Against reckless foreign war and unilateral intervention

Opening statement

Thank you Bari, I really appreciate you having me. I also want to thank FIRE, the Free Press, all the staff here at the theater, everyone who made this event possible.

My name is Lee Fang, I am an independent investigative journalist. I write about Substack atleefang.com – and I’m skeptical about US intervention and military escalation, which has produced one dismal failure after another throughout my adult life.

The question before us today is whether the United States should still police the world. We recently had a big debate about the role of the police in society, so these concepts are still fresh in my mind. Let’s talk about this framing.

In our country and in most Western industrialized countries, despite what some activists say, police are generally highly trained and enforce democratically established public safety laws, under constitutional constraints and civilian oversight. When done properly, policing serves as the foundation for a civilized society. When the police exceed their limits, there is usually responsibility, as it should be.

But police work can also be very dangerous if done without safeguards. Look at how the police operate in Saudi Arabia, China or Russia. In authoritarian systems, the police are completely unaccountable and are used to enforce obedience, stifle dissent, and terrorize the public.

Too often, American foreign policy takes the form of policing that looks much more like the authoritarian model. We impose our belief systems on others at the barrel of a gun. When we act unilaterally and attempt to use the awesome power of the US military and intelligence community for regime change, we tend to have disastrous consequences.

There have, of course, been some cases where American intervention has produced some benefits. But the one-sided mentality of the police has generally led to catastrophes.

Consider two of the recent examples of hawkish policing blowing up in our faces: Iraq and Libya.

In the run-up to the war in Iraq, politicians and pundits sold us lies, phantom weapons of mass destruction and false links to Al Qaeda. Our intervention in Iraq resulted in an insurgency and civil war that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The resulting instability fueled the rise of jihadist groups such as ISIS and gave Iran a new ally in the region.

Similarly, we were told that the US-led NATO bombing of Libya would, in the words of a Hillary Clinton aide, bring “democracy and inclusivity.” That war instead resulted in an ongoing dystopia and a rump state. Weapons from Libya – either stolen from Gaddafi’s government or from US stockpiles to militias – have reportedly ended up in Syria, Nigeria, Egypt and Mali, fueling civil wars, violent uprisings and extremists. The continued chaos of the post-Gaddafi state has given power to criminal gangs directing migrants from Africa to Europe.

There are countless other examples, which Matt will discuss and others that I’m sure we’ll get to later in the debate.

Before we get bogged down in examples and counterexamples, I want to clearly state what I stand for.

I would like to see an America with greater engagement with our adversaries, greater multilateralism, and a foreign policy based on respect for the legitimate concerns and positions of all countries and all peoples. A structured foreign policy with the confidence to settle old grudges, end cycles of distrust and violence, and find common ground for a mutually beneficial future. These are the ingredients for lasting peace and the conditions for the flourishing of American values.

And with that, let me close with one more thought about how we should think about this debate. Like many of you, I suffered a painful whiplash four years ago. It almost cost me my job.

In 2020, woke journalists harassed newspaper editors and demanded so-called “moral clarity” in all our reporting – in other words, in the name of social justice, there was an intolerance for questioning activist claims, a rejection of the diversity of viewpoints and a myopic obsession with partisan slogans around racial identity. Either you supported the movement’s demands or you were a racist; you were either an ally or a white supremacist.

The pro-military interventionist crowd uses exactly the same tactics. Remember the words of George W. Bush: “You are either with us or with the terrorists.” There are many variations of this form of belief. Either you blindly agree with the expansion of NATO in Europe, or you are a puppet of President Vladimir Putin. Either you stand with the US, or you stand with Iran.

This black-and-white thinking – whether practiced by the far left of BLM or by those in Congress who want to bomb America’s so-called adversaries – is simply gross propaganda.

The war hawks and the ‘woke left’ both embrace a utopian vision, moral fundamentalism and reckless hubris – they both believe they can remake the world by force. This worldview is reductive and counterproductive. With every bomb dropped, every civilian killed, every child starved by sanctions, every city looted by riots, every school closed for no reason, we create a vicious circle of resistance and more conflict and suffering.

Let us reject one-dimensional thinking in all its forms. Thank you.

Final statement

Our position is supported by evidence, by consistency and by the reality of the consequences of war and aggression – but perhaps it is difficult to defend our position alone because it is not easy to express it in one or two minute sound bites .

To understand the context of any conflict, there is a deeper history and nuance that is too often ignored in our national debates. Our entire media system is filled with rhetoric about war escalation – fear sells newspapers, fear is an easy way to mobilize voters on both sides of the aisle, fear is often more compelling than intellectual inquiry. If there’s one thing Fox News and MSNBC have in common, it’s their focus on the latest foreign boogeyman and smearing dissenters as foreign agents.