Western Foreign Policy is Anti-Democratic
[Foreign policy elites] are more like each other than they are like their fellow countrymen…there’s nobody weirder in America than the professional class of diplomats and policymakers and think tankers…
That clip is from a lecture I gave last year in the James T. Laney Lecture Series at Yonsei University. It occurred in a moment of immense personal frustration with the Biden administration’s dog-shit foreign policy, but it has renewed salience in the context of what I’m seeing across the UK, Australia, the US, and Europe: Sacrificing working people at the altar of inter-elite diplomacy.
When we think about the total unaccountability of foreign policy to the interests of the public, nothing screams as loud as America’s material support to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. That support has been incredibly unpopular and in many ways has ripped the US apart. Yet, the US national security state and the politicians who wield it just keep bolstering Israeli primacy no matter the cost:
But it’s not just the US that suffers from elite impunity; it’s Western governments across the board.
Let Them Eat Bullets
In the UK, the government led by the ironically named Labour Party is spiking military spending at the same time that it’s imposing a regime of austerity on its own workers. Even its healthcare system—which Adam Tooze referred to as the closest thing to the UK’s national religion—is getting squeezed and enshittified.
The UK has a more favorable geography than literally any other nation in Europe. It faces no serious military threats. And yet it gleefully trades butter for guns. Adding insult to injury for the country’s workers, the UK defense secretary also now appears obsessed with fighting China half a world away for reasons that he couldn’t possibly articulate without being racist.
One wonders if the defense secretary has any awareness that his re-armament program is the proximate source of the compounding economic insecurity of his own people.
Secret Sub-Imperial Subs
According to The Australia Institute, 66% of Australians want a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS, the tripartite defense arrangement with the US and UK that the Biden administration concluded in secret back in 2021. At the core of AUKUS is a massive wealth transfer—the largest in Australian history—to acquire US nuclear-powered submarines and subsidize the US defense-industrial base in the process.
But so doing requires a compromise of Australian sovereignty, locking Australia’s fate into US decision-making about military doctrine, procurement, and the like. AUKUS reduces Australia’s grand strategy to an arms deal. Ironically, the MAGA Pentagon is reviewing AUKUS right now with a skeptical eye and it’s unlikely Australia will ever receive the US submarines it’s currently paying for…and I’m pretty sure it’s not going to get a refund for what it’s already paid.
It gets worse. Polling from The Australia Institute also finds that twice as many Australians now want a more “independent foreign policy” than want a “closer alliance with the US.”
Looking on at the unbridled violence and predation that the US political system is engaged in, it’s not hard to see why. But none of this common-sense public sentiment is remotely reflected in Australian foreign policy, which is still built around the idea of Australia as a sub-imperial power supporting American primacy.
The governing Labor coalition—which is supposed to be a pro-worker party—seems to take its cues on foreign policy from the unelected denizens of its national security state in Canberra. Faced with that wall of elite intransigence, what can normal people do?
Europe’s Unequal Treaties
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen just announced a deal accepting a baseline 15% tariff on U.S. imports of EU goods. FT had a good chronology of how this came to be.
The tariff rate, which is a body blow to European exporters, is only part of the pain here. The EU also cut a side deal committing itself to “hundreds of billions of dollars” in US weapons sales and massive purchases of US energy supplies—$250 billion a year in crude oil and LNG for three years.
Even Reuters—a nonpartisan newswire service that avoids having opinions—said of the EU’s energy promise, “This is a delusional level of imports that the EU has virtually no chance of meeting.” The deal amounts to a strange form of appeasement. As Reuters also concludes, Europe’s strategy appears to be “Run down the clock, talk nice, and hope the next U.S. president is easier to deal with.”
Sitting next to Trump, von der Leyen was asked what the US conceded as part of the negotiations, and she said “nothing.” Only that previous relations were “unbalanced” (a Trump talking point), and that this would rebalance them based on a fallacious logic of trade imbalances.1
The people of Europe are (rightly) pissed about being sold out to a declining imperialist hegemon, making this image, which is circulating, sting:2
For European diplomats, the strategy of appeasement was the path of least resistance—literally the easiest thing to ensure they could continue to enjoy good offices in Washington and attend posh think tank conferences where they can jointly fret about China and Russia while ignoring a genocide.
But it’s the European economy that will suffer for this choice, and with it the European quality of life. Europe has entered a long period of civilizational decay, brought on by its milquetoast political class.
The common theme across the West, then, is open antipathy for democracy in any meaningful form outside the ballot box. Worker interests are traded away. Public opinion is ignored. Mass peace protests are repressed by force. And the hypnotic sounds from the drums of war beat on.
It should be clear now that the makers of foreign policy in the West will not reform themselves. They are not to be trusted by the public or their political masters, for they struggle to see outside their self-contained echo chambers where they tell each other mostly what each wishes to hear. Ultimately, you can’t expect reform from anyone who enjoys luxury hotels and cucumber sandwiches as part of their job.
That means populist revolts of one kind or another are the only, perhaps inevitable, way. A new generation of political talent—politicians who channels the righteous anger of a people who have been fleeced by their governments—is about to dethrone them all. When they do, the deposed will be stunned by the unforeseeable turn of events. They’ll mourn their own fate as a black swan. And they’ll have no sense that they were instrumental in their own destruction.
von der Leyen lapped up Trump’s rhetoric about unfair trade imbalances—“Europe has a surplus”—but that surplus is only in goods; it says nothing about and doesn’t rectify America’s massive surplus in services.
Why China would possible be in this image is beyond me. Russia is stealing part of Ukraine. America is trying to steal Greenland, demand tributary payments, and undermine European liberals while boostering for the European far right. China, as far as I know, just wants to sell Europe cheap renewable technology.
