My Country Right or Wrong–NOT
The Dramatic Erosion of Our Powerful Example
Watching the televised images of alleged Venezuelan gang members, bowed down and bent at the waist, their legs in chains, their heads being shaved, dragged beneath the bright white LED security lights into the jaws of the world’s largest prison in El Salvador—in defiance of a US circuit court judge’s direct challenge—literally sent chills down my spine. Even foreign born gang members deserve due process. What about the inevitable innocents caught up in the dragnet? What about possible dual nationals? American citizens—whatever their ethnic or national origins—may well be caught up in it. I wondered what I would do if my sons were among them, given their mother is from Guatemala.
First they came for “they/them”. Then they came for us.
Now come the threats to judges. “The Dominos pizzas arrived at the homes of federal judges without explanation”1, suggesting an offer they shouldn’t refuse. An offer much like the offer that Colombian judges received in the Pablo Escobar era when drug cartels were ascendant: “plata o plomo” (cash or bullets)? Meantime, on the truly Orwellian “Truth Social,” our criminally impeached and impeachable president calls for impeaching the judge who issued the ruling. The burnt pot calls the white kettle black, and gets away with it.
If that weren’t enough, the 1798 Alien Enemies Act is invoked for only the third time in our history to justify this twisted peacetime deportation scheme, stretching the meaning of plain English words like “war” to the breaking point, along with our constitution. Welcome to our newly inaugurated Banana Republic.
We are fast approaching the line of a constitutional crisis, if we haven’t already crossed it.
*****
To think that, in my 30 years serving as an American diplomat in 12 assignments in eight different countries including the United States, I never once wished I were sitting on the other side of the negotiating table. I knew the US could be a pain in the ass at times—a stickler for details, often peremptory, with endless demands, dictating terms when it was supposed to be a negotiation (particularly but not only about security), stating outright or strongly implying that those who disagreed should just suck it up and “get on board”.
I knew that our policy decisions and actions were not always 100% correct, and not easy to stomach at all at certain controversial moments.
*****
Defensible Mistakes
For example, while serving as human rights officer in Malaysia, I’d had to publicly defend the March 2003 invasion of Iraq even though I (and most of my career diplomat colleagues) vehemently disagreed with it. Before a skeptical crowd simmering with frustration in downtown Kuala Lumpur, I remember being relieved to have the more seasoned British Ambassador sitting next to me on the panel. I remember he likened the experience to David entering the lion’s den, a biblical reference that didn’t quite register in the majority Muslim country. Thanks to his more senior rank, he bore the brunt of the rancor.
Yet even that decision, which led to what arguably became the single greatest US foreign policy fiasco since the Vietnam War, felt somehow defensible. The suspicion that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD turned out to be wrong. But it wasn’t wrong on its face. Saddam had first prevented UN inspections, and then played hide and seek once he’d allowed them. By making it appear as though he might have WMD, presumably to benefit from their deterrence effect on hostile neighbors like Iran, he was playing a dangerous game. Also, it was hard to defend the sociopath Iraqi leader or to see him as a victim. Apart from the massive human rights violations wrought by his regime, the foreign policy status quo of sanctions leaking like a sieve and politically costly enforcement of no-fly zones, triggered a range of collateral problems. That Osama Bin Laden justified the September 11 terror attacks with particular reference to the permanent presence of infidels in the land of the prophet—US troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia to support no-fly zones in Iraq, among other things—appeared to demand dramatic policy action.
As for September 11 itself, I recall it as a moment of great trauma to the nation and to all Americans, and to our many friends around the world. (I was with family in France at the time, and remember the bold headlines in Le Monde the following day: “Nous sommes tous américains.”2) We were worried about another attack. We knew we had to do something big in response, something other than conduct yet another slow-moving criminal investigation. We were, in a word, afraid. Easy for anyone to say now that we should have acted more rationally. But countries like people are not immune to human emotions. Thucydides himself identified the sources of war as “fear, honor, and interest”—in that order. Fear played an outsized role in our colossal miscalculation, as did its cynical manipulation by political leaders with a narrow agenda who railroaded the system.
It could happen again. And, for its part, fear can easily be manufactured.
Bottom line: however problematic or compromised our position on any given policy question, the position of those on the other side of the table was not necessarily more defensible. Almost always (in my mind), it was not. Besides, being right is a relative matter, not always germane, and we were trying to work together to shared purpose most of the time. Diplomacy is, after all, the search for common ground and the pursuit of shared interests. Working on behalf of the United States of America, broadly shared interests were easy to find.
That’s what I loved about it.
*****
Draining the Power of Our Example
But under Trump 2.0 things appear to have changed. It’s not clear to me that diplomacy plays much of a role in the puzzling new political calculation. As I ponder our picking senseless fights with close friends like Canada, or changing sides on Russia and Ukraine, or threatening to seize the Panama Canal or to take over Greenland, or canceling the Voice of America, or abdicating our advocacy for good governance and democracy abroad and at home while dropping our legal restrictions against participating in overseas corruption, or—yes—rounding up alleged Venezuelan gang members under fabricated pretenses invoking constitutional arguments that collapse under scrutiny, I think it’s damn near indefensible.
Analysts of the cold realist persuasion will argue that it all comes down to power relations and naked self-interest. Values only mask the underlying power equation, which now pushes the United States in a Jacksonian and Nixonian direction. Time to drop the gloves and look out for number one. We’ve done enough propping up of would-be allies. We’ve borne more than our share of the burden from free-riding friends. We’re going broke, paying more for interest on the debt than on national defense, while our so-called allies splurge on social programs for their lazy, spoiled, unhardwoking people that poor Americans can’t even dream of benefiting from.
There may be truth to that argument, and needed adjustments are welcome.
Still, the greatness of America has always been linked with the idea of its being good—or at least trying to. The power of our example has always coexisted with—and reinforced—the example of our power. The erosion of our example drains that power. Its proudly smirking destruction saps it altogether.
I wonder who benefits from that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/opinion/law-firms-judges-intimidation.html?searchResultPosition=1
We are all Americans.
Alexis, I appreciate your thoughtful and candid response to my comment. However, from my seat on the sidelines, and opinions gathered from reading and discussing, rather than embedded in the diplomatic field of action, I still find it very hard to accept the defense of US foreign policy actions on a great many fronts. I have to believe that in this dialectic we would ultimately reach consensus, as admittedly, below I am cherry-picking particularly egregious examples of errant U.S. foreign policy from my small purview, and perhaps I err in assuming (heavy on the "ass" part) that these examples prove the rule; whereas you can draw from a hundred examples of U.S. policy makers doing yeoman's work in providing meaningful foreign aid to a host of nations, and specific groups of people within them. Be that as it may, when you mention being engaged in Nicaraguan politics during the Sandinista movement, can't we agree on that being a clear example of the U.S. promoting all of the wrong motives, and actors in the Somoza regime? The nefarious methods used, and our goals just cannot be justified as "complicated politics," not the bloody Contras, and the attempt to return power to the dictatorial Somozas! And what about our holding the people of Guatemala down for long decades, the motive being cheap bananas?! As another example of US foreign policy run amok, can we justify the toppling of Mosaddegh in Iran? And for what, to allow the Brits, and us (?) to continue extracting the natural petroleum resource wealth of that nation, while paying them a criminally small pittance?! That example seems every bit as much of a bald-faced, even openly admitted, piece of evil work as anything trump has yet perpetrated abroad. I am inspired by another of your reader's comments (Ira Genium) to state that the path to trump was a green brick road constructed by a host of former bad policy makers down through the ages.
Above are three examples, admittedly from the past, but how could we justify our actions in propping up Israel at the expense of the Palestinians--right through to very modern times? I believe our foreign, and increasingly our domestic policies, are hamstrung by power hunger, and the ethos of the profit margin, driving corporate interests. I'm sorry to speak in such vague generalities, and since politics is not my field of expertise, I may rue the night I decided to write this comment. (What's that apt Abe Lincoln quote?: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.") Leaving my brain out of it, I will maintain that in my gut (the cleaner upper part), I feel that the U.S. has too often had its foreign and domestic policies corrupted by private interests at the expense of higher values. I believe it was Noam Chomsky who said that rather than a real Democracy, our political system could be termed a "Corporatocracy." Okay Alec, one too many late night brandies, and this is what you get. Cheers, Ian.
G.K. Chesterton has one of my favorite quotes on this topic: “‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.'” Patriotism is not blind loyalty, it means to me loving your country in spite of the flaws as you work toward a more perfect union. It is hard to see however that the U.S. Government is anything but a malign force in the world right now. I remember going places with my German grandmother when I was a little boy in the 1970s. At the time I didn’t understand what the occasional hostile stares were for when she spoke. Now I realize it was her accented English with the connotations of Nazism, even though she was actually a Holocaust survivor. I wonder if an American accent is going to be viewed in the same light as that of a German speaker after WWII when this dark period of our history ends.