Needed Foreign Policy Changes

After long experience in the field, I have lately become greatly concerned seeing current U.S. foreign policies failing. Global evil forces posing great threat to us are not being contained. They are rapidly expanding. I feel two fundamental policy changes are urgently needed. First, assign the greatest priority to what is best for global stability and our own national security and give lesser priority to primarily “democratize” the Third World. Second, rather than our own “boots on the ground” rely increasingly on local forces to fight against our adversaries.

Stability vs. Democratization

Empirical experience has shown that non-democratic strongmen had been effectively keeping the lid, by force, on social upheavals whereas their downfall has been unleashing chaos enabling anti-U.S. insurgencies to fill the power vacuum and prevail.

Unlike in the West which has undergone the drastic humanistic transformations of the Age of Enlightenment some centuries ago, most of the Third World’s primitive societies are not ready and cannot yet handle democratic freedoms, at least not in the short term. Democracy has not been able to prosper in societies where traditionally laws have not been respected, vote tampering and rampant corruption have been the norm and where dissent has not been tolerated but instead considered the same as treason and has been severely punished.

In order to prevail and defeat the worse of global evil forces and defeat our most dangerous global adversaries, we must re-think and abandon our current, failing efforts to democratize the Third World. Instead, we must accept that we will only win if we “hold our noses”, work with and enlist in our fight the collaboration of lesser evil local foreign leaders even when they may not share our own values such as democratic freedoms.

Use of Local Forces

We have not been winning trying to fight simultaneously against two enemies all by ourselves: evil dictators and evil insurgencies. We need to fight primarily against just one of the two, whichever is the most imminent and greatest evil force and to encourage and assist the lesser evil local side to do the bulk of the fighting. Local fighters and their methods are far more effective, albeit more merciless, in suppressing insurgencies, and far less costly to us in terms of life and treasure, than the “soft” methods Western soldiers are accustomed to, constrained by “rules of engagement”. What is paramount is to win, at all costs.

Conclusion

In the great, current, Sunni-Shiite conflict throughout the Middle East it is best for us to side with the Sunnis, even when they are non-democratic dictators, and assist them in prevailing over insurgencies. In the longer term, we should prod Arab Sunni nations to form a military coalition to contain Iranian, Shiite, Persian imperial aspirations to attain hegemony over the whole Middle East, before acquiring nuclear capability. Both diplomatic, as well as clever, carefully planned and executed covert means exit, to get all of the region’s Arab Sunnis to jointly and effectively confront and contain Iranian expansion.

---