Sound Bite
In 1784 Benjamin Franklin advocated choosing the industrious, home-loving wild turkey rather than the thieving, wide-ranging bald eagle as the symbol of the United States. Franklin lost that debate, and since then advocates of cooperation as America's global role have been similarly losing their struggle with advocates of U.S. domination. The author recounts that struggle, with particular emphasis on the past 30 years, which he spent working in and around Congress with groups opposed to U.S. support for repressive yet "friendly" regimes. He then proposes electoral reforms and a revolution in Americans' attitudes that would place our values rather than corporate and strategic interests at the core of our global purpose.
About the Author
For 40 years Dr. Caleb Stewart Rossiter has been an advocate for a US policy of cooperation rather than domination toward formerly colonized countries.
An activist against the Vietnam War in his teens, he went on to earn a Ph.D. from Cornell University. He moved to Washington, DC, in 1980 to work for the Center for International Policy, the congressional Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus, and Demilitarization for Democracy on such causes as ending US-backed wars in Central America, the anti-apartheid act, the "no arms for dictators" arms trade code of conduct, and the campaign to ban anti-personnel land mines.
In addition to dozens of articles in newspapers such as The Washington Post and journals such as the SAIS Review, Prof. Rossiter has authored or co-authored several major reports on foreign policy, arms control, and democracy.
Dr. Rossiter has also published books on the purposes and uses of American foreign aid in Africa, and on the citizens’ movement against the Vietnam War. His books and articles can be found at www.calebrossiter.com.
|
|
About the Book
This book is about not just the effects but the making of U.S. foreign policy. It shows how advocates of basing U.S. relations on progress toward democracy struggle in Washington with advocates of support for repressive regimes in return for...
This book is about not just the effects but the making of U.S. foreign policy. It shows how advocates of basing U.S. relations on progress toward democracy struggle in Washington with advocates of support for repressive regimes in return for economic benefits such trade, investment, and mineral resources and military benefits such as access to their territory for U.S. armed and covert forces. By arguing that the outcome of this struggle is determined by the average citizen s position, the book makes readers participants rather than observers. By arguing that a cultural pump constantly promotes a vision of American domination as a positive force in the world, it encourages readers to analyze the day-to-day effect of this vision on their own perceptions.
Intended for a general audience, the book features enough inside tales and colorful characters to intrigue the casual reader, but also provides the clear themes and historical context needed for a high school or college text on U.S. policy after World War II toward the colonized, and then post-colonial countries.
|
More . . .
This book tells the story of how US politics became mired in the assumption of domination, and it offers a way for advocates of a foreign policy of cooperation to change that assumption. That is the real issue.... Would America be an eagle or a turkey in its relations with others? Would it Sharp and Rob, or would it mind its own Farm Yard? Would America be, as many of its founders advocated, a new kind of nation not just in its popular form of government and its religious tolerance, but also...
This book tells the story of how US politics became mired in the assumption of domination, and it offers a way for advocates of a foreign policy of cooperation to change that assumption. That is the real issue.... Would America be an eagle or a turkey in its relations with others? Would it Sharp and Rob, or would it mind its own Farm Yard? Would America be, as many of its founders advocated, a new kind of nation not just in its popular form of government and its religious tolerance, but also in having a foreign policy in which right made might, and neighborly collaboration replaced the interference and intervention practiced by European monarchs? As one can tell by looking on the back of the dollar bill, Franklin lost the symbolic struggle over the eagle and the turkey. He also soon fell behind in the real struggle over foreign policy. Calls for acceptance of the rights of Native American nations and neighboring governments were brushed aside by the political and economic mainstream as unacceptable weakness. The belligerent expansion of the government s zone of control continued under such imperious claims as god-given exceptionalism, racial superiority, the Monroe Doctrine, and Manifest Destiny.... There were strong and coherent arguments for self-restraint made in case after case by highly-respected commentators, including Franklin s own denunciation of slavery, Chief Justice Marshall s unenforceable rejection of Cherokee removal, and Congressman Abraham Lincoln s oration against invading Mexico. None, however, seemed able to deflect the American flood that kept surging toward the western shining sea. Individual acts of local aggression by settlers escalated into land grabs by the states they formed, and finally into federal military enforcement of large-scale rail, mining, and ranching claims that drove Indian nations onto reservations. At each step, convenient moral arguments were adopted to justify the taking of labor and land: slavery was a benefit to child-like Africans, civilization was a benefit to savage Indians, and American rule was a benefit to misguided Mexicans. Such logical contortions are, of course, not unique in the history of expanding powers. The Roman sweep into barbaric Europe under Caesar, the Muslim sweep across North Africa under the banner of Muhammed, the simultaneous sweeps at the start of the 19th century of Napoleon Bonaparte and his conscripted armies across Europe, Uthman don Fodio and his Fulani Jihad across west Africa, and Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) and his Scottish regiments across central India each employed a well-reasoned message that was firmly believed by the fighting men and the folks on the home front, a message of altruism and reform. Indeed, it would be difficult to find an expansion in history that was not justified on moral grounds by those doing the expanding....
|
Congressman Bill Delahunt | More »
Congressman Bill Delahunt
“Americans and citizens of other countries who want to know how US foreign policy really gets made should dig into this book. As an insider in Congress with an outsider’s perspective -- a Turkey among the Soft Eagles, in the book’s terms -- Dr. Rossiter takes us from the Founding to our latest challenges, perfectly capturing the enduring tension between the restraint and respect for others inherent in our democratic Republic and the expansion and misalliance inherent in our self-awarded sense of exceptionalism.”
Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian | More »
Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian
Caleb Rossiter is fearless. He names the names and writes as an insider/outsider in his account of the inner workings of Washington’s foreign policy establishment. It is a sobering tale of roads not taken.
Author of Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956%u20131978
Edie Wilkie, former Executive Director, congressional Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus | More »
Edie Wilkie, former Executive Director, congressional Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus
“Even during our toughest day-to-day battles in Congress in the 1980s and 1990s, as we had to settle for that famous ‘half a loaf’ to block new nuclear weapons and reduce US support for repressive regimes, Caleb Rossiter always had a vision of the world as it should be. In this book he uses both his Congressional and his academic experience to define the core conflicts within U.S. foreign policy, and offers a broad range of proposals to address them. This high-energy, high-intensity work challenges each one of us to rethink our nation's motivations and priorities for these perilous times.”
Book News 2010
Will the United States play the role of the eagle in world affairs, "Sharping & Robbing," as Benjamin Franklin put it in 1784, or will it play the less adventurous, but more "respectable" role of the turkey, Franklin's preferred national symbol? Rossiter (School of International Affairs, American U.) has spent years working and lobbying in Congress urging the latter. He advocates a less arrogant approach towards the rest of the world and for the transformation of the US global role from one of domination to cooperation.
In this work he provides an assessment of US foreign policy from World War II onwards and policy efforts to oppose the choice of domination in such areas as Central American civil wars, arms sale to dictatorships, the campaign to ban landmines, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, incorporating his own experiences in and around Congress into his narrative.
In the final part of his book, he explores electoral reforms and the change in American attitudes that he believes can shift American policy from that of the eagle to that of the turkey.
How high can a Turkey fly? - Foreign Policy In Focus | More »
How high can a Turkey fly? - Foreign Policy In Focus
In the debate over the imperative of changing America's global role, the author's Hard Eagles are unapologetic expansionists, Soft Eagles decry the damage to the US's international standing caused by ill-advised military adventures, while Turkeys categorically reject the logic of exceptionalism. The book explores how Turkeys can outfly Eagles. - Click here for full review.Peter Certo, "Review: The Turkey and the Eagle" (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, November 17, 2010)
Is Obama a Turkey or an Eagle? - Foreign Policy in Focus | More »
Is Obama a Turkey or an Eagle? - Foreign Policy in Focus
... President Barack Obama dramatically changed the rhetoric of American purpose in his first year in office and received the Nobel peace prize for doing so. He spoke of shared interests and mutual respect rather than a unilateral right to choose governments and impose solutions, and he put an end to Bush’s aggressive demand that governments stand “with us or against us” in a “global war on terror” that featured illegal renditions, secret prisons, and “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Obama famously traveled to the Middle East to praise Islam as a progressive force in world history, and to the United Nations to outline his vision of a world without nuclear weapons.
However, Obama’s fundamental shift in rhetoric was not matched by a similar shift in practice. He increased the size of, and the budget for, military and covert forces, and maintained Bush’s arms aid and sales to dictators who provide basing and support for military and covert deployments. The two stops on his visit to the Middle East were Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where he trumpeted the cause of democratic reform without noting that the Mubarak regime and the House of Saud are authoritarian dinosaurs who treat dissent with jail and torture. He called for more cooperation in combating terrorism by Islamist militants without noting that al-Qaeda turned on the United States because of its military and covert support for the rule of those two dinosaurs.
Obama did quietly ease off on his campaign pledge to use military force to block Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. And in a related decision, which was so brilliantly complex that nobody could quite understand or criticize it, he reversed Bush’s plan to place anti-ballistic missiles in Poland. However, he followed through on his pledge to step up the war against the Taliban and tripled the level of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 100,000 -- although he bizarrely announced, before the troops could even arrive and test their effectiveness, that they would begin withdrawing within 18 months. This policy was typical of Obama’s approach to America’s global role: tone down the rhetoric and the excesses, and maintain the underlying alliances and military power.
Domestic Sources of Imperialism
How does the Eagle, signifying aggression and dominance and a neo-colonial approach to U.S. foreign policy, maintain its rule over the Turkey, signifying moderation and cooperation and an anti-imperialist approach? The answer is found in both procedure and politics, but at its heart, in American culture and self-perception, benevolence and altruism, and so has the right, indeed the duty and historical calling, to impose order on the world -- over others’ objections but for their benefit. Exceptionalism considers acts of self-benefit, such as forming a strategic alliance with a repressive regime, to be idealistic, because they will eventually result in American influence that will promote democracy and human rights. These beliefs resonate poorly in underdeveloped nations, who have a grim history of perpetrators justifying colonization and neo-colonialism as altruism.
Read more at http://www.fpif.org/articles/is_obama_a_turkey_or_an_eagle. Caleb Stewart Rossiter
|
|
Pages 300
Year: 2010
BISAC: POL000000 POLITICAL SCIENCE / General
BISAC: POL007000 POLITICAL SCIENCE / Democracy
BISAC: HIS036060 HISTORY / United States / 20th Century
Soft Cover
ISBN: 978-0-87586-798-4
Price: USD 23.95
Hard Cover
ISBN: 978-0-87586-799-1
Price: USD 33.95
eBook
ISBN: 978-0-87586-800-4
Price: USD 23.95
|
