US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption

US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population. In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022. Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton. What gives? The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money. As a result, the American people are losing big. The failed wars since 2000 have cost them around $5 trillion in direct outlays, or around $40,000 per household. Another $2 trillion or so will be spent in the coming decades on veterans’ care. Beyond the costs directly incurred by Americans, we should also recognize the horrendously high costs suffered abroad, in millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars of destruction to property and nature in the war zones. The costs continue to mount. US Military-linked outlays in 2024 will come to around $1.5 trillion, or roughly $12,000 per household, if we add the direct Pentagon spending, the budgets of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, the budget of the Veteran’s Administration, the Department of Energy nuclear weapons program, the State Department’s military-linked “foreign aid” (such as to Israel), and other security-related budget lines. Hundreds of billions of dollars are money down the drain, squandered in useless wars, overseas military bases, and a wholly unnecessary arms build-up that brings the world closer to WWIII. Yet to describe these gargantuan costs is also to explain the twisted “rationality” of US foreign policy. The $1.5 trillion in military outlays is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world. To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House, Pentagon and CIA. Each division uses public power for private gain through insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying outlays. Interestingly, the Health Industry division rivals the Foreign Policy division as a remarkable financial scam. America’s health outlays totaled an astounding $4.5 trillion in 2022, or roughly $36,000 per household, by far the highest health costs in the world, while America ranked roughly 40th in the world among nations in life expectancy. A failed health policy translates into very big bucks for the health industry, just as a failed foreign policy translates into mega-revenues of the military-industrial complex. The Foreign Policy division is run by a small, secretive and tight-knit coterie, including the top brass of the White House, the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate, and the major military firms including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. There are perhaps a thousand key individuals involved in setting policy. The public interest plays little role. The key foreign policy makers run the operations of 800 US overseas military bases, hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, and the war operations where the equipment is deployed. The more wars, of course, the more business. The privatization of foreign policy has been greatly amplified by the privatization of the war business itself, as more and more “core” military functions are handed out to the arms manufacturers and to contractors such as Haliburton, Booz Allen Hamilton, and CACI. In addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, there are important business spillovers from the military and CIA operations. With military bases in 80 countries around the world, and CIA operations in many more, the US plays a large, though mostly covert role, in determining who rules in those countries, and thereby on policies that shape lucrative deals involving minerals, hydrocarbons, pipelines, and farm and forest land. The US has aimed to overthrow at least 80 governments since 1947, typically led by the CIA through the instigation of coups, assassinations, insurrections, civil unrest, election tampering, economic sanctions, and overt wars. (For a superb study of US regime-change operations from 1947 to 1989, see Lindsey O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change, 2018). In addition to business interests, there are of course ideologues who truly believe in America’s right to rule the world. The ever-warmongering Kagan family is the most famous case, though their financial interests are also deeply intertwined with the war industry. The point about ideology is this. The ideologists have been wrong on nearly every occasion and long ago would have lost their bully pulpits in Washington but for their usefulness as warmongers. Wittingly or not, they serve as paid performers for the military-industrial complex. There is one persistent inconvenience for this ongoing business scam. In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth. (A similar contradiction of course applies to overpriced healthcare, government bailouts of Wall Street, oil-industry perks, and other scams). The American people rarely support the machinations of US foreign policy when they occasionally hear the truth. America’s wars are not waged by popular demand but by decisions from on high. Special measures are needed to keep the people away from decision making. The first such measure is unrelenting propaganda. George Orwell nailed it in 1984 when “the Party” suddenly switched the foreign enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia without a word of explanation. The US essentially does the same. Who is the US gravest enemy? Take your pick, according to the season. Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hugo Chavez, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, Hamas, have all played the role of “Hitler” in US propaganda. White House spokesman John Kirby delivers the propaganda with a smirk on his face, signaling that he too knows that what he is saying is ludicrous, albeit mildly entertaining. The propaganda is amplified by the Washington think tanks that live off of donations by military contractors and occasionally foreign governments that are part of the US scam operations. Think of the Atlantic Council, CSIS, and of course the ever-popular Institute for the Study of War, brought to you by the major military contractors. The second is to hide the costs of the foreign policy operations. In the 1960s, the US Government made the mistake of forcing the American people to bear the costs of the military-industrial complex by drafting young people to fight in Vietnam and by raising taxes to pay for the war. The public erupted in opposition. From the 1970s onward the government has been far more clever. The government ended the draft, and made military service a job for hire rather than a public service, backed by Pentagon outlays to recruit soldiers from lower economic strata. It also abandoned the quaint idea that government outlays should be funded by taxes, and instead shifted the military budget to deficit spending which protects it from popular opposition that would be triggered if it were tax-funded. It has also suckered client states such as Ukraine to fight America’s wars on the ground, so that no American body bags would spoil the US propaganda machine. Needless to say, US masters of war such as Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, and McConnell remain thousands of miles away from the frontlines. The dying is reserved for Ukrainians. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) defended American military aid to Ukraine as money well spent because it is “without a single American service woman or man injured or lost,” somehow not dawning on the good Senator to spare the lives of Ukrainians, who have died by the hundreds of thousands in a US-provoked war over NATO enlargement. This system is underpinned by the complete subordination of the U.S. Congress to the war business, to avoid any questioning of the over-the-top Pentagon budgets and the wars instigated by the Executive Branch. The subordination of Congress works as follows. First, the Congressional oversight of war and peace is largely assigned to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which largely frame the overall Congressional policy (and the Pentagon budget). Second, the military industry (Boeing, Raytheon, and the rest) funds the campaigns of the Armed Services Committee members of both parties. The military industries also spend vast sums on lobbying in order to provide lucrative salaries to retiring members of Congress, their staffs, and families, either directly in military businesses or in Washington lobbying firms. The hacking of Congressional foreign policy is not only by the US military-industrial complex. The Israel lobby long ago mastered the art of buying the Congress. America’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid state and war crimes in Gaza makes no sense for US national security and diplomacy, not to speak of human decency. They are the fruits of Israel lobby investments that reached $30 million in campaign contributions in 2022, and that will vastly top that in 2024. When Congress reassembles in January, Biden, Kirby, Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, McConnell, Blumenthal and their ilk will tell us that we absolutely must fund the losing, cruel, and deceitful war in Ukraine and the ongoing massacre and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, lest we and Europe and the free world, and perhaps the solar system itself, succumb to the Russian bear, the Iranian mullahs, and the Chinese Communist Party. The purveyors of foreign policy disasters are not being irrational in this fear-mongering. They are being deceitful and extraordinarily greedy, pursuing narrow interests over those of the American people. It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon. This overhaul should start in 2024 by rejecting any more funding for the disastrous Ukraine War and Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Peacemaking, and diplomacy, not military spending, is the path to a US foreign policy in the public interest. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/corruption-of-us-foreign-policy 美国的外交政策似乎完全不合理。美国卷入一场又一场灾难性的战争——阿富汗、伊拉克、叙利亚、利比亚、乌克兰和加沙。近日，美国在全球范围内孤立无援地支持以色列对巴勒斯坦的种族灭绝行动，反对联合国大会关于加沙停火的决议，该决议得到153个国家的支持，占全球人口的89%，而仅有美国和9个人口不到全球1%的小国反对。 在过去的20年里，美国的每一个主要外交政策目标都失败了。塔利班在美国占领阿富汗20年后重新掌权。萨达姆后的伊拉克变得依赖伊朗。叙利亚总统巴沙尔·阿萨德尽管中情局试图推翻他，仍然保持在位。利比亚在美国领导的北约行动推翻穆阿迈尔·卡扎菲后陷入了一场拖延的内战。乌克兰在美国秘密破坏了2022年俄乌和平协议后，在2023年被俄罗斯在战场上击败。 尽管发生了一次又一次引人注目且代价高昂的惨败，同一批人物在美国的外交政策中仍然居于统治地位，包括乔·拜登、维多利亚·努兰、杰克·沙利文、查克·舒默、米奇·麦康奈尔和希拉里·克林顿。 这是为什么呢？ 这个谜题的解答在于认识到美国的外交政策根本不是关乎美国人民的利益。它关乎华盛顿内部人的利益，因为他们追逐竞选捐款和为自己、工作人员和家庭成员争取利润丰厚的工作。简而言之，美国的外交政策已经被大笔资金操控。 由于这一事实，美国人民正在遭受巨大的损失。自2000年以来的失败战争已经使他们付出了大约5万亿美元的直接支出，或者每个家庭大约4万美元。未来几十年内，还将花费大约2万亿美元用于退伍军人的护理。除了美国人直接承担的成本外，我们还应该认识到在国外遭受的惨重代价，包括数百万人的生命丧失以及在战区的财产和自然环境中数万亿美元的破坏。 这些成本不断攀升。如果我们将五角大楼的直接支出、中央情报局和其他情报机构的预算、退伍军人事务部的预算、能源部核武器计划、国务院与军事相关的“外援”（如对以色列的援助）以及其他安全相关的预算合并在一起，到2024年，美军相关的支出将达到大约1.5万亿美元，或者每个家庭大约12000美元。数千亿美元被浪费在无用的战争、海外军事基地和完全不必要的军备竞赛中，这让世界更接近第三次世界大战。 然而，描述这些巨大的成本也是在解释美国外交政策的扭曲“合理性”。这1.5万亿美元的军费支出是一个不断为军工复合体和华盛顿内部人提供好处的骗局，即使它让美国和世界变得贫困和危险。 要理解外交政策的骗局，可以将今天的联邦政府看作是由出价最高的投标人控制的多部门企业。华尔街部门由财政部掌管。卫生产业部门由卫生与公众服务部掌管。大型石油和煤炭公司由能源和内政部门掌管。而外交政策部门则由白宫、五角大楼和中央情报局掌管。 每个部门都利用公共权力谋取私人利益，通过内幕交易，并得到企业的竞选捐款和游说支出的润滑。有趣的是，卫生产业部门与外交政策部门一样，都是一项引人注目的金融骗局。美国在2022年的卫生支出总额达到了惊人的4.5万亿美元，或者每个家庭大约36000美元，远远高于世界上最高的卫生成本，而在寿命方面，美国在全球排名大约40左右。失败的卫生政策意味着巨额的利润，正如失败的外交政策会转化为军工复合体的巨额收入一样。 外交政策部门由一个小而秘密的紧密结合的小圈子掌管，包括白宫的高级将领、中央情报局、国务院、五角大楼、众议院和参议院的军事委员会，以及包括波音、洛克希德·马丁、通用动力、诺斯罗普·格鲁曼和雷神在内的主要军工公司。在制定政策方面可能涉及到大约一千名关键人物，而公共利益几乎没有起到什么作用。 关键的外交政策制定者负责运营800个美国海外军事基地、数千亿美元的军事合同以及装备部署的战争行动。当然，战争越多，业务越多。外交政策的私有化在很大程度上得到了战争业务本身的私有化的增强，因为越来越多的“核心”军事职能被分配给了军火制造商和承包商，如哈利伯顿、布兹艾伦哈密尔顿和卡西。 除了数千亿美元的军事合同外，军事和中央情报局行动还带来了重要的商业溢出效应。随着美国在全球80个国家设有军事基地，中情局在更多国家进行行动，美国在决定这些国家的统治者，从而影响涉及矿产、碳氢化合物、管道、农田和森林土地的有利交易方面发挥着巨大的，尽管主要是秘密的作用。自1947年以来，美国至少试图推翻80个政府，通常由中情局领导，通过策动政变、暗杀、暴动、内乱、选举干预、经济制裁和公开战争。 （有关从1947年到1989年美国政权更迭行动的出色研究，请参见林赛·奥罗克的《隐秘政权更迭》（2018年）。