The Intelligent Conversationalist

by Imogen Lloyd Webber

  The conditions imposed on Germany were so harsh they caused instability and allowed the rise of Hitler. We reach World War II, also focused on in Cheat Sheet 16. Britain and France declared war after the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. America turned up when Germany’s pal Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. The Germans surrendered on May 8, 1945—which we know as VE (Victory in Europe) Day, just after President Roosevelt had died of a brain hemorrhage, leaving Harry Truman to finish it all off. Thanks to the Manhattan Project, America now had the bomb. In August Truman dropped it on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered. Approximately 45 to 60 million people died during World War II, including around 6 million Jews in the Holocaust—and Pandora’s box had been opened.

  The Soviet Union may have been America’s wartime ally, but America was not about to sit about while an alternative version of totalitarianism spread westward. Winston Churchill, as usual, put it best when in 1946 he noted that an “iron curtain has descended across the continent.” The cold war began, which we also cover in Cheat Sheet 16. It really is quite the read (or something).

  Not to put too fine a point on a description of the cold war, its concept can essentially be understood by the song lyrics “Anything you can do, / I can do better.” etc. By August 1949 the Soviets had tested their first nuclear weapon. So instead of total mutual annihilation, there were arms races, space races, and communism’s “containment” via proxy wars in Korea from 1950 to 1953 and then … Vietnam.

  * * *

  KEY TERM: MCCARTHYISM

  Paranoia about the rise of communism, named after Senator Joseph McCarthy, who ferreted out communists in 1950s with all the accuracy they sussed out witches in Salem in 1692.

  * * *

  Backing up for a second, JFK was elected in 1960. He may have been in office for only two years and ten months, but he managed to accelerate the space race and the American role in Vietnam, plus he oversaw the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The energy of youth—he was the youngest person ever elected president, after all.

  * * *

  KEY TERMS: BAY OF PIGS AND CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

  • In 1959 Castro overthrew Cuba’s America-backed, repressive, corrupt dictator-type president (sound familiar?). Cue the CIA and State Department trying to remove the too-friendly-with-communism Castro, culminating in April 1961 with an invasion by 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. They were outnumbered and surrendered, although the espionage and sabotage campaigns continued with Operation Mongoose.

  • The Cuban Missile Crisis took place in October 1962. The USSR was trying to install nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. Since Cuba is around a hundred miles from the USA, the idea went down like a lead balloon in Washington. The Americans blockaded Cuba and a game of chicken transpired. Disaster was averted when Nikita Khrushchev removed the missiles and Kennedy agreed not to invade Cuba—and clandestinely said he’d take American missiles out of Turkey.

  * * *

  To the quagmire of Vietnam. The seeds of Vietnam were sown in the Truman administration, which committed to South Vietnam that America would protect it from communist advances. Eisenhower sent CIA operatives and military advisors, while JFK sent troops. It was his successor Lyndon Jonson who sent the troops into full combat in 1965—and Richard Nixon who ordered their withdrawal in 1973. America failed with this one. In 1975 communist forces took Saigon, and in 1976 the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. More than 3 million people, including more than 55,000 Americans, died and billions of dollars were spent. This was perhaps the moment America should have learned the lesson forever that being a superpower doesn’t mean you have superpowers.

  Now Nixon may have got in trouble for his stage management of the domestic side of things. But he—along with his man Henry Kissinger—was a bit of an operator when it came to foreign policy. China and the Soviet Union were intrinsically suspicious of each other, and Nixon, known for his anticommunism early in his career (so no one was about to accuse him of being procommunist), played on that. Nixon’s triangular diplomacy—he even trotted off to both China and the USSR in 1972—attained détente, a relaxation in the tension between the other two countries and America.

  The 1970s were not a pretty sight, and we’re not talking about the shaggy hair. There were the OPEC shenanigans with oil, looked at in Cheat Sheet 17, that caused high energy prices. Worth noting, however, this high point. President Carter was not just the Iran-hostage-crisis/Argo president, but he also did sort a deal between Egypt and Israel in the form of the Camp David Accords, which we also delve into in Cheat Sheet 17.

  Détente pretty much died with the 1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, swiftly followed by the arrival of President evil-empire-rhetoric Reagan. The Reagan Doctrine was all about supporting “Freedom Fighters” for anyone opposing Communism. Including … the mujahideen rebels fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Note that mujahideen is the plural of mujahid, which means in Arabic someone engaged in jihad, which you may also know by the term jihadist. There is much debate about the consequences of this: Did America essentially create Islamic terrorism? What happened to those arms and those rebels when America later waged its own Afghan war? If you ever meet specialists on the subject, sit them down and ask them questions. You know enough to know that you don’t know enough about this, and it would take an entire book to answer them. This is a Cheat Sheet.

  So, back to this era, where state-sponsored terrorism was a real problem. A suicide bomber killed 241 US service personnel in Lebanon in 1983. Governments including those in Syria, Libya, and Iran (yes, them) were believed to be training terrorists.

  Mikhail Gorbachev got power in 1985, tensions reduced thanks to his glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reform), and by 1991 the Soviet Union had collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell.

  All’s well that ends well. Well, not exactly …

  WHY IT MATTERS TODAY

  America had won! The world’s only superpower. But the rules changed.

  * * *

  WISE WORDS

  Christ, I miss the cold war.

  —M, James Bond’s head of MI6 in Casino Royale, 2006

  * * *

  There is a big difference between pre– and post–cold war foreign policy. During the cold war, America was trying to affect nations’ external behavior. It didn’t really matter what they were doing internally, as long as they were allies and not procommunist. Intervention potentially led to superpower confrontation.

  Post cold war? Foreign policy is about affecting what is going on internally in nations.

  But here’s the thing. It is very tricky to have an impact on what is going on inside a nation, to reconstruct politics and culture in foreign lands, where your priorities and beliefs are not necessarily theirs. The people who populate these places are not objects, but subjects. Mere money and rhetoric won’t cut it. Examples: Bosnia, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Ukraine …

  Initially the 1991 Gulf War in Iraq seemed quite the success. It was no Vietnam. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had invaded Kuwait, which had a large amount of oil that needed rescuing, while neighboring Saudi Arabia had a large amount of oil that needed protecting. Sorry, did I slip with my typing there? Nation-states needed rescuing and protecting. The big change now was that Russia wasn’t standing in America’s way or anything. And that CNN broadcast all of Bush I’s war was a major television event.

  But the Gulf War didn’t stop conflict and resentment brewing in the region. We leave historian-psychologists to talk about the father-son Iraq complex—Bush II of course had his Iraq moment in 2003.

  President Clinton had to deal with the end of cold war fallout in Yugoslavia, which caused centuries’ worth of hatred between competing ethnic groups to bubble up. Peacekeeping troops were dispatched to Bosnia to stop ethnic cleansing. As civilians starved in Somalia, American troops were sent to provide food in the war-ravaged region, as they were to reinstate Haiti’s democratically el
ected president. Clinton also ordered the bombing of supposed terrorist bases in Sudan and Afghanistan.

  That’s worth a repeat, because I certainly had forgotten about it. Well, I was at school, all I was interested in coming out of America was Beverly Hills 90210. Yes, Clinton I bombed Afghanistan.

  Say what you will and you do about President George W. Bush, but his presidency became defined by an unimaginable, horrific event: 9/11. Three thousand people were killed when nineteen Al-Qaeda militants hijacked four planes and crashed into the World Trade Center, a field in Western Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon. They were allegedly acting in retaliation for America’s support of Israel, its involvement in the Gulf War, and its continued military presence in the Middle East. Bush II announced the “War on Terror” on September 20, swiftly followed by intervention in Afghanistan. Unfortunately the Brits couldn’t find a solution in Afghanistan, the Soviets couldn’t find a solution in Afghanistan—and the definition of insanity is? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

  The debate will rage for centuries to come about America’s reaction to 9/11 and what it has done to civil liberties. The Patriot Act expanded intelligence services and law enforcement’s investigative and surveillance powers. The Department of Homeland Security was founded to manage federal counterterrorism. So came the controversies over the alleged human rights abuses to detainees at Guantánamo Bay, aka Gitmo, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq for possessing “weapons of mass destruction.” Bush II called the “intelligence failure” in Iraq his biggest presidential regret. For Iraq’s WMD stockpiles didn’t exist, however much some have tried to rewrite evidence on the issue.

  Obama was elected to end wars, not start them. Which he managed to do in Iraq by 2011. (We look at what happened next—ISIS et al.—in Cheat Sheet 17.) What perhaps was surprising, especially to his most fervent fans, was how very similar he was in some ways to his predecessors. More troops initially ended up in Afghanistan. He didn’t close Gitmo. He did get Bin Laden. And his National Security Agency brought us a new concept of global surveillance.

  For those who have seen me on air, this is where I drone on. About drones. It’s my thing, skip it if I’m boring you, but it’s my book and I’ll rant if I want to.

  Armed drones are remote-controlled pilotless aerial vehicles that are able to hit targets of interest, including killing individuals. The US army purchased its first spy drone in 1959, and the first strike by an armed drone took place in Pakistan in 2004, under then-president Bush II. Under Obama they became America’s go-to tool of choice in both its conventional and its shadow wars.

  I believe history will judge President Obama harshly on his short-termism on the drone issue. Along with the arguments about the way his intelligence agencies have been collecting data on us all, Obama’s use of drones has been about as far away from his first presidential campaign slogan of hope and change and his Nobel Peace Prize as you can get. Perhaps the reason this is so disappointing is that President Obama is a constitutional lawyer whose actions are likely to land our descendants in a world that looks like a James Cameron Terminator movie. Obama’s attempts to address drone protocol in his second term were too little, too late.

  Domestically it is estimated that by 2020, up to 30,000 drones will be peering down on US soil snooping on US citizens.

  Internationally? The precedent set by the Obama administration is a disaster. It went ahead and regularly utilized drone attacks when where they stand in law was murky at best. They’ve assassinated people, including Americans. There’s the question of who pulled the trigger. Under international conventions, civilians cannot engage in war, but CIA members, behind the controls of some of those drone strikes, are civilians. America unilaterally decided that it could send drones over borders to kill its enemies. Into countries it had not declared war on. Unsurprisingly, the world is now involved in a new arms race. What happens when everyone else starts using drones the way the United States has already done in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere? When the Chinese start taking out perceived threats to their state in other states? When governments of other countries assassinate escaped dissidents and other enemies in a country not their own? If Uncle Sam protests, which it will inevitably do, America will be looking mighty hypocritical. A collective international decision was needed about the rules of engagement of killing by remote control before America started doing it. The US has set a dangerous precedent—for itself.

  Added to which, the use of drones is often counterproductive. In some countries, drones have been the only face of American foreign policy for years. Drones don’t treat terrorism’s symptoms. They more often than not worsen them, inevitably sometimes killing the wrong targets, radicalizing local populations, and thus causing more terrorism. And they have security flaws—the Nevada US base from which some are remotely flown has not proven immune to computer viruses.

  A science fiction scenario is becoming real. Experts believe that unmanned aircraft will eventually take over most tasks currently undertaken by manned systems. That drones will one day be the size of insects and birds and that swarms may be used to overwhelm modern defense systems. Obama’s riding roughshod over international law has put America in danger in the future.

  It’s a balance. America famously has a somewhat apathetic view of international law. The argument often goes that it is incompatible with the US constitution. Guantánamo was such a scandal inside America because it flouted American law. America has not signed on to the International Criminal Court, which was founded in 2002 to “bring to justice the perpetrators of the worst crimes known to humankind—war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.” The counterargument is that if America led the way in a global standard of justice, some of the nations who have a more dubious approach to it, such as Saudi Arabia and China, might be forced into a bit of a rethink.

  Enough. America did rescue the world twice, after all. And after a phase of neoisolationism, the rise of ISIS and Russia’s hard-line posturing has reminded much of the world how much it needs America the Beautiful.

  TALKING POINTS

  Classic lines to make you seem wise:

  • Foreign policy? All politics are local.

  • What happens when an exceptional country behaves in an ungovernable way?

  • Foreign policy is often determined by unanticipated events.

  • America considering intervention in foreign lands? These will see you through—they have done me on air enough times:

   Can America afford to be the world’s policeman either financially or personally? An estimated twenty-two veterens take their own lives every day. Surely it is excessive that America accounts for around half of the total global defense spending? Perhaps America should be aiming to be global police chief instead? A Fox News host refused to ever have me return to a show I did most weekends after I employed that line on him.

   Statecraft is not moral empathy. You have to balance the humanitarian urge to intervene with what happens next.

   There is a limit to what the US can do—we’re in a no-win situation: America can harm with the best of intentions and it is extremely difficult to get good outcomes inside other countries. Example? Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria …

   Post the Iraq catastrophe, Americans know that, as a superpower, when you take sides in a civil war, the outcome is your responsibility to shoulder.

   What about the law of diminishing returns?

   As Churchill said, “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”

  • The French called the American soldiers pitching up in France in 1918 “doughboys,” as they were immature. It cost millions of dollars to treat the around 15 percent who contracted VD from Parisian prostitutes.

  • During World War I, the German army dropped leaflets to try to convince African-American troops that if the Germans won, society would be less racist.

  • In April 1917, when America finally got into World War I, the U
nited States military had only enough bullets for two days of fighting. Oh, how things change …

  • In 1961, the USSR built the Berlin Wall, which divided East Berlin from West Berlin. JFK pitched up to West Berlin in 1963 to show solidarity and ended his speech with “Ich bin ein Berliner,” which translates to “I am a jelly doughnut.” Maybe.

  • Russia acting up again? Quote Churchill (again): “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” For an added bonus, mention that fun is not a word that exists in the Russian language.

  RED FLAGS

  • Foreign, and with an American talking about Uncle Sam? He or she is probably referring to the United States, not to his or her uncle Sam. The nickname apparently appeared in the vernacular during the War of 1812 and was drawn from the Troy, New York, meat-packer Samuel “Uncle Sam” Wilson.

  • Don’t get these mixed up: A hawk is someone who advocates an aggressive foreign policy, while a dove believes in a conciliatory and peaceful one. Just to confuse matters, it’s perfectly possible to have a Republican dove and a Democratic hawk.

  • Don’t start going on about how much America gives in foreign aid, as you’ll probably bump into someone who will wipe the floor with your argument.

   It doesn’t, compared to other countries in percentage terms (somewhere around 0.2 percent in national income versus, say, the UK, which is 0.5 percent).

   The foreign aid bill is in the tens of billions, while Iraq and Afghanistan cost in the trillions. It’s a drop in the ocean compared to what the taxpayer contributes to defense spending (just under 20 percent of your federal taxes go to it).