SeriousBull

Guns or Butter. What will they choose?

Tags: Arab + Bush + Congress + Mid East

This week President Bush has plans for an 8-day visit to the Middle East as a follow-up to his Annapolis Mid East peace initiative late last year. He reportedly will begin his trip by meeting first with the Israeli Government and then circle around for meetings in the West Bank, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to discuss his peace initiative. Though coming late in his administration’s agenda, progress has already been made with both the agreement to continue with additional talks and a new commitment of billions in foreign aid to assist Palestine.

According to the Financial Times, Iran’s growing threat in the region will also be a part of
this agenda as will bringing democracy to the Middle East. President Bush dismissed a recent US Intelligence report that Iran discontinued development of their nuclear arms program in 2003 countering that Iran is still trying to develop highly enriched uranium and remains a threat so that the US will not change its policy towards Iran.

Ironically the upswing in Iran’s new regional prominence can be directly attributed to President Bush’s ill-fated policy of supporting democratic rule in Iraq, a country whose majority population is Shia like Iran. Iraqi Shias readily embraced democratic elections pushed by the Bush Administration’s in what most other Arab nation leaders have to have considered a most puzzling, geo-political initiative. Eventually amidst what many said was a civil war in Iraq, the Bush administration armed the Sunni militias to help regain a measure of balance.

Already we know that President Bush is a steadfast pragmatist. He moved ahead taking aggressive action to overthrow Saddam Hussein using his “Pre-emptive Strike” policy as righteous justification for dealing with a presumed threat the United Nations failed to address. Now he is proposing a series of arms deals with Gulf nation states aimed at countering Iran’s influence. In one such arm sale deal he has asked the US Congress to approve the sale of bomb guidance kits to Saudi Arabia.

Could it be that President Bush is again showing his pragmatism—that he now understands the cost/benefit of a Mid East Peace Agreement is in the US’s best interest given the high cost of stabilizing Iraq? But will US arms sales stabilize or destabilize the region? We know that Russia has recently supplied Iran with non-weapons grade uranium to fuel their nuclear reactors. And we know that China recently signed a ten year oil field development agreement with Iran. Will advanced technological weapons sales by the US be met with counter-part arm sales by Russia and China to Iran, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon?

Or being a pragmatist and due to the fact that the US is the largest Arms Dealer in the world, could it be that President Bush merely seeks to aid his country’s economic well being? Right now US GDP is on the wane. Purely from an economic perspective with the US economy headed into recession, with unemployment on the rise, with deflating home values, with a plummeting US dollar and with energy prices and the national debt at all time highs there is abundant economic reason.

But should we not now ask, can the world any longer permit any nation state, no matter that it is a super-power, to act in its own best interest with peril to the rest of the world? And indeed if a nation’s economic circumstances are in such tenuous financial condition that there is a likelihood for it to devise foreign policies that undermine the common good of nations shouldn’t the world community act to change such policy actions, by demand resolution, by economic sanctions, by some democratic means? For surely the ramifications of doing nothing could be great. For example, what does the need to finance a growing deficit approaching $10 trillion, imply that a nation’s policies may be with regard to its financial need to service its debt? Would a nation with overburdened by debt burden be in favor of peace, stability, and growth in the financial markets, or more likely adopt and favor policies that are disruptive, chaotic, and destabilizing? For the former policy would likely increase its costs of debt service as global investors favored equity investments thereby increasing interest costs, while the later policy would likely lower its debt service costs as investors favored safe-haven investments to avoid risk in chaotic markets?

SB asks: Should not some world body, like the United Nations, act as a Global Regulator to both examine its member’s current accounts and impose greater oversight and regulation of its member’s international political-economic activities just as it does their military activities? To ignore the implication of financial circumstance on foreign policy seems to be tantamount to ignoring that “white collar” crime is motivated by something other than money. It would seem important to the security of all nations that the world moves toward recognizing that nations act out of their own self-interests and in a growing Capitalistic world, that self-interest is largely the pursuit of greater wealth where real power is derived. Surely the world needs a formal mechanism, a democratic means, to deal with the ramifications of excess nation state debt or insolvency?

And likewise if the world accepts the tenant that financial circumstance may inadvertently lead to unintended consequences in a nation’s foreign policy, any directive must address the lack of wealth (poverty) as well. It would seem that on-balance, nations must ask what non-punitive policies may be adapted to thwart inevitable problems and foster more growth and more wealth, more evenly distributed. For surely whether the corrective policy action is toward a ‘Have or Have Not’ nation state, the problem may only be made worse with purely punitive policy. Instead if policies are made to give those without something to lose, and those with something to value, surely progress can be made. SB argues that the world community of nations should adapt a point of departure that recognizes that the world is not in a ‘zero sum gain’ economy. Indeed, working together may foster the realization that less can be actually be more! Moreover such an approach to solving a problem may curtail exploitation and develop co-dependent nation state ethos. And in SB’s mind, that would be a good thing.

January 6, 2008 - Politics