insulted and are being held down by an enemy.  What this means is that we can prevent warfare by addressing frustration when it occurs and even better address frustration when its causes can be foreseen.

 

Today, much frustration is caused by the United States and other large nations, including China, Brazil, and India.  China, Brazil and India are noticeably determined to pursue a standard of living similar to the United States, a level of material prosperity that is admired or envied around the world but which economists tell us is not possible.  The reason the materialism of the United States cannot be matched by other nations on a sustainable basis is because the natural resources of the planet are being rapidly depleted.  The United States and China are primarily responsible for pollution of atmosphere and water resources, and the global warming that has resulted.  People understand this fact but there are even more immediate economic losses caused by the United States and China and other large industrial nations such as Japan and Russia, and that is the depletion of the ocean fisheries of the world.  A significant percentage of the world's people live within 100 miles of the sea and they have traditionally depended on seafood as a source of protein.  But many of the smaller and poorer nations can no longer depend on the sea for their protein food source.  And that is because the large industrial nations have built factory ships that vacuum the fish from the sea, destroy large quantities of "by-catch" animals, and damage the fish nurseries of the world.  Loss of food resources is among the most common causes of migration, invasion, and warfare throughout human history.  The loss of food security has often been caused by the loss of soil fertility, or the depletion of forest or mineral resources.  Not all human societies have been foolish in this way, simply using up all of their accessible economic resources.  Human societies have typically avoided the disasters caused by economic losses by self- discipline, scientific observation, and planning for the natural recharge or generation of sustainable natural resources.  This means, simply stated, not using up soil or water resources at a rate that cannot be sustained by rain, natural fertilization, or management by human technology.  Water can be stored, preferably in wetlands or reliable underground storage, and soil can be restored by the addition of fertilizing materials.  These practices have been known for millennia.  Mineral resources are sometimes enormous, and sometimes limited and must be found at a new location.  Changes in trade routes caused by human intervention can be a loss that leads to warfare.  This kind of warfare was generated in Europe when the trade routes with the East were regulated or blocked by the cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean.  Religious conflicts inflated any economic problems that existed, such as food losses due to climate, and many economic losses arose out of the religious conflicts.  This is all human history at a simple and basic level, but we can re-frame the details to note that what is common to all explosions of warfare is that one or both sides in the conflict are frustrated.  We can philosophize about fear and about religious explanations for war, but underneath every act of war is the motive of frustration.  The human survival instincts are powerful, which is why we are still here.  And when survival appears to be threatened by a lack of resources, a lack of fertile lands, forests, minerals, even a lack of minimal acceptable stability in economic conditions, the survival instincts are triggered and men choose to react with violence rather than perish without protest.  This is not all bad news.  It means we might reduce the risk of warfare by addressing national economics and national frustrations.

 

The reality that economic frustration and economic fears are the cause of warfare is still bad news because of the wealth and militarily power of the United States, the number one military force in the world.  We are perceived as everyone's economic enemy because we consume everything, take and use up the world's natural resources as though they are all ours and provide an infinite supply.  Mineral mining and extraction, especially that of oil and coal, is often devastating to the air, water and soil resources of smaller nations and tribes, and offshore oil drilling, and oil shipping, has been a direct destroyer of ocean nurseries.  Our modern technological materialism has become a kind of religion that is opposed to the natural religion of our ancestors, reverence for the laws of nature.  It is argued, on a scientific basis and not only a religious basis, that the organizational pattern of industrial materialism that we admire and enjoy is not sustainable.  Industrial materialism consumes the most basic and essential natural resources at a rate that nature's reproduction cannot match.  Even our meat-eating impulses are entirely unsustainable, because animal agriculture is the primary source of methane that is causing global warming.  We have the tool of science, but we make the mistake of thinking that because we have science we can only do what works.  The truth is we have to respond to what our scientific studies teach us.  The persistent flaw in the human mind is that we are eager to try new physical technologies, but we refuse to apply social technologies, such as population controls and truly democratic decision making, in order to create a human civilization that is in harmony with nature.  The belief that we humans can control nature and re-shape it, kind of like manufacturing our own natural world, rather than submit to the limitations of the natural world and be part of it, is the self-destructive impulse in the human character.  Thus, the universe has served us with an ultimatum:  adjust to the limits of your planet, or die.  The motto of the state of New Hampshire, and Vietnam:  "Live free or die!" is an error.  The truth by which we can survive here on Earth is "Live sustainably or die."  It is a fact of scientific truth, and not a religious myth.  The Native Nations of the Western Hemisphere have it right:  "Walk the Earth as though you are related to everything that lives."  Because you are.  To reduce the risks of war, therefore, the foreign policy of the United States should be not only to address the economic frustrations of other nations, but make a genuine effort not to be the cause of those frustrations.  So long as we rely on our military capacity to defend our material world, we will repeatedly be cast backward to the conditions of the War in Vietnam.  We can "win the war" by killing every last human being who is fighting against domination.  The problem we cannot solve, of course, is how that kind of behavior would affect our own identity and future.  A civilization that exists because of its power and will to destroy others was not our original aspiration.  Our economic and technological success becomes our failure because we cannot do what we were taught to do in pre-school:  share.  The advice that we create a planetary civilization, one group that commands our respect and loyalty, is not just an emotional or ethical impulse; it is a scientific recommendation that is really an ultimatum from the stars.  We must do what we consistently tell our adolescent children to do:  live within the limits of the law.  In this case, the laws we must observe are not the laws of men, but the laws of God, or of Nature.