Mac-Coleman

4 March 2013 –

Alaska:  Where men are men and women win the Iditarod.  The first Saturday in March, two days ago, started the 41^st annual Iditarod ten-day, 1,049 mile dog sled race from Anchorage to Nome.   Forget the Tour de France, the Boston Marathon, or any competition where skinny men wear skin-tight spandex.  This is a real man’s race that real women win with regularity.  If you win, like Susan Butcher did several times, you finish the race in eight to ten days.   If you finish last, as John Schultz did in 1973 with a time of 32 days, 15 hours, nine minutes and one second, you get the Red Lantern award for your perseverance.  The race ain’t over until everybody is off the trail.  If you can’t find solid metaphors for real life in this race, you aren’t looking.  Dogs, sleds, snow, ice, wind, night, storms, solitude, mountains, bad food, collapsing muscles, and grit.  Ain’t nothun’ like it.  I am glad I am dry and warm.     

Foreign Policy:  The art of failing to protect U.S. interests by being nice to people who don’t care a hoot about you, hate you, or only want your money.    Or, it is the art of offending your enemies so that they stay enemies and offending your friends until they too become your enemies. 

Why is it so difficult to have an effective foreign policy, no matter the political party in charge?  I think it is because we, as Americans, have an almost genetic propensity to try to “get things done right” in the world for “the betterment of mankind”, to make the world “safe for democracy”, to “end world hunger”, to “stop the dying”, ad gloria mundi.  As a friend succinctly phrased it, “Our hearts, prosperity, religious teachings, and arrogance compel engagement in lost causes.”  That indeed seems to be the case.  Such outside efforts usually are lost causes because rarely do the individual and collective desires of good people, when projected through our government elite to be implemented on a large scale outside the borders of the United States, succeed.  Too many bad people in too many places doing too many bad things.  Nonetheless, our hearts continually tell us that with just a little more of the wealth and blood of our nation we can righteously tell our neighbors how to make things better.  Do we do this?  Yes, all the time.  Do we succeed?  Rarely.

I recently wrote and taught a class on senior military leadership traits in a counterinsurgency environment to colonels and generals in the Congolese military.  We talked about the importance of common beliefs, common languages, common cultures, and individual and societal loyalties and traditions in the building of a stable nation.  These things create a sense of sovereignty and cohesion—a people.  We talked about how differing loyalties and cultures compete in a society and often lead to dissolution, insurgencies, and strife—many times with the interference of outside nations.  We focused on what attributes a senior military leader needs in order to “win the hearts and minds of the people” and, thereby, to take the fire out of an insurgency. 

When talking about outside support against an insurgency, I would often warn that a nation’s leaders must beware of outsiders who come into their country saying that they have come to help.  I emphasized that for a country to be successful in its foreign policy, it should always act only in its self-interest.  If an outsider’s self-interest coincides with the host country’s interests, as expressed by its leaders, then things can be done together.  But, the moment the outsider errs from the common path, it is time to kick him out—if the host country leader still can, that is.    I also stressed that the corollary to this last principle is especially applicable to an intervening country.   An outside nation’s (that means the U.S.’s)  decision to intervene in another nation’s business, should not be expanded or contracted by a host nation’s, or its corrupt leaders’, plaints for more help, U.S. public desire or media hype to help, or the U.S. leader’s personal desire to “do something” more as a leader.  If U.S. action, however large or small it may be, does not directly support vital, U.S. strategic interests, then we should coldly, clearly, and resolutely not do it.   

When challenged by the Congolese officers as to why I was in their country, I told them two things:  because I was paid to do so; and, more importantly for them, because I was looking for a Congolese George Washington.  I had already explained to them how the British colonies rallied around Washington’s leadership in the formation of our country.  I said I was looking for a Congolese George Washington around whom they could rally and become Congolese instead of remaining loyal only to a specific tribe or region in this vast country.  I clearly reiterated that it was in the vital, strategic interests of the United States for the Democratic Republic of the Congo to coalesce into a truly sovereign entity, with stable societal and governmental institutions and a strong rule of law.  I was there only to effect the strategic interests of the United States—and, of course, to get paid.  The officers, hard-bitten survivors of horrendous civil and tribal wars, accepted that answer, and the course went well. 

I know from years of experience throughout the world that a country’s lasting strength, success, and thrift come from its acting only when its vital interests are threatened or when there is a clear opportunity to advance its interests at little to no cost in lives, money, or prestige.  When the latter bet, a risky one at best, begins to sour, pulling out quickly is the only time-proven remedy for such a mistake in judgment.  Doubling down or finding new reasons to stay engaged are adventurism, almost always with tragic results.  The U.S. presidents in the last sixty years whose arrogance has compelled them to engage in enticing, but, alas, lost causes have come from both political parties.  These men and their advisors usually have big hearts, are prosperous, and have high public morals.  But, those qualities and their arrogance always seem to “compel engagement in lost causes.”  I would rather have a cold, mean, pagan who cares only about the United States running our foreign policy than these guys.  It is what the job has always required.   Ask any soldier, or his widow.