Foreign Policy

By Carol L. (Shepard) Brouillet

Our foreign policy must reflect our aspirations for peace, cooperation, justice, and respect. We must transition from a criminal global empire/bully that flagrantly flouts international law and morality to being a responsible global citizen that respects law, as well as the integrity and sovereignty of other people and nations.

Our current foreign policy serves to guard our global empire through political, military, and economic coercion. We must stop inflicting our will on other nations through militarism and imperial power. Instead, we need to recreate a flourishing democracy and a vibrant economy here at home that other nations might want to emulate. Our foreign policy should focus on safeguarding our autonomy and sovereignty, and respect that of other nations as we seek peaceful diplomatic solutions to serious world problems.

War

We have to end our preemptive war policy. We must not commit state crimes that undermine democracy in foreign nations. We have to stop war profiteering and the capture of foreign resources to bolster corporate profits. We need to close our six hundred-plus foreign military bases and shut down hundreds of the more costly, unnecessary domestic military bases. Our foreign policy must reflect our aspirations for peace, cooperation, and respect rather than continuing to feed the military-industrial-complex's bottomless appetite for defense dollars.

Role of Intelligence

We need an intelligence service that warns us of attacks against Americans, keeps us informed about the world beyond our borders, cooperates and builds trust with our allies, and provides this information to the American public with complete openness and transparency. We must end the illegal plots perpetuated by our intelligence agencies under presidential approval to assassinate foreign elected leaders, stage rebellions and coups against uncooperative governments, finance foreign politicians, indefinitely detain and torture prisoners of war and "suspected" terrorists, wiretap domestic phone and electronic communications, pursue ownership stakes in influential domestic media companies to issue self-serving propaganda, and finance many of these operations independently of Congressional appropriations through "black ops" budgets including funding from drug cartels.

September 11th Attacks

The 9/11 Commission Report was authored by Phillip Zelikow, who served in 2000 with Condoleezza Rice on President-elect George Bush's counterterrorism transition team. The report was seriously flawed, raising more questions than it answered. As a co-founder of the Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance, I have been an outspoken leader of the 9/11 Truth Movement. We need an independent, citizens' investigation of the September 11th attacks on America, the release of all of the evidence, subpoena power to ask the difficult questions to government officials regarding their roles and actions, before, during and after the attacks.

Trade Policy

American trade policy shamelessly projects corporate power by subsidizing major export industries, overthrowing governments that resist privatizing precious national resources, and enforcing corporate privileges abroad. We must end protectionism + no more subsidies for the big exporters. We must repeal CAFTA, NAFTA, and GATT, and dissolve the World Bank and the IMF which assist large corporations in preying on the poor and politically unconnected throughout the world. Foreign policy should serve human needs, not corporate greed.

Economic Imperialism

We need to end the economic colonialism that places foreign workers into wage-slave employment in corporate sweatshops. We must not allow American corporations to continue pillaging and plundering the indigenous peoples of the world.