U.S. foriegn policy: inconsistent over the years

I ran into a friend this morning at the coffee shop, which was great, and we had an interesting conversation. He is a native of India, here working for several years on an H1-B visa, and naturally has a different perspective on what’s happening in Afghanistan just now. He has not problems with the U.S. military actions there although like myself and many others he might have changed some of the details had he been in charge. But the interesting part of our conversation to me is that he pointed out some inconsistencies in American foriegn policy over the years, all of which I’ve come across before but this put the whole together in a different light.

The big one that everyone points to is of course that we supported bin Laden’s side in the ’80s against the Soviets. Of course anything to mess up the Soviets during the Cold War was good. Now we’re fighting them. Second big one: we supported Saddam Hussein and Iraq in the ’80s when they fought Iran. Of course, Iran was sponsoring terrorism, threatening our allies, and had held our people hostage. We’ve been fighting him for ten years.

We claim to be all about democracy and freedom. Yet we back the House of Saud and have since the family founded the country even though they are corrupt and anti-democratic and their regime has so dissafected Saudi citizens that they flock to bin Laden’s cause or fund it. We ally ourselves with Pakistan even though that country has been ruled by the military for most of its existence (and even the politicians have been mainly corrupt) and even though they have supported terrorists in both Afghanistan and Kashmir. There are plenty (dozens?) of examples from the past century where our government backed dictatorships and other repressive, undemocratic regimes around the globe and in the long run had terrible results just from a policy perspective (not accounting for the harm to the citizens of said countries).

I really wonder if we (and by we I mean the American government) will ever learn to look at the big picture and act more rationally. Don’t get me wrong, when America is attacked as it has been now, we must repond with appropriate force. But instead of looking for ways to manipulate other governments, we need to focus on our real goals: promoting a better life for as many people as possible through freedom (including democracy), health, and prosperity. Taking shortcuts just puts us further from these goals.