The American “Promise”

I am a youth baseball coach. I have been for the last 15 years. In that time, I have tried to remind myself that the meaning of victory for an 11-year-old is different from the definition of victory for a parent. When I make promises to my young players, I keep them, despite the probable outcome of the game.

Yesterday, at my baseball game, I promised one young man that he could pitch. Our ace was late to arrive, and I had to prepare for the possibility that he wasn't coming. The young man I allowed to pitch was so deeply thankful, his gratitude was almost ridiculous. He hugged me and declared me to be "the best coach I ever had". Then, our star pitcher arrived. Still, I'd made a promise, and I was bound to keep it. I let the boy pitch for one inning. On the mound, he did a pretty good job. The problem was, his usual position, as a catcher, is so critical to the team that his presence on the mound was not as important as his absence behind the plate.

I think that if George Washington had been a baseball coach, he'd have allowed that boy to pitch. He would have understood that personal integrity, a promise kept, both on a personal scale and on a national scale, must trump self-interest.

Washington was a true revolutionary, a man who wanted to export the ideals of limited government and Constitutional Democracy beyond our borders, and apply our standards of equality, flawed as they were at the time, to the whole world. This meant that, even when the choice was against our immediate self-interest, Washington believed The United States should support "our" concept of government wherever it rose in the world.

Early on, many freedom-loving people throughout the world must have felt that some implied support for American-type revolutions, and de facto opposition to tyranny should have been the cornerstone of American foreign policy. This should have been the "American Promise".

While we were restricting the actions of our government, I wish we had restricted its ability to act on foreign soil as well. I would have included a Constitutional amendment worded it in this way: "Congress shall sanction no military action in which the probable results will be to protect or establish a government that does not restrict itself in accordance to the principles of this Constitution, except in the case of this nation's immediate self-defence."

Such an amendment, of course, wouldn't have prevented the US from making many domestic mistakes, but it would have given the world another safeguard against the abuse of power, and it would have given us more credibility as a "Shining City on a Hill". It may have cost us banana plantations in Guatemala, or pipelines in the Middle East. We may have discovered that other nations were out-competing us. On the same token, it may have hastened the Arab Spring, or forced Israel to come to equitable terms with its neighbours. It may have forced us to withdraw from NATO unless allied nations respected the religious freedom of its member citizens. As I write these words, Tribute FM is on my radio, bravely broadcasting from Libya in English, and the song "You raised me up" is playing on the radio. Now they're playing Aerosmith. It moves me to know that what Libyans do with their freedom is to play old Josh Groban and Steven Tyler tunes, but it worries me to know that we support an uprising without any guarantee that the next government there won't be as oppressive as the previous one was.

American commercial self-interest has, for far too long, allowed us to look the other way while friendly dictators torture and kill their people. Even American military self-interest, as critical as it may be in the short term, cannot justify support for one regime in the Middle East, while it withholds support for another. Our policies worldwide, informed by our immediate commercial self-interest, and the perception of potential threats, has led to an enormous lack of credibility for the United States, especially in the developing world.

At the same time, politicians in Bangladesh who wish to curry favour with the US under the current policy need to understand how their nation is perceived, and how the current situation there is confirming the prejudices of politicians and businessmen here. Your own credibility suffers when the delicate balance between freedom and responsibility is tipped. I say this gently, as a concerned friend. Two weeks ago, I had an informal discussion with an individual whose job it is to create policy papers for bankers and entrepreneurs who seek new opportunities in the developing world.

At the time, both your prime minister and ex-prime minister were in the United States. When I asked the writer for his perception of Bangladesh, he told me "Bangladesh is a bad investment. All the state visits in the world will not increase the credibility of a nation who can't find a better way to redress grievances than with work stoppages. Protests, referendums, angry facebook messages, graffiti, wars of words, almost anything is less harmful to a nation's reputation as a viable investment than a general strike."

Our onetime House Speaker "Tip" O'Neil once rightly stated the "all politics is local". And indeed, on a local scale, declaring hartals (a term I was unfamiliar with six months ago) may accomplish their purpose. However, the dangerous rumblings from the West begin, the same ones I heard in the US to justify support for dictatorship in Latin America: "These people would be happier under a strong hand. They don't have a culture of democracy." I hear such pronouncements and I tremble, not just for the future of Bangladesh, but for my own country. Witness how gently we treat that greatest enemy of individual freedom – China. We try not to be too offensive. We accommodate. I would contend that Washington policymakers prefer a stable nation to a free one, so long as there is a profit to be made. Throw in the justification for abuses committed in the name of counter-terrorism, and I begin to question my government's integrity when it comes to commitment to democracy in the world.

Throughout the Cold War, the US supported the cruellest thug governments on earth in Latin America and elsewhere, and the CIA did its best to undermine legitimately elected leaders who were non-supportive of the exploitative practices of huge, unprincipled US corporations. Individual Americans did not protest such practices because they were shielded from them by a local press agreeable to corporate interest, and by general fear of the Soviets. My greatest fear for my own county's foreign policy is that, in the name of counter-terrorism, we will interfere with the evolution of the developing world, and forget the principles of limited government by which our nation is defined.

I see policymakers backing "stable" monarchies in the Middle East. I see a double standard emerging between Yemen and Libya, where our entire policy towards Yemen deals with counter-terrorism without addressing the root cause: The desire for self-determination, and the right to be wrong. We must defend the right of all nations to commit errors and to engage in a policy of self-directed improvement, no matter how dangerous that self-improvement happens to be. In Libya, we are supporting the overthrow of a dictator hostile to our interests (and just a plain weird dude, in a strange Michael-Jacksony, Ozzy Osborne-ish kind of way), but we have no notion what type of government will take the place of Gadhafi's Bizzarro-World Order. Our longstanding policy is to oppose the status quo when it suits us. We arm the opposition, until it votes to break lockstep with American interests, and then we send in a military force to depose it. We armed Saddam Hussein, supported militant Islamic groups in Afghanistan, and supplied the arms that Argentina eventually used against Great Britain.

My contention is that the only American interest that we are obliged to care about is found in the document that defines the United States, that radical work upon which our nation is based – the US Constitution, with its Bill of Rights.

Such a revolutionary export could lead us into very dangerous waters. It could threaten our internal security. But we are, as our National Anthem claims, "The land of the free and the home of the brave". Our national courage should steel us against the consequences of a free world, where foreign nations have the right to make their own mistakes, and generate their own forms of chaos. In the long run, by keeping the promises upon which our nation was founded, despite the possible outcome today or tomorrow, we will be creating a much safer, freer world for our grandchildren.

Political "mosquitoes" and petty annoyances are inevitable during the initial stages of constitutional systems which restrict government and free the people to act. We may cringe at the errors that nations commit while initiating such forms of government. We forget that we committed many errors ourselves, from the mass extermination of Native cultures and the enslavement of an entire race of people, to the restriction of the rights of women, which were, first granted then denied (at least in New Jersey). We had our own period of crippling labour stoppages. We expect Democracy to emerge, full-grown from Zeus's head, and to be a perfect clone of our own system. We fail to see that any Individualist-based Republic is self-correcting and adaptive, but needs to time to mature and grow to fit the confines of its environment and culture. Our own system here in the US is in a constant process of refinement and tweaking. But we love the process. It keeps us engaged, and it allows the many cultures and traditions of our country to all proudly define themselves as American. Our system of government should be the only export (or import) we are willing to sacrifice our lives to defend.

Testimony though it may be to the odd wiring in my brain, those are the thoughts that ran through my head when the diminutive eleven year-old catcher took to the mound. Sure enough, his absence behind the plate caused five runs to score, and, of course, we lost the playoff game by exactly five runs.

At the end of the game, the players were ecstatic despite the loss. They didn't want to stop playing. They begged their parents to let them keep playing, despite the fact that the shadows were growing long and the mosquitoes were swarming. They stayed on the field, and not even the promise of hot dogs and cheese fries could entice them to quit the field until darkness forced them home.

The point was, these kids were energised by love of the game, and the promise of self-directed improvement. I know they will get better, but more importantly, no matter how long they play baseball, they will learn the central lesson of life – that integrity triumphs temporary victory. If our politicians remembered that before they sent our soldiers into battle, if they waited for the Libyan people to adopt a Constitution before they decided to take military action… well then… perhaps I'd have nothing to write about.

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Frank Domenico Cipriani writes a weekly column in the Riverside Signal called "You Think What You Think And I'll Think What I Know." He is also the founder and CEO of The Gatherer Institute — a not-for-profit public charity dedicated to promoting respect for the environment and empowering individuals to become self-taught and self-sufficient. His most recent book, "Learning Little Hawk's Way of Storytelling", is scheduled to be released by Findhorn Press in May of 2011.