At a symposium held on the Atlantic coast in Abidjan and attended by prominent members of the international political and cultural communities, participants engaged in a lively debate on how US foreign policy is impacting on the rest of the world. The debate centered on trying to find a rational explanation for the support the United States has been extending since the end of World War II up to the present day to a large number of corrupt regimes in the Third World, with often disastrous consequences. Indeed, it was thanks to American backing that many otherwise defunct regimes survived as long as they did, including those of several banana republics in South America, the Shah of Iran and other unpopular rulers. In addition to consistently placing its bets on the losing side, the United States pursued a policy throughout the Cold War of supporting fundamentalist –theocratic- political movements in the belief that they could serve as a bulwark against the spread of communism.

What Washington failed to take into account is that once a genie has been let out of the bottle, there is no way it can be induced into going back in and that, moreover, the impact of its emergence in the light cannot be predicted with any degree of accuracy. Everyone knows that the Iranian revolution, which was to cause the United States a great deal of aggravation, was assiduously courted by Washington in the early days, before Khomeini fled first to Iraq and from there to France, which took him under its wing and away from the American embrace. But far from learning its lesson, the United States continued playing the theocratic card in a number of other cases to counterbalance the communist threat, which it regarded as a greater evil.

Perhaps the most famous illustration of how this irresponsible game can get out of hand is what happened in Egypt in the early ‘seventies, when the theocratic genie was used to offset the influence of the socialist genie which had been let loose in the ‘sixties. By the end of the decade, the theocratic genie had become strong enough to turn on the man who had been instrumental in giving it a new lease of life, Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated by a member of Egypt’s fundamentalist movement. Moreover, there is no doubt in my mind that the Palestinian theocratic genie was let out of the bottle in order to clip the wings of the secular Palestinian resistance movement, Fattah – an act of folly its perpetrators will rue for many years to come.

Participants at the Abidjan symposium spent many hours trying to come up with a logical explanation for this bizarre aspect of US foreign policy which, despite an abysmal record of failures, continues to be applied to this day. The theme of the debate was dictated by the venue of the symposium, Africa, where corrupt, despotic rulers kept in power by the United States have wreaked havoc on the peoples of the continent. Examples abound, but perhaps the most notorious was Zaire’s Mobuto. My interpretation of the phenomenon differed from that of the other participants, some of whom attributed it to America’s inexperience in the field of foreign affairs, others to Jewish domination over the American decision-making process.

My view was, rather, that American foreign policy is influenced by two sets of considerations. One set is related to its long-term interests, which dictate that the political system of the United States support forces capable of moving their societies forward both in terms of democratic development and economic growth; the other, running parallel with the first, is related to the short-term interests of powerful economic institutions, interests which are not necessarily compatible with those of the United States in the long term. The history of the United States since the end of World War II has been shaped by a constant tug of war between the two sets of considerations. Sometimes the decision-making process is more responsive to the short-term interests of economic institutions, leading to the disastrous alliances we spoke of earlier, much less frequently, it 

operates to serve America’s own long-term interests. When that happens, the United States astounds the world by taking principled stands in defense of legitimate rights, as when President Eisenhower condemned the tripartite aggression against Egypt in 1956.

If scientific socialism died because it carried within it the seeds of its own destruction as represented in its inability to achieve economic success, so too does the so-called “Free World”, which is currently led by the United States, carry the seeds of its own destruction, in the form of the sharp discrepancy between the short-term interests that often determine its political decisions on the one hand and the long-term interests of its own society and those of the world at large on the other.

And yet this bleak picture is not without a glimmer of light. There are grounds for optimism thanks to the technological and information revolution which could help engender a general climate favourable to the positive development of human rights and environmental protection systems, which are still primitive, uncoordinated and extremely inequitable. In such a climate, long-term considerations that have for long been subsumed to the short-term considerations of special-interest groups with an inordinately powerful influence on the political decision-making process will come into their own.

Here a number of key states in the Third World can play an important role in fostering a climate conducive to just such a development. A necessary if not sufficient condition here is to defuse whatever tensions now poison their relations with the United States. Maintaining these tensions will only reinforce the status quo and leave the field open to short-sighted, short-term interests, with all this implies for the prospects of global peace and stability. If these interests are given a free rein, they will be like a cankerous sore on the global body politic, eating away at the foundations of world order and paving the way to clashes, bottlenecks and explosions that could destroy the present world order and bring the stage crashing down on the heads of its principal players.

Summing up the conclusions reached by the symposium, a noted French professor of political science at Paris I University had this to say: “In other words, it is only if the United States discards the theory that these strange regimes are the only barrier in the face of global chaos that this worst-case scenario can be averted. By clinging to that theory, the United States is trying to avoid the breakdown of world order through methods that will only hasten its coming!”