Reforming U.S. International Terrorism Policy

Among the three proposed NCFCA topics is:

Resolved: The USFG should substantially reform its foreign policy regarding international terrorism.

Since the 9/11 attacks international terrorism has been at the center of U.S. foreign policy. For older folks 9/11 seems like yesterday, but for students it’s already history, being nearly 17 years ago. We are now a year into the third U.S. Administration fighting the ongoing worldwide “War on Terror.”

For an overview, see War on Terror Facts, Costs, and Timeline (The Balance, Updated March 31, 2018) which notes: “It added $2 trillion to the debt as of the FY 2018 budget.” Critics of U.S. terrorism policy range across the political spectrum. Economist Veronique de Rugy, in Wars in the Middle East Have Cost Taxpayers Almost $1.7 Trillion (Mercatus Center, January 21, 2015) reviews war on terror spending then asks a question:

On top of the on-going fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the recent high-profile attacks by ISIS and al-Qaeda affiliates in Europe are being cited by hawkish members of Congress as justification for additional funding. Before doing so, policymakers should consider whether our heavy military presence in the Middle East, and the $1.7 trillion allocated in war funding since 9/11, have created more problems than they have eliminated. Indeed, a strong case could be made that what taxpayers are actually paying for is national offense rather than national defense—and the former is driving the latter.

The Charles Koch Institute, which is often mischaracterized as conservative, has this Foreign Policy page deeply critical of the War on Terror. William Ruger in A Realist’s Guide to Grand Strategy (American Conservative, August 26, 2014) reviews the foreign policy and International Relations policies of MIT’s political science department:

…in their seminal article “Come Home, America,” these three argued that the country needed a grand strategy of “restraint” that harkened back to America’s traditional and Washingtonian approach of noninterventionism.

…the current grand strategy debate as pitted between two main rivals: liberal hegemony and restraint. Liberal hegemony is an activist grand strategy that aims to assertively maintain U.S. dominance and the “unipolar moment” in the service of liberalism and national security. Posen explains that it has been the reigning U.S. grand strategy since the end of the Cold War and remains the consensus view of the foreign-policy establishment of both major parties—of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike. Yet he believes it is “unnecessary, counterproductive, costly, and wasteful,” and ultimately “self-defeating.” Posen therefore spends the first half of the book explaining in detail what liberal hegemony is and why it so imperils America. In the book’s second, meatier half, he lays out his overarching restraint strategy and describes the specific military approach required to support it.

Beyond the billions spent so far on War on Terror military operations overseas, economists Chris Coyne and Abigail Hall focus on cultural and police-state issues expecially expanded surveillance state powers.They describe the “boomerang effect” of policies first designed to pursue the war on terror overseas, but then deployed in the United States.

The Stanford University Press webpage for Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism (Amazon) explains:

Many Americans believe that foreign military intervention is central to protecting our domestic freedoms. But Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall urge engaged citizens to think again. Overseas, our government takes actions in the name of defense that would not be permissible within national borders. Emboldened by the relative weakness of governance abroad, the U.S. government is able to experiment with a broader range of social controls. Under certain conditions, these policies, tactics, and technologies are then re-imported to America, changing the national landscape and increasing the extent to which we live in a police state.

Short video on Tyranny Comes Home:

The NCFCA resolution involves important Constitutional issues. The Federalist Society, in a description of the 3-minute video below:

What kind of war power does the Constitution grant the President? Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, outlines the framework that the American founders placed around the limits of the Executive branch to exercise the power to declare war.

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto argues for institutional and economic reforms to address the frustrations  that feed violent efforts to overthrown political authorities. In How to Win the War on Terror (January 14, 2016) DeSoto writes:

It is time to consider that the strength of our opponents derives, at least to some degree, from sentiments similar to those that animated the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution: frustration with and alienation from the prevailing system. In Britain’s American colonies before 1776, and throughout France in the years leading up to 1789, ordinary people became convinced that their lives, assets, and businesses had been subject for too long to the predations of arbitrary rulers. That same estrangement is felt nowadays in the Middle East and North Africa.2

After all, the Arab Spring began when a poor Tunisian entrepreneur, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire in December 2010 to protest the merciless expropriation of his business. He committed suicide – as his brother Salem told me in an interview recorded for American public television – for “the right of the poor to buy and sell.”

DeSoto explains in his documentary Unlikely Heroes of the Arab Spring.