Last Wednesday night, speakers at the Suffolk University Law School debated the issue of U.S. foreign policy and attempted to answer the proposed question: What in the world should we do?
The event was part of the Ford Hall Forum lecture series for which Northeastern is one of the primary sponsors. Panelists discussed whether the actions concerning foreign policy taken by President George W. Bush’s administration have created a more or less stable world.
Mickey Edwards, lecturer in legislative politics at the Kennedy School of Gov-
ernment at Harvard, said it is important to define the goals of foreign policy before debating what steps the U.S. government should be taking.
“The goal of any nation’s foreign policy is to ensure and enhance the security of its citizens,” Edwards said.
Noting that nations such as France, Germany and Russia have their own interests to protect, Edwards said that such countries should not be criticized for opposing Bush’s decision to enter Iraq. Edwards said that these countries had reason to oppose the U.S. invasion since they all had important economic ties with Saddam Hussein.
Furthermore, Edwards argued that Bush should not be admonished for going against the United Nations.
“No president in the history of the United States would have ever agreed to allow important decisions involving our national security to depend on the approval of others,” Edwards said.
Edwards concluded that nation-building, such as what the U.S. is doing in Iraq, is the way to obtain a more stable world and that we should “dip into America’s great wealth to build a free and prosperous world.”
Jeffrey Taliaferro, a political science professor at Tufts University, identified different motives for the U.S. activity in Iraq. Taliaferro said the policy of preemptive war that was embraced by the Bush administration in October 2002 was a means to prevent any “shift in power.”
Taliaferro compared the Iraq situation with instances in which other U.S. presidents have considered similar defensive strategies. He pointed out, however, that in every other instance, the administration was worried about rising great powers, something that Iraq was not.
“Saddam didn’t pose the same threat as Stalin,” Taliaferro said.
Taliaferro also said the Bush administration failed to calculate the repairing costs to follow after the war, especially since Iraq never had an industrialized economy like Japan or Germany did before World War II.
“There is a tendency in the U.S. for policy makers to deal with the world as they want it to be rather than deal with it as it actually is. There is also a policy to assume that the U.S. has benign intentions,” Taliaferro said.
Elaine Hagopain, professor of sociology at Simmons College, spoke about how the U.S. policy towards Iraq has shown changing intentions over the years. Hagopain said Bush called for a Palestinian state directly after September 11 and that it was important for him to recognize Muslim strife in this way.
“He started to accept Israeli occupation as part of the war on terrorism. He said we had to dismantle the terrorist structure … what the Palestinians saw as resistance,” Hagopain said.
Hagopain predicted that Bush would try to avoid taking action in the Middle East until after the elections. She said the U.S. policy towards the Middle East has been unsuccessful in terms of bringing justice to Palestinians and that any other presidential candidate “will be stuck with the Iraqi and Muslim world hating us.”
