Our Worst foreign policy blunder? alas, no
As we move into our nation’s 251st year, let’s discuss: Is the war-on-a-whim launched against Iran—the war that a certain politician claimed something like 38 different times was over but now is going almost full blast again—the worst American foreign policy blunder in history?
Buttressing its case are the facts that it has killed thousands, severely disrupted the world economy, alienated our allies, destabilized an entire region and apparently ended, at least once, in what was clearly abject surrender to a religious fanatic regime while accomplishing none of its purported goals.
But the worst blunder? Alas, it has a lot of competition, and almost all the other contenders have happened within our lifetime, in our memory.
Just think back to …
The Vietnam War. More than 58,000 Americans and perhaps 2–3 million Vietnamese died. And despite all the blood and treasure expended on behalf of what was then South Vietnam, that country collapsed in 1975. The lasting image, of course, is the helicopter lifting off the last Americans from the roof of the U.S. embassy in what was then Saigon.
And while that southeast Asian country became united, under communist rule, our country had become irreversibly divided.
The Iraq War. We started it because, our government said, we were after weapons of mass destruction. Problem was, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We also wanted to ostensibly punish Iraq for 9/11, for which they bore no responsibility whatsoever.
Instead of those weapons of mass destruction, what was there when we finally left was a destabilized Middle East, a burgeoning Islamic State and the graves of thousands of Americans.
Bay of Pigs Invasion. Maybe it should have been called the Bay of Stupids. The idea, hatched and supported by the CIA, was to send 1,400 Cuban exiles to defeat Fidel Castro’s army of tens of thousands. It took only three days for the whole escapade to fall apart. The invasion entrenched Castro’s regime, embarrassed the U.S. and, as a bonus, led to the existential Cuban Missile Crisis just a few years later.
The War in Afghanistan. On the very slim plus side, the war did destroy al-Qaeda’s sanctuary, which was the initial goal. But instead of declaring victory and getting the hell out, we stayed for 20 years and more than $2 trillion worth of nation-building. And when we finally, and chaotically, left, the Taliban came right back to power and now use some of the weapons we left behind to enforce their tyrannical rule.
And before we go, let’s head back to Iran, where we have such an illustrious history. Two decades before the 1979 Iranian revolution, there was our support for the 1953 Iranian coup d'état. That coup overthrew a democratically elected government, restored the rule of the autocratic Shah and, worse, generated decades of resentment toward the United States which culminated in the Islamic Republic. You know, the folks that are still in charge despite Operation Epic Fury and in control of the Strait of Hormuz and so on.
Granted, maybe none of these blunders quite reaches the disastrous level of Hitler and Napoleon’s decisions to attack Russia, or the abject failure of the Treaty of Versailles which theoretically ended World War I but led inevitably to World War II or the rejection of the League of Nations by the American government. But we’re dealing here only with the last 65 years or so and—maybe much more important—Trump still has two more years to go.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed.