The contradictory compass of American foreign policy!

Raju Korti
Over the last forty-five plus years, I have found myself frequently perplexed, sometimes even darkly amused, by the sheer contradictions that run like a fault line through American foreign policy. The United States has long projected itself as the global torchbearer of democracy, liberty, and the rule of law. Yet, its actions, both historical and contemporary, reveal a pattern more self-serving, opportunistic, and, at times, deeply hypocritical.

Take, for instance, Osama bin Laden. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the US, through its CIA-backed Operation Cyclone, funnelled billions of dollars in weapons and training to the Mujahideen -- among them, bin Laden himself. At the time, he was a useful asset in America’s proxy war against Moscow. Decades later, he became the architect of 9/11, the very embodiment of the terror the US had once indirectly nurtured. That’s not an unfortunate twist of fate; that’s a policy boomerang.

(Pic representational)

The same duplicity is evident in America’s tangled relationship with Pakistan. While proclaiming India to be a natural ally -- flattering its democratic ethos and market potential --Washington has simultaneously continued to pump in billions in military and economic aid to Pakistan, a country with a well-documented history of harbouring terrorists, including bin Laden himself, who was found just a few kilometers from Pakistan’s military academy. The balancing act here isn’t diplomacy; it is duplicity dressed as pragmatism.

This isn’t new. American foreign policy has, for decades, treated geographical proximity and economic interests as moral justifications. Mexico and Canada, for instance, have endured various forms of economic coercion -- be it through NAFTA-era job siphoning or energy politics. In Latin America, the record is more damning. Nicaragua suffered under the US-funded Contras, who were armed despite their documented human rights abuses. In Chile, the US orchestrated the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, a democratically elected socialist, and installed the brutal regime of General Pinochet. The Monroe Doctrine was less a hemispheric shield than a licence for interventionism.

Some would say these are relics of Cold War paranoia. But even in the 21st century, similar patterns persist. I recently came across a provocative statement, often attributed to libertarian Spike Cohen, which summarizes the domino logic of US foreign blunders: “ISIS was created by the US Government to fight the Shiite militants, who were armed by the US Government to fight Saddam, who was armed by the US Government to fight Iran, who hates us because the US Government overthrew their elected leader and installed a brutal dictator.” That might sound reductionist, but when you map the facts, it isn’t far from the truth.

In 1953, the CIA deposed Iran’s elected Prime Minister Mossadegh and reinstalled the Shah, laying the groundwork for decades of anti-American resentment that eventually gave rise to the Islamic Revolution. In Iraq, the US once backed Saddam Hussein in the 1980s war against Iran, only to later invade Iraq on shaky premises of WMDs. The vacuum that followed gave rise to Sunni insurgency, from which ISIS was born -- a monster inadvertently sired by short-sighted policy.

Lurking beneath all this is what many have come to call the “Deep State” -- not in the conspiratorial sense popularised by cable television, but in the more systemic reality of entrenched interests within America’s military-industrial complex, intelligence community, and bipartisan hawks. Foreign policy, in this framework, becomes less about consistent principles and more about maintaining strategic and economic hegemony under the garb of “freedom.”

As someone watching from the outside -- or perhaps the periphery -- I can’t help but see these contradictions as both deliberate and structural. They’re not bugs in the system. They are the system.

What troubles me most is not just the duplicity, but the moral cost. Every time America backs a dictator, funds a proxy war, or topples a government in the name of liberty, it chips away at the very ideals it claims to defend. The world sees through it, even if Washington sometimes doesn’t.

History, after all, has a long memory. And increasingly, so do its victims.