John Kerry’s policy of surrender: His failures are redefining American exceptionalism

We have just marked a year since John Kerry launched himself, at 69, as America’s chief diplomat. And for most of the period since it has been difficult to find anything good to say about our 68th secretary of state.

Events of late require that I confess to error and change my mind. Kerry could go down as the most important overseer of American foreign policy in the post–Cold War era.

The record is very mixed, it is important to add immediately. The past year’s agenda is littered with failures — Syria (Kerry’s diplomacy just reached a dead end), the famous “pivot to Asia” (driftwood floating somewhere in the Pacific), Ukraine (Putin again trumps Washington). But this list goes straight to the point: Kerry appears to be managing America’s relations abroad at precisely the moment it comes clear that Washington must surrender the preeminence it has exploited without much inhibition since the Spanish-American War in 1898.

So in failure there lies buried a certain success. Each time Kerry encounters the limits of American power, he goes some way to redefining America’s place on the planet in what we can call our post–exceptionalist era. Of necessity this comes to a more modest but more constructive, less imposing and less disruptive presence. In failure success, and in retreat (as conservative critics, empire builders and militarists see it) we find advances.

There is one question that crystallizes the thought more than any other. Let us look closely.

Kerry’s efforts to restart talks between Israel and Palestinians — some Palestinians — are tritely advertised as his “signature” issue. Many were the commentators who warned that Kerry would break his pick trying to induce a settlement, and they are proven right. Talks continue, but it is evident now they are a wash.

Yet it is in Israel that Kerry has achieved his clearest success-that-looks-like-failure. He has brought light and air to a relationship that has been cloistered, untouchable, mired and on autopilot for decades. He has opened a door, then: Across the threshold, America will be better off, Israel will be better off, Palestinians will be better off, and the Middle East will be, too.

One can identify the very moment Kerry managed this feat. It was on the morning of Nov. 7 last year. That Thursday Kerry took the odd step of granting a joint interview to Channel 2, an Israeli network, and the Palestinian Broadcasting Corp., which, as the name implies, functions as a BBC of the occupied territories.

Putting the two correspondents together was inspired. In hindsight it suggested what was coming. The Israeli press thought he “spoke from the heart” and that he put aside his “statesman-like impartiality.” I do not think he did either. His remarks were considered, as is plain on reading them, and spotlessly impartial. What he dropped was the pretense of American impartiality that long ago devolved into a mere formality, an empty convention it was not done to acknowledge as such.

It is difficult to choose a single remark that represents the whole of what Kerry said. But here is a try. He was addressing a certain complacence evident in Israel of late, the thought that Israelis are safe as things are and in no need of a settlement with Palestinians.

“Well, I’ve got news for you,” Kerry said then. “Today’s status quo will not be tomorrow’s or next year’s. Because if we don’t resolve this issue, the Arab world, the Palestinians, neighbors, others, are going to begin again to push in a different way.”

The background here is important. Kerry was in Jerusalem for talks with Benjamin Netanyahu. The previous day the Israeli prime minister had prevailed upon Kerry to “steer [the Palestinians] back to a place where we could achieve the historical peace that we seek.” Netanyahu, as has been his habit since this round of talks began last July, had just announced that permits would be granted for yet more settlement construction on the West Bank.

Equally, momentum was building — notably but not only in Europe — behind boycotts of Israeli businesses operating on the West Bank, banks financing illegal settlements, and so on. This is called the BDS movement — boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions — and it starts to resemble the campaigns waged against South Africa during the later years of apartheid: a slow burn, but not without effect.

Kerry thus warned of a “third intifada,” this one an economic squeeze. “If we do not resolve the issues between Palestinians and Israelis,” he said early in the interview, “if we do not find a way to find peace, there will be an increasing isolation of Israel and an increasing campaign of de-legitimization of Israel.”

Kerry gathered steam as the encounter went on — almost certainly out of frustration, as Israeli commentators speculated. He let rip on the settlements question, the Israeli military presence, the risk of engendering a generation of Palestinians prone to what used to be called armed struggle.

“How, if you say you’re working for peace and you want peace, and a Palestine that is a whole Palestine that belongs to the people who live there, how can you say we’re planning to build in a place that will eventually be Palestine? So it sends a message that perhaps you’re not really serious.”

“If we do not resolve the question of settlements and the question of who lives where and how and what rights they have; if we don’t end the presence of Israeli soldiers perpetually within the West Bank, then there will be an increasing feeling that if we cannot get peace with a leadership that is committed to non-violence, you may wind up with leadership that is committed to violence.”

You did not read or hear much about Kerry’s interview in the American media. Paradoxically, the Israeli press is far freer in its reports and commentary on the Mideast crisis than one finds in the States. I found good accounts in the Times of Israel and here.

The reaction was strong, predictably. Conservatives accused him of anti-Semitism, dealing Israel out of existence, indulging a “messianic” streak, knowing better than Israel what is good for it. Three members of Netanyahu’s cabinet mounted frontal attacks.

I predicted in this space last summer that a renovation in U.S.–Israeli relations was due. It is far from accomplished, but this is what it looks like for now. Something abrupt had to push the process in motion. Kerry did the deed waiting to be done.

He did some other important things, too. Most immediately, he reasserted control over American policy in the region. As the Middle East evolves post–Arab Spring and as Iran seeks to open, the only alternative was to allow Israel’s standing hostilities and its givenness to military solutions over diplomacy to limit Washington’s alternatives.

The honest talk, fresh and direct, was key. By way of it he insisted on a key distinction that is often blurred. While making clear his support for the Israeli project, he insisted that this does not compute to acquiescing to Israel’s behavior in the occupied territories and its evident lack of genuine interest in a comprehensive settlement.

One cannot imagine a previous secretary of state pulling this off, but in my view Kerry got his timing just right. He tapped a liberally flowing undercurrent. One already detects a distinct turn in the comments of prominent Israel watchers, and they follow that distinction Kerry insisted upon.

One example among numerous will do. It comes from Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist whose pieces usually run in the international edition or as blogs on the website. Many concern Israel, and a very fine one appeared last week. Declaring himself “a strong supporter of a two-state peace,” he remarked, “Jews, having suffered for most of their history as a minority, cannot, as a majority now in their state, keep their boots on the heads of the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank any longer.”

Cohen’s commentary along these lines preceded Kerry’s interview in Israel by a long way. But Kerry has lent this perspective deserved prominence and credibility. This lands us all with a new responsibility. It comes as a question. What do critics of Israel mean now that it is feasible they may be heard in high places?

I answer this way: I am a vigorous critic not of Israel but of its conduct. The flaws lie in execution, not the originating thought. As to history, it can never be made not to count; the displacements of 1947-’48 cannot be forgotten. But neither can history be reversed, as Cohen asserts. “There can, and should be, agreed compensation for the dispossessed,” he writes. I sign on to this. As a memorial Israel is a poor one, in my view. All concerned, those living and those remembered, deserve better.

Kerry’s first year raises a question of intent. Obviously he did not intend for the current round of Mideast talks to fail when he started them last July. He did not intend to give Russia the lead on the Syria question, or Iran the initiative in getting talks going on its nuclear program. But in the latter two cases, recognition of other poles of power has resulted.

As to the Mideast, Kerry has accomplished something I had judged possible only in principle. He has shaken loose a policy badly in need of shaking and given a stale conversation a new sound.

All positive. Maybe Kerry’s gift is for getting underway a transition in America’s posture abroad that will inevitably lead to a loss of primacy, and to do so quietly enough to avoid (so far, anyway) upsetting conservatives, nostalgists and exceptionalists any more than necessary.

Who can imagine that failure-as-success was Kerry’s purpose when he set out a year ago? But the big messes, such as the coup Washington sanctioned in Egypt, now a god-awful crisis, are cases wherein old policies, in the American century mold, ran the full course. Then you get success as failure, not the other way around.

Another believer in diminishing the U.S. - John P. Holdren, Obama’s Science and Technology adviser.

http://citadelcc.vo.llnwd.net/o29/network/Levin/MP3/ShowAudio/HOLDREN-NEEFUS.doc

White House Science ‘Czar’ Tells Students: U.S. Can’t Expect to Be Number One in Science and Technology Forever
By Christopher Neefus

(CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration’s top science and technology official, who has argued for the economic de-development of America, warned science students last Friday that the United States cannot expect to be “number one” forever.

“We can’t expect to be number one in everything indefinitely,” Dr. John P. Holdren said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Holdren is director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology (PCAST), making him the top science adviser in the administration.

The former Harvard professor was at the AAAS to speak to students about the Obama administration’s priority of advancing science and technology issues, its goal to increase spending in the area to 3 percent of the gross domestic product, and Obama’s great personal interest in the fields.

In a question-and-answer session with students after the talk, one student asked Holdren how the United States could move forward now that it is no longer “the big shiny beacon” where all scientists travel to do their research.

Holdren called it a mixed picture, and said it was not purely bad for the United States that other countries were making gains instead of us.

“That is, there are many benefits to the increasing capabilities of science and technology in other countries around the world,” he said. “It’s not an unmixed or dead loss that other countries are getting better in science and technology.”

“Other countries getting better increases their capabilities to improve the standard of living of their countries, to improve their economies and, as a result, ultimately to make the world a better and safer place,” he said.

Holdren, who was previously at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said that as a result of those good advances, “We can’t expect to be number one in everything indefinitely.”

“Probably the most appropriate responses to this degree of levelization (sic) of the playing field is to cooperate, to exchange more,” he said. “We have all kinds of programs already in which U.S. graduate students and post-docs go to China and Chinese graduate students come here—direct exchanges, university to university.”

Holdren said such programs also exist with Japan, India, Brazil, and “a variety of European countries.”

“We intend to grow those programs because we think they are mutually beneficial and we intend to grow the cooperations (sic) in which we engage with other countries,” he said.

However, the top science adviser admitted that accepting this kind of level playing field also had its downside for the United States.

“On the other hand, there are some problematic aspects,” he said, “if, for example, it is so hard for scientists and technologists from certain countries to get into this country that kind of cooperation is impeded.”

“It’s a problem if everybody who we graduate from our universities who is originally from another country goes back—invite some of them to stay,” he said. “And we make it, in some respects, too hard to stay. Some people have suggested we should staple a green card to every Ph.D. in science and engineering that we give to a non-U.S. citizen. So again, like so many of the very good questions you folks are asking, this one has no really tidy answer, but we’re trying to work it on a number of fronts.”

Holdren is often called the science ‘czar’ for the vast swath of topics on which he is tasked to advise the president, including health care, the space program, bioethics, and more.

As CNSNews.com previously reported, his ideas for cooperation among nations in prior decades have included diverting large amounts of the U.S. Gross National Product (GNP) to countries in need of development aid.

In 1995, in accepting a Nobel prize on behalf of a large group of scientists, Holdren said investing about 10 to 20 percent of the GNP of developed countries in less developed ones was vital to a world of “durable security.”

Pointing to the conclusions of geochemist Harrison Brown in the 1950’s, Holdren said, “(T)he cooperative effort needed to create the basis for durable prosperity, and hence durable security, for all the world’s people would require an investment equivalent to 10 to 20 percent of the rich countries’ GNPs, sustained over several decades. In 1995, these figures do not seem far wrong, but they are said to be politically unrealistic: nothing approaching them has ever been seriously contemplated by the world’s governments. Until this changes, a world free of war…will remain just a dream.” http://www.pugwash.org/award/Holdrennobel.htm

Similarly, in his 1973 book “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions,” he suggested “de-developing” the United States to benefit other, poorer nations.

“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,” Holdren and two co-authors wrote. “De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation. Resources and energy must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses of overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of underdeveloped countries.”

“This effort must be largely political, especially with regard to our overexploitation of world resources, but the campaign should be strongly supplemented by legal and boycott action against polluters and others whose activities damage the environment,” he said.

Holdren has rebuffed the efforts of CNSNews.com and other media to discuss his former positions on multiple occasions, and he did not take questions from the press at the AAAS event.

Following is a post-modern academic's dim view of America - - where she examines (and deplores) the resilient "space cowboy" mentality still inhabiting space exploration circles - stubborn, annoying holdouts who believe in frontiers, American exceptionalism and its power (and the desire to extend it and capitalism beyond Earth). Her distaste for industrialization and profits (makes Americans greedy and militaristic and unable to change) is a good example of what students are getting a steady diet of in school. This administration's has done much to advance her (and her colleagues') anti-American ideological agenda stemming back to the 70s.

In an essay (Dec. 17, 2013) where she took exception to a piece on American exceptionalism and space exploration, Dr. Linda Billings references her chapter “Ideology, advocacy, and spaceflight: evolution of a cultural narrative,” for the book Societal Impacts of Spaceflight.

[Billing's excerpted "Conclusion" section]

“Everything now suggests,” Nisbet wrote 25 years ago, “that Western faith in the dogma of progress is waning rapidly.” This faith appears to have remained alive and well, however, in the ideology of spaceflight.

Christopher Lasch wrote 5 years ago, “almost everyone now agrees that [the idea of] progress — in its utopian form at least,” no longer has the power “to explain events or inspire [people] to constructive action.” But in the current cultural environment, perhaps it does — at least among space advocates. progress is, indeed, modern American dogma and a key element of pro-space dogma. But it does not resonate well — as Pyne and others have noted — in the current postmodern (or even post-postmodern) cultural environment, where public discourse is rife with critiques of science, technology, the aims of the military - industrial complex, and the corporate drive for profit.

".......This brief historical review has shown how the rhetoric of space advocacy has sustained an ideology of American exceptionalism and reinforced long-standing beliefs in progress, growth, and capitalist democracy. This rhetoric conveys an ideology of spaceflight that could be described, at its worst, as a sort of space fundamentalism: an exclusive belief system that rejects as unenlightened those who do not advocate the colonization, exploitation, and development of space. The rhetorical strategy of space advocates has tended to rest on the assumption that the values of “believers” are (or should be) shared by others as well.

Although the social, political, economic, and cultural context for space exploration has changed radically since the 1960s, the rhetoric of space advocacy has not. In the twenty-first century, advocates continue to promote spaceflight as a biological imperative and a means of extending U.S. free enterprise, with its private property claims, resource exploitation, and commercial development, into the solar system and beyond. Pyne, among others, has addressed the problematic nature of these arguments: “the theses advanced to promote [solar system] settlement,” he noted, “are historical, culturally bound, and selectively anecdotal: that we need to pioneer to be what we are, that new colonies are a means of renewing civilization.”

Spaceflight advocacy can be examined as a cultural ritual, performed by means of communication (rhetoric), for the purpose of maintaining the current social order, with its lopsided distribution of power and resources, and perpetuating the values of those in control of that order (materialism, consumerism, technological progress, private property rights, capitalist democracy).

Communication research has shown how public discourses — those cultural narratives or national myths — “often function covertly to legitimate the power of elite social classes.” And this review has shown how the rhetoric of space advocacy reflects an assumption that these values are worth extending into the solar system.

Pyne observed almost 20 years ago that space exploration was “not yet fully in sync” with its cultural environment. Modern (seventeenth - to twentieth-century) Western (European-American) exploration functioned as “a means of knowing, of creating commercial empires, of outmaneuvering political economic, religious, and military competitors — it was war, diplomacy, proselytizing, scholarship, and trade by other means.” But the postmodern exploration of space is different. outer space is not simply an extension of earth and the era of space exploration is not simply an extension of the modern era of transoceanic and transcontinental exploration. Its cultural context is different. The modern phenomenon of spaceflight has outlived the modern era and its purpose is not clear in a postmodern or even post-postmodern world, characterized by uncertainty, subjectivity, deconstruction, and a rejection of so-called master narratives such as the story of frontier conquest. The moral imperative of the myth of pioneering the space frontier could be interpreted as a narrative that is in tune with its postmodern cultural environment in the sense that it conveys the values of the dominant social order—that is, what communication scholar herb Schiller has called “the transnational corporate business order” and its ideology of private property ownership, resource exploitation and profit building.

Of course, the idea of the human colonization of space is not publicly compelling in the current cultural environment. Poet Wendell Berry has addressed this dilemma:

"The [space colonization] project is an ideal solution to the moral dilemma of all those in this society who cannot face the necessities of meaningful change. It is superbly attuned to the wishes of the corporation executives, bureaucrats, militarists, political operators, and scientific experts who are the chief beneficiaries of the forces that have produced our crisis . . . .

If it should be implemented, it will be the rebirth of the idea of progress with all its old lust for unrestrained expansion, its totalitarian concentrations of energy and wealth, its obliviousness to the concerns of character and community, its exclusive reliance on technical and economic criteria,its disinterest in consequence, its contempt for human value, its compulsive salesmanship."

The sales pitch for space colonization goes this way, according to Berry:

"If we will just have the good sense to spend one hundred billion dollars on a space colony, we will thereby produce more money and more jobs, raise the standard of living, help the underdeveloped, increase freedom and opportunity, fulfill the deeper needs of the human spirit etc. etc. . . . anyone who has listened to the arguments of the army corps of engineers, the strip miners, the defense department or any club of boosters will find all this dishearteningly familiar."

Visions of the human colonization of space present a “moral law of the frontier” that is disturbing, Berry concludes: this law is that “humans are destructive in proportion to their supposition of abundance; if they are faced with an infinite abundance, then they will become infinitely destructive.”

Berry wrote his essay about the downside of space colonization in the 1970s. But his views are not necessarily out of date. Environmentalists might argue today that the case Berry made against space colonization is even more relevant today than it was in the 1970s.

In order to survive as a cultural institution, spaceflight needs an ideology. It needs to have some connection to widely held beliefs. It needs a role in a cultural narrative. But as Pyne has noted, “locating exploration in the human gene or in the human spirit” and not in specific cultures is not viable. Continued reliance on this narrative “only absolves us from making those vital, deliberate choices” we inevitably have to make — about how we should proceed into space, and what values space exploration should embody.“ These choices,” Pyne has said, “are not intuitive.” As a cultural institution, space exploration “has to speak to deeper longings and fears and folk identities.” It “is not merely an expression of curiosity but involves the encounter with a world beyond our ken that challenges our sense of who we are. It is a moral act . . . more than adventuring, more than entertainment, more than inquisitiveness.” It has to explain “who a people are and how they should behave.” And in the current cultural environment, as Pyne has observed, space exploration “will have to base its claim to legitimacy on transnational or ecumenical values.”

Unlike the Western American frontier, as Janice Hocker rushing has pointed out, space is too big to be conquered. The recent focus of space exploration on the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life is a product, she has said, of a widespread understanding that humankind exists in a universe, not only on planet earth. The narrative of space exploration today might better reflect this understanding by telling a story of “a spiritual humbling of self” rather than “an imperialistic grabbing of territory.”

Although she has noted that “the WASP space cowboy version of spaceflight” has persisted from the Apollo era into the present, Constance Penley also has observed that NASA “is still the most popular point of reference for utopian ideas of collective progress.” In the popular imagination,“ NASA continues to represent ...perseverance, cooperation, creativity and vision,” and these meanings embedded in the narrative of spaceflight “can still be mobilized to rejuvenate the near-moribund idea of a future toward which dedicated people . . . could work together for the common good.”

This historical review of the rhetoric of space advocacy reveals competing American cultural narratives, then. The dominant narrative — advancing the values of the dominant culture — upon which the narrative of U.S. spaceflight piggybacks, is a story of American exceptionalism that justifies unilateral action and the globalization of American capitalist democracy and material progress. The story of spaceflight is embedded in this broader narrative. That story is also woven into a competing narrative, a vision of “utopian ideas of collective progress” and “a spiritual humbling of self.” This competing narrative may be a site within which the ideology of spaceflight might rejuvenate itself — where the vision of a human future in space becomes a vision of humanity’s collective peaceful existence on Spaceship earth and the need to work together to preserve life here and look for life out there. [end excerpt]

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