Civil Society Analysis
...mies from threatening us, our Allies, and our friends with weapons of mass destruction, expanding the circle of development by opening societies and building the infrastructure of democracy, and working with others to defuse regional conflicts all sound as if the United States government has the world?s best interests in mind. This could play a double roll. One, it convinces the American populous that the government has no ulterior motive and second, it keeps the guard of our foreign counterparts lowered for future possible gain. With a written policy such as this it is no wonder that when terrorists strike at the heart of America the rest of the world pours out sympathy and goodwill. They realize that we are trying to stand for a higher goal and when we, as the United States of America, are blindsided it freaks the rest of the world out. This type of action creates legitimacy for the U.S. foreign policy throughout the world. What about the past few months? How can the U.S. still hold legitimacy when the rest of Europe and the world seem to be against us? Here again is where our national political structure comes in. In short, the United States has been on the wrong side of Arab history for almost five decades, and it is not doing much better than the Soviets. The old [foreign (Middle East)] policy had no future, only a past. It was a dead policy walking. September 11 was merely the death certificate. Bush is no sophisticate, but he has the great virtue-not shared by most sophisticates-of knowing a dead policy when he sees one. So he gathered up the world's goodwill and his own political capital, spent the whole bundle on dynamite, and blew the old [foreign] policy to bits. (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=7911) This action caused much dissent within the ranks of American citizens who worried about our ?out of control president? and the fact that we couldn?t seem to control him. Countries in Europe flinched and balked at the prospect of such a radical change and worried because they couldn?t seem to control the president. Both these facts show that the individual and the system have not affected our foreign policy. The only president in the recent past who seems to have been overly concerned about citizen polls has been Clinton of who the leftist Europeans warmed up to. This lack of worry about how his people feel from past presidents shows that the foreign policy the president creates isn?t controlled much by the individual but by the political structure he has surrounded himself with and is controlled by. The international system, on the whole, has not been able to restrain the United States for the past fifty years. In this post Cold War Unipolar power system, the United States come in a long first supported by our western allies and uncontrollable by anybody. This was shown when the United States began the Gulf War II. We gave the United Nations the cursory chance to climb aboard the war wagon but it was not as if they were going to change our minds when they didn?t get on. We were rolling forward. The international system looks at the U.S. Government and cringes expecting the out-of-control giant to step on their toes in the near future. This is obviously not a sign of control. Most recently, Eric Alterman laid out the liberal case in this week's cover story for The Nation. Alterman's explanation: The Bush administration's unilateral policies, both before and after 9/11, explain the French distaste for the United States. In fact, the French don't even dislike the United States, Alterman argues. Rather, they dislike its leader. President Bush's religiosity, self-righteousness, and indifference to allies justify France's low opinion. Alterman is essentially saying to Americans what Bush told Iraqis in the State of t...