Social Justice As Foreign Policy
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Posted: 01/29/09
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Social Justice As Foreign Policy
By Thomas E. Brewton
President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reportedly
believe that the key to world peace is an international welfare state
to equalize wealth distribution worldwide.
Both the President and his Secretary of State are on record as
believing that the key to world peace and the end of Islamic jihad is
to buy-off the enemy with welfare benefits, funded by American
taxpayers. Given the current state of the economy and the Federal
government's massive deficits, this may be unrealistic.
That approach based on social justice, the liberal-progressive
hypothesis that institutions supporting private property rights
foster unfair accumulation of wealth in the hands of greedy
capitalists, leading to social discontent. Redistributing wealth, in
liberal-progressive doctrine, removes incentives to aggression,
crime, and war. As Hillary Clinton said in her primary campaign for
the presidency, she intended to take more wealth, via higher taxes,
from some people and put it to better social purposes.
On the Commentary Magazine website
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-return-of-
carterism--14051
Arthur Herman writes:
"America's other important foreign-policy goal, Obama wrote [in a
Foreign Affairs essay], was reducing global poverty: the root cause,
in his view, of terrorism and political extremism around the world.
By "sharing more of our riches to help those most in need," by
building up the social and economic "pillars of a just society" both
at home and abroad, America could bring security and stability to the
entire world-if, he added, the task were undertaken "not in the
spirit of a patron but in the spirit of a partner-a partner mindful
of his own imperfections."
"In short, instead of being the world's swaggering policeman, America
would become the world's self-effacing social worker. The sentiment
is hardly unique to Obama; it was a point of virtually unanimous
agreement among those competing with him for the Democratic
nomination. Specifically, it was the view of Hillary Clinton, his
arch-rival and now his nominee as Secretary of State. In her own
Foreign Affairs article (November-December 2007), she, too, blasted
the Bush administration for its "unprecedented course of
unilateralism," which had "squandered the respect, trust, and
confidence of even our closest allies and friends." And she, too,
promised a new start, focusing on international cooperation and
multilateralism, exhausting every avenue of diplomacy before
resorting to military action, "avoiding false choices driven by
ideology," and devoting our resources to problems like global warming
and third-world poverty. If pursued sincerely and consistently, such
a course, she was confident, would keep us safe, restore America's
image, and win the respect of the planet."
Those views are a reversion to pre-World War I progressivism, when
European and American liberal-progressives were firmly convinced that
the world was moving inevitably toward social perfection. Russia had
finally freed its serfs, democratic institutions were becoming
widespread, governments increasingly were being managed by
bureaucratic experts, and nations appeared to be relying on
international diplomatic agreements rather than war.
The same sorts of conceptions had been a fundamental aspect of
nascent socialism in France during the opening decades of the 19th
century. In his exposition of positivistic philosophy and the
Religion of Humanity, Auguste Comte had expressed confidence that all
peoples of the world, after becoming aware of his new scientific era
ethical principles, would voluntarily and happily come to study peace
and harmony at his feet.
A core presumption in French socialism and English and American
liberal-progressivism was that science's apparent conquest of nature
would also entail the ability of governments to change and perfect
human nature. This is the intellectual platform upon which the Obama-
Clinton foreign policy appears to rest.
The savagery of World War I, followed by the 1917 Russian Revolution,
brutally questioned the validity of that worldview, as did the abject
failure of the post-war League of Nations. The whole liberal-
progressive-socialist scenario was replayed in World War II and the
great expectation that the UN would eliminate military aggression as
a mode of international conduct.
Apparently having learned nothing from the dismal showing of liberal-
progressive foreign policy in the 19th and 20th centuries, President
Obama and his Secretary of State propose to run the same banner up
the flagpole once again.
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc.
The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of
writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
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