The Rise and Fall of the Christian Myth by Burton L. Mack

Author:Burton L. Mack [Mack, Burton L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300222890
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

FOREIGN POLICY

It is not clear to culture critics that the United States has a rationalized foreign policy, if “foreign policy” still has the connotations of the kind of relations to other nations that require skilled representatives and statesmen able to understand and negotiate the histories and interests of both states. The term leadership seems to be preferred as a description of our position among the nations of the world, as if all of our interests in that arena assume our superior knowledge of international relations and our ability to instruct others in the governance of their own nations. Nevertheless, whether as a “policy” or an “assumption,” the history of our relations to other nations does exhibit a clear profile of attitudes and practices that can be analyzed as a fairly consistent mode of response to global issues in which we somehow become involved.

This history starts with a sense of caution about becoming involved with foreign nations and their wars that we have called isolationism. As an awareness of a popular stance, isolationism was quite strong at the end of the nineteenth century and was a factor in our resistance to involvement in both the First and the Second World Wars. The surprising success of the war machine we finally managed to put together in a short amount of time, and of our victories in both the European and Pacific “theaters” after the Second World War did not cancel out our isolationist sensibilities, but it did leave us with the circumstance of having dealt with other nations in the serious business of war, and with having military bases around the world as the major form of our global presence in what at first were devastated nations. It was during the second half of the twentieth century that our “leadership” began to look like a “policy.” One distinctive feature of our involvements might be called a curious sense of responsibility to provide “humanitarian aid” to nations, peoples, and troubled situations. We did not ask ourselves where that sense of “responsibility” came from. There was the Marshall Plan for the European nations, the Berlin airlift for the Germans, NATO to form the European nations into a union, and many gestures of political and financial aid to Japan. This burst of aid to other nations after the war turned into a role that the United States continued to see as its responsibility for points of distress in Central America, Yugoslavia, Africa, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Near East. Our media were easily exercised by tribal hostilities, health and food deprivations, ethnic cleansings, and, as the twenty-first century unfolded, the native disruptions of our own industrial interests in other lands that looked at first like problems that a “developing nation” was having while learning how to engage the modern world. This sense of being responsible for humanitarian aid has produced such agencies as Doctors without Borders, the Gates agencies at work in health care for the underprivileged in Africa, Habitat for Humanity, various women’s

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