America's Failures in Foreign Policy: The Role of Our Virtual Culture

Is America failing itself by being unable to develop complex models for our foreign policy objectives and behavior? It appears so, given the great similarities in how we attempted change, but failed, in Vietnam and Iraaq, and now again, it seems,in Afghanistan.

This blogger proposes the fault for our failure to achieve foreign policy success in these past cases, and future failures unless we change something, derives from the virtual, reduced-in-complexity, plots and worlds of America's pop culture which provides us with the models that shape our mental vision of the world and pre-selects the methods we repeatedly and ineffectually, use to intervene abroad and pursue our global interests.

As for our American culture and how it influences our foreign policy, Americans seem to be perpetually stuck with our heads in TV virtual (and incomplete) worlds written to provide immediate gratification for audiences and commercial sponsors. We then "grow up" (and not necessarily mature)trying to make foreign peoples, cultures and problems conform to some familiar, simplistic Hollywood script. The problem is our elected officials, in order to gain admission to office, have to play to the cultural electorate who have been reared on this stuff.

Richard Haass, Newsweek correspondent, writes about the need for America to reformulate it's mission, tactics and objectives in Afghanistan. A segment of his article was preleased in a Huffington Post article by Nicholas Graham,
"Richard Haass In Newsweek: Rethink Afghanistan Because Nation Building Is Not Working And We're Not Winning ":

Haass:
"After nearly nine years of war, however, continued or increased U.S. involvement in Afghanistan isn't likely to yield lasting improvements that would be commensurate in any way with the investment of American blood and treasure. It is time to scale down our ambitions there and both reduce and redirect what we do. ... The war the United States is now fighting in Afghanistan is not succeeding and is not worth waging in this way. The time has come to scale back U.S. objectives and sharply reduce U.S. involvement on the ground. Afghanistan is claiming too many American lives, requiring too much attention, and absorbing too many resources. The sooner we accept that Afghanistan is less a problem to be fixed than a situation to be managed, the better."

We americans always seem to carry with us, around the world, a false, video game, bad guys-good guys interpretation of conflict and disagreement whereby we insist on forcing any foreign "issue" into a format looking like a 40 minute TV drama, full of blood and guts and ending in a simplistic "win" and a kiss, and "losers" who are usually blown up or at least killed off in some entertaining way. Have Americans lost our sense of reality? Is it always necessary to "win" in easily perceived terms? What about more subtle foreign policy successes?

Has America, because of its perpetually adolescent, immediate-gratification, short-term attention span, TV culture, become unable to think log term or subtly?

Are we stuck in a foreign policy point of view that de-emphasizes a real-world pursuit of complex policy objectives and instead focuses on promoting more easily (to Americans) understood, titillating gadgetry, TV-video-game features that usually consist of fancy or quasi-speculative "war toys", viz. Drone UAV's (unmanned aerial vehicles), huge main battle tanks, fancy anti-personnel weapons of all sorts, exotic framed B-2 flying wing bombers ala some "Terry and the Pirates Face Lost Nazis" film, and so on?

All the above suspicions seem to hold water. Our foreign policy, our economics, our energy "planning" - all lack a mature and steady, long term approach. We will continue to make this mistake while our culture remains overwhelmed by virtual foes, unreal weaponry and heroism, and of course while we still have deep bench money make man-sized versions of our cultural fantasies.