Destabilizers

One of the big problems with the American right wing is that it only has one tool in its toolbox — namely, the sledgehammer.

And, in the words of an American proverb, to the one who only has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Put another way: There is hardly a foreign policy problem that cannot be solved, in the end, with a hard hit.

9/11? Hit it! Namely Iraq, which had nothing to do with the [event]. Ukraine? Hit it! That is, after all, the only language that Ivan understands. The Iranian nuclear question? Hit it: The mullahs would view any offer of negotiation as a sign of weakness anyway, and construe it, therefore, as an invitation to obliterate Israel.

Now, one wants to say, blessed are those who have such a simple worldview because, as is well known, the goddamn Gordian knot could also only be dealt with by — bingo! — hitting it.

The problem with that for the rest of the world is that American hard-liners in the USA, in association with their brothers in spirit in Israel and Iran, are doing everything possible to torpedo a rapprochement between the moderate mullahs and the [so-called] moderate powers in the West, and thereby thwart a solution to one of the most dangerous threats to world peace.

For every civilized nation, it is tremendously important that its foreign policy is predictable. The ground rule of this predictability is the principle “pacta sunt servanda,” [a Latin phrase] meaning “agreements must be kept.” Even when the voters in a parliamentary democracy hand the reins of power to the opposition, this means that the new head of diplomacy, as a rule, also feels obligated in principle to the agreements that his predecessor made — even when as a member of the opposition, he himself never tired of decrying the supposed or actual weaknesses of this agreement.

In the U.S. now, when the ridiculous — but, therefore, no less dangerous to public safety — fanatics from the tea party wing of the Republican Party threaten President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry that they will later destroy every compromise that the “Kenyan” would reach with Tehran, they thereby signal to the rest of the world that there can be only limited reliance on the U.S. as a treaty partner in the future. This would not exactly have a stabilizing effect on world politics.

At the same time, the policies of George W. Bush have already had an extremely destabilizing effect on the Middle East: Without him, for example, there would be no insane Islamic State regime today. The stability of Europe is also in no way served by militaristic NATO leader U.S. Gen. Philip M. Breedlove’s constant saber rattling toward Moscow.

The European partners of the alliance must forcefully reprimand this gentleman because any conflict would be fought at the cost, primarily, of Europeans.