Why Owen Jones is wrong about Foreign Policy

Part 1: The case for chaos over connection

Our minds naturally seek patterns. The desire to make sense of the world transcends partisan boundaries, affecting us all. This is especially true of political theorists, who use a particular lens and begin to see the world through it. In doing so, we risk making false connections —links that don’t exist —to verify our worldview.

This is a complex process and one which I rarely champion. Instead, I spend most of my days, when not applying for work, in the lonely process of attempting to adjust my filter to reality. Akin to a complex camera where the resolution is almost always just a little out, theorising about the world is a lonely and impossible process to feel entirely adjusted to. But what else is there?

Well, Owen Jones gives us a guiding hand here. Far from seeking nuance, he adjusts himself to reality, instead choosing bombast to derive a particular view of the world for his readership. Jones is particularly demanding in his own form of pattern-seeking. Simplistic in form and outcome, Jones ignores any piece of evidence which does not align with his diagnosis. Jones is neither a political theorist nor an expert on foreign policy, two facts that become apparent when reading his article on drawing a direct line from Iraq to Gaza.

Jones does not merely draw a direct line from Iraq to Israel, but he implicitly attempts to weave together the complex, multifaceted, and profoundly different histories of colonialism. What he overlooks is the transformation of modernity and colonialism from Columbus to the end of the Second World War. Hidden within this is not a straight path but a series of zigzags, with little coherence to be found. Instead, there are a series of regrets and failures which mark almost any foreign policy intervention.

Jones witnesses Western foreign policy as the combination of capitalism and racism, producing a toxic combination where the result is always the same. The massacring of non-white lives and the pillaging of wealth is what Jones sees not simply as an outcome but also as the raison d’être of Enlightenment materialism. From Columbus to Trump, the West is a bloody tale of imperial racism undermining its own value and is increasingly lost in its own story of righteousness. Of course, attempting to deconstruct something like ‘the West’ or several hundred years of history is a messy business. Or it would be to anyone but a columnist high on his own moral supply.

My critique of Owen Jones’s attempt to deconstruct the ‘West’s’ foreign policy is not simply due to his perspective, but rather the fundamentally flawed approach of seeing lines where, unfortunately, none exist. The fact that he attempts to do this in 1075 words makes the effort even worse. Jones ignores context, philosophical differences, and genuine periods of uncertainty in favour of a clearer picture of domination without any regard for the consequences. Just as he would never dare speak of ‘the East’ with any claim of uniformity, neither should he do so of the ‘West’. To do so is to repeat Said’s cardinal error of reducing the Occident to little more than the mythic qualities he wants the Orient to be rid of.

In Jones’s world, America, despite its emergence as a country from an Empire, is intertwined with European traditions of Empire. Jones’s reductive attempt to saddle the US with Europe ignores a long tradition of distinctive policymaking. From the initially anti-imperialist Monroe Doctrine to the US’s post-World War II refusal to prop up the ailing empires of Europe, the US and Europe have created alternative paths for one another. Paths which are perhaps best exemplified by the Suez Crisis. During the crisis, President Eisenhower not only refused to aid the British and French efforts to retake the canal but also threatened Britain with financial catastrophe if she did not withdraw.

Jones also ignores the significant period of isolationist thought pre-World War II, where the American right conceived of nothing worse than getting involved with foreign wars. FDR had to use all his political skill and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour to get the US into the war. Previously, the US was not the global power it is today. Neither were its affinities with Europe so closely tied; it was felt by many that Europe had gotten itself into a mess, and it could get itself out of it.

Simply equating the US with Europe, as is often done, relegates the complex past to a simplistic narrative that obscures the truth. This is not to deny the US’s legacy of becoming a regional and eventual world powerhouse, the like of which the world has never seen and its interference in the domestic affairs of other states. However, intellectually and diplomatically, this has often looked different from European colonial efforts, even if there have been periods of mimicry, as seen in examples ranging from Iran to South and Central America.

But Jones is not only wrong in simply conflating the US and Europe, he also conveniently starts in 2003. Why not start almost a decade earlier, in 1994 in Rwanda instead of Iraq? Where the scale of the atrocity was so great that it cannot be comprehended- an estimated 800,000 people massacred in 100 days, not with sophisticated machinery but primarily with machetes. The scale was so colossal, and the world’s impotence at such a devastating genocide so unbearable, that Kofi Annan began the process of imagining a world where genocidal and criminal regimes could be legally stopped.

The doctrine of R2P was created and endorsed by almost every country on the planet. It demanded an end to regimes that committed acts of gross criminality, rendering the already mythic notion of Westphalian sovereignty dead in the water. This doctrine, although not a law, utilised the premise of law to create norms that were, for a period of time, successful. Of course, Jones does not discuss Sierra Leone or Kosovo, to name just two examples where Western intervention has stepped in to the rescue. To do so would be to blemish his claims about the natural relationship between deposing a sadistic and totalitarian dictator and standing by once again and watching nightmares happen. Gaza is not the legacy of Iraq; if anything, it is the legacy of Rwanda, where we sit around and watch as genocide happens. To pretend Gaza is the first of anything is a mistake; it is merely yet another crime that we witness after we said ‘never again’ in 1945.

Of course, critics of R2P merely see it as yet another tool of imperialism trampling on post-colonial states. If Jones had broached the subject beyond 1075 words, I am sure he would have mentioned it at the very least. He does so indirectly by mentioning the intervention in Libya, the process which was begun under the auspices of R2P to protect helpless civilians as their raging thug of a leader threatened to murder ‘cockroaches’. According to Jones, it would have been better to stand back, as in Rwanda and watch the devastation unfold rather than at least try to stop it.

The proponents of this critique believe that, at its best, R2P represents little more than the ‘organised hypocrisy’ of the Westphalian order that Stephen Krasner argues grants far less sovereignty than is often supposed. But R2P, as imperfect as it is, provides at least a roadmap to limiting crimes against humanity. In the anarchic world around us, that is about as good as it can get. This is where we come to Iraq.

The invasion of Iraq was not the byproduct of a calculated and fiendish attempt to destroy a nascent democracy in a region devoid of it. Neither was it a nest of bloodthirsty neoconservatives as it is widely supposed. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld —the Big Three of the Bush Cabinet, including the President himself —were not neoconservatives. Instead, the most visible neoconservative in the Bush administration, Paul Wolfowitz, was a mere deputy secretary. The shadowy conspiracies which have loomed over Iraq, from the oil snatching which never happened to a poorly funded think tank writing a position paper for the new American century, have mucked up a far messier picture. There was nothing certain about Iraq.

In 2000, Bush was not going around America demanding more intervention and a stronger US presence in the world. Instead, this particularly uncultured man from Texas was demanding US withdrawal from it. Using a classic conservative form of thought, Bush was sceptical of attempts at nation-building and sought to re-focus priorities at home. It was a position whose ridiculousness was chillingly told in the masterful Looming Tower, the US could not simply withdraw from a world it had helped shape and whose enemies were gathering and already making plans.

Then 9/11 happened, and even if America did not change, Bush did. Suddenly, the world was not too large for American power to help reshape. America needed to be safe, and to do so, liberal democracy must be spread far and wide, regardless of the cost in blood and treasure. Iraq is the byword for the policy of preventative intervention, but it could have come elsewhere. For a time, both Syria and Iran were on the hit list of countries whose despotic rulers could have been removed.

This is where Jones’s claim that Iraq proved that Arab life was cheap is incorrect. If anything, it proved its own expense. Both Afghanistan and Iraq saw money flow through incompetent governing administrations that failed to understand culture, local politics, and social dynamics influencing the security of the country. Both saw significant casualties as forces were attempting to maintain a fractured peace in damaged countries.

It would be a mistake to argue that the damage was solely the responsibility of the West. The sectarian war in Iraq, stoked by Iran and Syria for their own nefarious geopolitical purposes, was latent in Iraqi society under the corrupt Ba'athist regime. Iraq under Saddam was not allowed a civil society of any kind, with countless people disappearing, leaving the dictator appearing as little more than a god. Where the West can take blame is in removing Saddam without a genuinely well-planned alternative already mapped out with experts and Iraqis on the ground ready to begin from day 1 in reconstructing a devastated country.

Of course, in both countries, and around the region, the rendition programme and its immoral excesses left America and its allies with less of a moral leg to stand on. I will not attempt to defend it- there is no defending it, and there is a good case that those who approved it should face trial at some point. But that programme, which did not include Abu Ghraib, a separate and particularly horrifying incident, was one part of the intervention. It was not the whole story. It did not and should not define the mission of preventative intervention, which the Bush administration controversially pioneered. For all the damage done during Iraq, the world is thankfully rid of Saddam Hussein and his bastard family.

Menacing the region and its people, the current President of Iraq is glad to see the back of Saddam. He does not see the intervention as an inherent mistake, even if mistakes were made. The mistake was not to depose Saddam even earlier, before he could do the damage which he eventually did to the Iraqi people. George Bush’s father had the chance, following the first Gulf War, to get rid of Saddam, but he feared the consequences of doing so. Some see Bush Sr’s decision as a moment of clarity and wisdom, whereas others believe if Bush Sr. had removed Saddam, then perhaps, just perhaps, Iraq would be in much better shape today.

Twenty years have passed since the event, and four Presidents, both Democrat and Republican, have occupied the White House. Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump again all represent profoundly different visions of world politics and how to utilise American power. It is what those Presidents have wanted to do, which is different, and all of them have reacted in a way which sets them against George W Bush. Bush himself, when campaigning for the Presidency, could not have anticipated what would come.

Far from seeing any straight line, all I see is a series of missed opportunities from imperfect men. Obama, when the Arab Spring arrived, lacked the steel to get on board and give the Arab people what they were begging for. Refusing to get involved in Syria, a conflict which Jones bizarrely includes in his article, as if the US was responsible for it, Obama, unlike Bush, wanted to put an end to the maligned War on Terror. Those infamous ‘red lines’ so easily crossed marked a new era and an age of global impunity.

The mass bombing not of dictators’ palaces or Jihadist camps, but of the democratic demands of the Syrian people by Russian airpower was a taste of things to come. The crimes we abhor today in Ukraine, Xinjiang, North Korea, and Gaza emanated from a world where it was seen as better to look the other way than to get bloody ourselves to try and stop the problem. Obama’s speech-making and deals with the UN to ‘disarm’ Assad, following numerous Sarin attacks, painted a false picture. The ‘peace conferences’, which did nothing more than guarantee Assad’s survival, are the logical results of Jones’s alternative to intervention when crimes are committed.

(Two opposite visions- one from the Iraqi President and another from Owen Jones)

For all the ill the ‘West’ has done, if we must use that term, are we really looking forward to the alternatives? Jones, in his article, does not address this because he does not have to. But it is necessary to do so if we really want to evaluate the West. The promise of the growing influence of the illiberal world order is hardly one that excites me.

The liberal order, which has helped shape the world, is far from perfect. I am the first to admit that. But it has constructed a semblance of decency in world affairs. The international law which Jones so dutifully triumphs is the byproduct of this political order. Does he really expect the rise of illiberalism to galvanise respect for it? He is asking his readers to believe somehow that someone like Saddam Hussein would just hand himself in to the International Criminal Court and await judgment. It is a proposition so ludicrous that it does not even merit a response.

The shadow of the War on Terror, if not long gone, has been replaced by the fear of a renewed clash of world powers, such as China, the US, and Russia, in their attempts to reclaim that particular mantle. The US is now bestowed with a President who makes George Bush appear to have the foreign policy foresight of FDR and Nixon. After all, what really connects the man who called Iraq a ‘big, fat mistake’ with one who pronounced the need to destroy Saddam’s regime? Trump has had small moments where morality has intervened, but largely, he is content to sit back, be praised, and watch the mess unfold as long as he is acknowledged.

The West is not perfect and faces challenges, but pretending we have reached some nadir is an error. Instead, we live in a world that sees more, and we perceive things increasingly quickly. It is a new world, and it needs leadership more than ever. Jones does not provide a space for that- instead, all we get is a vacuum of criticism. The world is messy, and fitting ourselves into morally contorted shapes of self-righteousness is easy. Instead, we need to act in reference to reality.