Foreign policy dreamscapes: Does reality matter?

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

One of many cataclysmic changes brought about by the digital revolution is additional difficulty for that ancient problem of distinguishing perception from reality.

It is now possible with a keyboard touch [the flicker of an iris or, soon, a brainwave] to create “virtual reality”. Bombarded with the misinformation revolution [as well as information superfluity], judgments about the world and the U.S.’ role become even more difficult.

There are, at least, a dozen circles where American interests are critically paramount but where outcome is – perhaps as always — unpredictable:

Iraq-Vietnam. Is the reality the constant stream of bloody media stories — attracted as reporters are to disaster and largely antagonistic to U.S. policy? If so, then Washington strategy is caught in a time warp, indeed repeating “Vietnam”. But looking back, we now know Hanoi leadership in the winter of 1961-2 thought it was losing just as it became fashionable in American media to believe the Saigon government was losing the guerrilla war. [No less an authority for confirmation than testimony by a Cambodian-based Australian KGB agent masquerading as a newsman.] We now know the 1968 Tet Offensive was a military disaster — the Communists losing their whole guerrilla force — even though it was a clinching propaganda success in the U.S. And we know from defectors no one was more surprised than Hanoi when, after creating a competent South Vietnamese military, the Nixon-Kissinger team aided by Congress cut off its logistics tail bringing on the final collapse. [But nothing is ever final: there was a recent anti-government demonstration quelled by a few hundred policemen on the Saigon waterfront not long before Prime Minister Khai’s White House visit.]

China-EU. Straight-line projections by interested businessmen of a new economic superstate, the usual claque of “Political Pilgrims”, and a largely economically illiterate media, tell us “a rising China” has to be accommodated. But much the same was said of a European Union only yesterday; now Brussels and European capitals are faced with intractable economic dilemma. If the dollar is weakened by a horrendous American balance of payments deficit, last year’s thesis — Japan, China, Taiwan, and South Korea would wreck the U.S. by dumping their dollar reserves — has been put on the shelf. Instead, Europeans secretly examine their Euro bill’s nomenclature to see if the issuer is Germany, France, or Italy — just in case.

North Korea. Endless “mirror-imaging” about Beijing’s propensity to rein in Little Brother has given way to the reality China can’t or won’t apply the brakes to Pyongyang’s purported nuclear weapons program. The isolated, impoverished, famine-stricken, unstable North Korean regime nevertheless plays the Western media like a violin, issuing contradictory statements, vacillating from boorish aggression to siren calls for U.S.guarantees for its survival. Bush meets Japan’s Koizumi, South Korea’s president meets Bush, Koziumi meets Roh, but whether there is any meeting of minds continues a mystery. Does North Korea have bombs and can it mount them on long-range missiles might be clear to the intelligence analysts, but certainly not to an interested public.

Mideast. Washington endorses the Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, then calls for Palestinian-Israeli coordination. Near Palestinian civil war erupts for control of a state now called for by Washington, but terror may be creeping back into the equation vitiating all this. Lebanon elects an anti-Syrian majority, but based on communal appeals which earlier produced civil war, with little guarantee Syrian “hidden assets” have withdrawn with their troops as the latest assassinations prove. Tricked elections produce more of the same in Iran, giving the lie to hope elections are a panacea for “democracy”, now Washington’s battle cry. In any case, wouldn’t any Tehran regime want nuclear weapons the Mullahs are trying to make? After acknowledging 60 years of coddling dictatorship didn’t produce stability much less modernization among the Arabs, Islamicist radicals wait in the wings. Does that mean Washington is gambling with destabilization by preaching “democracy”? At risk is the world’s energy supply before technology makes alternates a reality.

In the digital world of perception rather than reality, Sen. Durbin’s outrageous Guantanamo statements becomes in the hands of satellite TV working the Arab souk a weapon at least temporarily as powerful as all the billions Washington pours into good works in Iraq. The BBC’s “normal” warped worldwide presentation of the complex Senate protocols over John Bolton’s nomination helps overshadow cascading revelations of UN corruption, possible culpability of its secretary general, and need for drastic reform.

The media — and some historians — are obsessed with looking for that moment when the issue is decided. Yet the nature of human events is such decisive moments — if and when they occur — are rarely identified at the time. That is certainly likely to happen in Iraq, the metamorphosis of the Chinese Communist regime, the search for stability on the Korean peninsular, and the revolution sweeping the Arab-Moslem world.

A cautionary note, then: human events are a continuum which even with hindsight are difficult to assess.