Foreign Affairs

This post was originally written on 3/25/2012

When I set out to write about Foreign Affairs, I thought that it would be a good idea to point out just how many of the different countries in the world the Americans of today draw their ancestors from.  It turns out that this data is not available, at least not anywhere on the internet that I can find.  I read somewhere once that if you can't find something that you're looking for in the first two pages of results that are generated by a Google search, then it doesn't exist.  Well, in this case, I scoured between five and ten pages of results from at least twenty differently worded search queries, and I've got nothin.  There simply is no comprehensive list of the countries from which our immigrants originated.

     Even without the fancy statistics, I can still make the point that I was trying to make though, which is this:  There are roughly 200-250 different countries in the world.  The exact number is difficult to pin down because borders change and some "countries" are claimed as part of other countries without the consent of the people who live in them.  Regardless of exactly how many different countries there are, chances are pretty good that at least one of the more than 300 million people who live in the US who came here after being born in each of those countries, or is descended from someone who did.  The population of the US is THAT diverse.  Somewhere among our citizens can be found people who came here and brought some small part of the culture of each and every country on the planet with them.

     From the perspective of the average voter, Foreign Affairs is all about us vs them.  We are America, the land of the free, home of the brave and all that happy crappy.  They are all the other countries in the world. It is really important for people to remember that the only thing that makes us different from them is the form of government that we live under.  Anybody can be an American, no matter where in the world they were born and raised, as long as they grasp the system that we've got going on here and agree to live by the rules that system sets for us.  It isn't about language, because our language is a mish mash of all the languages that everyone who has come here from other places.  It isn't about skin color, because every single shade that skin can come in is represented by the legal citizens of our country.  It's not about religion either, because there are red blooded American's who practice each of the 730 different religions of the world, believing in about 3200 different variations of those religions.  It is all about our Constitution, and the fact that we don't let our government control the type of people we are.

     Foreign Affairs is all about two things- Wars and Treaties.  These two things are completely controlled by the elected representatives who make up our Federal Government.  Only the US Congress is allowed to declare us to be at War with another country, and only the President or his appointed representative may enter into a Treaty agreement with another country, with every treaty needing to be approved by 2/3 of Congress.  No state is allowed to declare war or make treaties with another country, and no individual who has not been elected by the people may do so either.  The reasoning for this is that we are one nation, and we need to avoid a situation where the needs or desires of a few are dictating the circumstances of the all.  Or at least try to.

     Global politics is a lot like high school for countries.  Wars are the ways that the leaders of countries act like macho teenage boys, and Treaties are the ways that these same leaders act like catty teenage girls.  The whole situation is often one big great catch-22, with wars being threatened to get treaties signed, then treaties being signed to either head off wars or clean up the mess after one has been fought.  Like teenage boys, Wars are fairly straight forward, and like teenage girls, Treaties are really fucking complicated.  I'm going to try to break these two sides of Foreign Affairs down further, if you'd be so kind as to keep reading.

 WARS

     War is a very popular tool for governments to use in when dealing with the governments of other countries.  If for some reason your government or some of your citizens have a beef with another government or their citizens, both sides get their military forces together, arm them, and make them go fight each other to the death.  Wars are also used by different factions within the same country to try and settle issues that different citizens of the country may have with each other.  We frown upon that type of thing here in the US and our government tries to stop our citizens from going this route, but our government has been guilty of using the War option here in America too.  Other countries, where it is not standard practice for the government to let the citizens be different from one another, have so many Civil Wars in their history that they can't get by with just calling them The Civil War in their history books.

     There are a whole lot of people here in the US who have read about a lot of different historical events who have caught onto the fact that war never really fixes any of the problems that lead to it.  Assassination of a person or group of people who were causing the problem to begin with is somewhat effective, but using big armies and navies to gather in one place and kill each other off?  Not really solving anything.  The only use for war in most cases is to cause enough losses on both sides that the governments of those sides decide that they should sit down and work out a treaty to settle the disputes and hash out the clean up problems that were created while the war was being fought.

     Sometimes governments decide that their military forces need to be used to Defend The Country from the aggressive forces of another country.  Reasonable people, such as me, consider this to mean that when the military of another country is headed towards our borders with their weapons at the ready, our military is going to hop to it and fight them off, all the way back to their own country and beyond, until the two governments sit down and work out a treaty to stop the fighting.  Other people, some of whom are elected members of our government, have a much more flexible definition of what it means to Defend The Country.  Those people think that it means whatever they want it to mean when they feel inclined to go kick some foreign ass.

TREATIES

     On to the catty teenage girl side of Foreign Affairs.  The first treaty signed by the US Government (post Constitution) was the Jay Treaty.  The purpose of this treaty was to clean up the details of which countries owned what, and other problems left over after the American Revolution.  It wasn't signed and passed by Congress until 1794, 11 years after the fighting stopped, which proves that governments can drag out an argument even longer than a pack of pissed of girls.  The Jay Treaty is standard we've got some problems with another country and we're going to make a deal to get it resolved.  Even so, it wasn't wildly popular with the American public or with many members of the Federal Government at the time.  Thomas Jefferson and James Madison hated it, but President George Washington was convinced by Alexander Hamilton that it was the best deal we were going to make, and that the only other alternative was another war, so eventually it got signed and Congress agreed to it.  See?  Even the very first President and Congress, who got together and wrote the damn Constitution, had to play politics and make unpopular treaties with other countries!

     All over the world, in every country, the citizens and government leaders of the different countries think that their citizens and their government- their way of life- is the shiznit.  This is called Nationalism, and it is what makes it so damn hard for all the countries to just get along and leave each other alone.  It's like the running argument that I have going with my Younger Sister about whether women HAVE to wear makeup to look good or not.  She belongs to the "Women with no makeup are hideous!" camp, and I belong to the "Men don't care as long as your goolie bits smell nice" camp.  There will never be any resolution to this argument, so the only thing we can do is avoid meeting face to face or discussing the issue again until the day we die, or at least until she learns on her own that I was right all along.

Asshole Leader

     While it would be great if countries and their governments would just learn to leave each other alone  and let things lie, there are a lot of reasons that they can't or won't.  One of those reasons is resources.  Anything that can be used is a resource, and not every country in the world has the same amounts of all the different resources.  So countries sometimes have to get together to arrange for a swap of resources, and anytime that negotiation for something you want has to happen, the person or country you're trying to get it from is automatically your adversary until you get the thing and feel like you got a good deal on it.  Another reason that countries can't just ignore each other is that some of the people who lead those countries are assholes.  The type of assholes who are never satisfied with how much stuff they've got, they always have to have more.  And the more that they want already belongs to someone else who isn't willing to give it up, so these assholes want to just take it.  Yet another reason that we can't just leave each other alone is that some of the leaders of different government are really big assholes, who treat even their own people like crap and kill them for no good reason.

     Those first two reasons that we have to deal with other countries are pretty much non negotiable.  We have to get resources that we don't have from other countries, or we won't have them.  Since our country is based on the idea of everyone owning their own stuff and selling other stuff to make the money they pay for things with, we also have to sell some of our stuff to other countries or we wouldn't have enough money in our economy for anybody to get really really rich without everybody else being really really poor.  We also have to keep talking with the asshole leaders and trying to find ways to convince them that taking our stuff is a really bad idea for them to try and pull off.  If all else fails, we can always just let those assholes learn the hard way by letting them try to come and take our stuff, but that would require letting them try to attack us and then fighting a war with them to prove that we can kick their ass.  That involves damage to property and people dying, and takes up time that our military and other citizens could be spending buying and enjoying stuff.

Really Big Asshole Leader

     The last reason I mentioned, the really big assholes treating their citizens like crap and killing them, well, that one is a little iffier as to whether we should be getting involved with that.  A lot of times that one comes into play because of political alliances that we have with other countries or certain groups of citizens in different countries.  The US Federal Government, along with the governments of a whole bunch of moderately developed countries, plays a game called Balance of Power Politics.  This game is played by making treaties and fighting wars that are designed to keep too many of the governments and citizens in the various countries in the world from becoming too much like each other.  Governments don't want that, because then people won't be as nationalistic as they want them to be, and won't follow the rules of the government as well because they can just move to a different country without having to experience too much culture shock.  There's another very good reason for keeping things separated, and that is that you don't want too many people and their governments to be alike because then some asshole leader could take over all those countries and use the people in them to create one big ass military that could go around and conquer all the other countries where the people and governments are still different.  Kind of like the Roman Empire did.

     Balance of Power Politics encourages the leaders of different governments to get pretty crafty when it comes time to sit down and write treaties with the governments of other countries.  It's become the norm for countries to not only use treaties to settle disputes that they have with the country they are having problems with, but also to use treaties to line up alliances with countries that ensure that those countries will have your back if you ever get into a war with another country.  Kind of a "The enemy of my friend is my enemy" sorta deal.  Very teenage girl.  It is supposed to be a deterrent against some asshole leader picking fights with other countries who were just going along minding their own business, but just like teenage girls, not all the "victims" of bullies are completely innocent themselves, and sometimes alliances are formed that give otherwise weak countries who should mind their business a big ole set of brass balls.

Little shout out for one of my favorite book series

     For quite a while now, the US has been categorized as one of the world's "police" powers.  It's been a really long time since the government of any country has had the chutzpa to send their military over here to try and attack us on our own turf, so we haven't really fought in a defensive war since we dropped the bombs on Japan in WWII.  Before that, we hadn't had to pull out the troops in order to Defend Our Country since 1848.  Every other conflict that we have had troops in since the American Revolution took place because our military was fighting in defense of territory we hold outside of the US, or in defense of an ally, or has been an aggressive war fought on foreign soil for some reason relevant to Balance of Power.  Many Americans, including myself, question whether the US should have such a visible and dominant military presence outside of our own borders, and whether we should really be in all of the different conflicts that we are now in or may be headed towards.

     Because I have gone so long just trying to cover the ground of what Foreign Affairs is about, I think that it's probably best that I take the discussion of our relations with Afghanistan, China, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Israel, North Korea, Palestine, and Venezuela to a separate blog.  If you're interested in further information about what we do and don't have to do with these countries (at least from my perspective) please read further about that here.

     Bottom line on Foreign Affairs is that we definitely do have to deal with the governments of other countries, and the job of dealing with them lies solely with the Federal Government.  Citizens of our country should definitely inform themselves about these issues, but they must inform themselves completely before they can just assume that they know everything that there is to know and start judging the decisions that our elected members of the Federal Government make about Foreign Affairs.