Bruce Ackerman On America’s Failed Long Term Foreign Policy

Eminent scholar Bruce Ackerman penned a piece in Huffington Post yesterday entitled “America’s Tragic Turn in Germany and Japan”, in which he outlines post-WW2 strategy by the US in building and maintaining positive relations in those critical nations who had heretofore been enemies.  He argues the US hasn’t been the best friend:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel meets with President Obama in the White House in 2009. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)”

“It’s taken a long time for Germany and Japan to recover from the Second World War. After enduring the indignity of military occupation, they regained sovereignty only by guaranteeing against future threats to peace. Germany’s new constitution only authorized military force in self-defense or in collaboration with collective security agreements. Japan’s Article Nine went further, “forever renounc[ing] … the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.”

This post-war settlement is unraveling before our eyes. Germans and Japanese who lived through the 1940s are passing away. Rising generations are defining their fundamental interests in new ways; and, after 1989, they can’t count on the United States to fight on their behalf. Indeed, American military interventions may be profoundly damaging to their national interests, as the Iraqi tragedy suggests.

The stage has been set for an escalating cycle of estrangement. Without creative statecraft, particular problems will provoke deeper doubts about long-established understandings. Within a decade or two, post-war partners may well be viewing one another with deep suspicion. Yet, precisely because the American partnerships with Germany and Japan have been fixtures of the modern world, the Obama Administration implicitly supposes that they will continue to remain stable in the future — allowing the Pentagon and CIA to dominate key decisions without rethinking political fundamentals.”

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