Displaying Foreign Policy

Do we ever stop to think about the way we create our foreign policy? This is not an argument if what we are doing is right or wrong, although I - and everyone else - do have my opinions on that. Rather, how do we come to our policy conclusions, and what are the criteria?

Here is an illustration to help make my case, where Justin Raimondo wrote in The American Conservative regarding Senator John McCain’s positions on Iraq and general foreign policy:

It is impossible to know what is in McCain’s heart.

Maybe the paradigm needs to shift away from “thinking with our hearts.”

We need to realize that there is still a significant contingent of American’s who believed that Bush could look into a Russian President’s soul and see the good in him. Yet, when it comes to what we write in the newspaper, or what we say on talk radio, we have to use our head in order to stand resolute against all of America’s enemies.

Is anyone else other than me worried about that dichotomy?

So, why are we allowed to use our heart in some places and only our heads in others? At the end of the day the rhetorical nonsense is hypocritical and intellectually dishonest. At what point are we allowed to think with our minds?

The simplistic black/white, good vs. evil dichotomies that have been perpetuated does not help matters much either. And don’t think that I am the only person who thinks that this is a problem. Even people on the other side of foreign policy perspective think that the American public is not being told what all the relevant information and idiosyncrasies of foreign policy options. Here, around the 4:30 mark of the video is a clip of John Bolton discussing it with Jon Stewart.




So, then in terms of coming up with our foreign policy, maybe another question to ask is why our current government does not wish to disclose, or create discourse with the public on the real intricacies of foreign policy. Does our government think we are not smart enough to understand? Or, does our government not wish for us to know the intricacies because we may not agree?

And when we think about it that way, is that not as good a reason as any to make sure we think with our hearts? If we are thinking with our hearts, then it is all so simple, and we do not care what happens so long as the bad guys lose.

Unfortunately, sooner or later, the public ends up wanting to know.