U.S. Foreign Policy Post-September 11: Some Notes for the Barnard Conference: Why?

What Kinds of Arguments Will Be Effective?

Three kinds of arguments might be effective at this point. First, there is what we might call rhetorical provocation. Provocations are outrageous or startling statements that shake things off track for a short period of time, but which plant the seeds of deeper criticism and get the attention of the U.S. media – such as a call for renewing the draft or the strange commercial about how SUV-driving habits support Osama bin Laden.

Artists can also provide important provocation because their work is emotional and can be used to increase empathy and understanding of others. One of the most effective provocations of the antislavery movement was the distribution of thousands of cross-sections of a slave ship by Thomas Clarkson. In the current situation, examples of artists’ provocations include Peter Sellars’s recent adaptation of Euripides’s ancient Greek tragedy, Children of Herakles, which he updates to tell the plight of modern-day refugees, or Tony Kushner’s new play, Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, about Laura Bush reading a storybook to dead Iraqi children.¹

And of course, civil disobedience is a provocation, but the content of the argument is sometimes obscured by the act and civil disobedience must be very carefully staged.

• A second set of arguments consists of a deeper analysis that can fracture the elite consensus. That deeper analysis has to:
• continue to unpack the illogic and dangers of U.S. foreign policy most vulnerable to critique are preventive war doctrine the U.S. is hiding under the rubric of preemption and capabilities based defense planning. Some policies of the administration may work, but others are clearly destabilizing and reckless.
• make linkages to issues where the Bush administration is vulnerable, to peace movement issues. E.g. the administration is vulnerable on the environment and the economy. Which takes us back to where I started: the three horses of the apocalypse: environmental decay, poverty, and war are linked.

This is related to the third kind of argument. We desperately need an articulation of alternative foreign, environmental, and energy policies for the United States. The alternatives are not simply isolationism or robust imperialism – as the administration calls it, preeminence. The United States must be a responsible power.

1. Scene 1 of Kushner’s play appeared in The Nation, March 24, 2003. [↩]