Charles W. King

The recent outbreak of Ebola in a remote part of Congo prompted a rapid and comprehensive response from the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) including the first time in its seventy year history that its Director has traveled into the midst of an active hotzone. The response from the United States has been decidedly muted, unlike the previous outbreak in West Africa that began in 2013 where thousands of U.S. Army troops were deployed to construct field hospitals and support aid efforts. In the years since the West African outbreak the Trump Administration has requested Congress roll back funding that had been allocated for addressing Ebola and other virulent outbreaks. While costly, the expenditures by the United States between 2014 and 2016 to combat Ebola in West Africa, primarily through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.) and U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.), represent an important strategic deployment of American resources to address a national interest.

Like food aid, medical aid to foreign countries, especially to address potential epidemics, is not solely altruistic. Infectious diseases like Ebola and Marburg are easiest to contain when populations of infected are localized. The the outbreaks of SARS and Avian Flu, which are much less lethal to humans than Ebola or Marburg, demonstrate how difficult fighting a disease that has penetrated the international travel network. If the United States was attempting to prevent Ebola or a similar disease from making it through American border posts, seaports, and airports it would be significantly more costly and dangerous than the billions spent in the West African campaign. American support for the fight against Ebola in West Africa between 2014 and 2016 was ultimately a single-digit billions line item in a trillions of dollar budget. A medical quarantine of the United States would not only be a major federal expense, but would have a significant effect on gross domestic product and economic growth.

The relatively contained outbreaks close to their origin are also important for the development of medical remedies and vaccines. The WHO is now deploying a vaccine for Ebola that was first tested in the last months of the West African outbreak in the thousands of doses in Congo. Without international funds for fighting in West Africa or Congo Merck, the pharmaceutical giant who developed the vaccine, would not have been able to incentivized to do so, which would hamstring future responses whether the outbreak was in the developed world or the undeveloped world.

It is also in the long term interest of the United States that the developing be stable and prosperous world. Stable developing states are markets for American goods and services. Unstable ones are sources of not only misery and death, but dangerous pressures on the United States and its allies, the Syrian Refugee crisis being only the largest and most recent example. Civil strife has been simmering in Congo and among its neighbors for decades, the return of major conflict at the same time as an outbreak could be orders of magnitude deadlier than the 2013-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa which killed approximately eleven thousand people. Epidemics cause their own refugee crises, but combined with flight from conflict such an outbreak could be un-containable by current measures. Policy-makers in the United States and Europe have a good case for supporting medical aid to the rest of the world, both in crises and in times of relative calm. They simply need to make it.

Charles W. King

Taxation without representation, the presence of the Royal Army in colonist’s homes, and the suspension of trade and English Common Law are the most well-known of the grievances levied by the Continental Congress against King George III. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was another, and like the statutes against trading with foreign powers and their colonies it was violated repeatedly by American colonists. Issued after the French & Indian War, known in Europe as the Seven Years War, the Proclamation forbade American settlers from expanding past the Appalachian Mountains, establishing the Ohio River Valley and the lands beyond at native territory. For many Americans access to the other side of the Appalachians was the point of going to war against France and her native allies. The British Government had promised large swathes of land west of the Appalachians in exchange for American service against the French, which the Proclamation nullified without compensation. The Crown sought to avoid another war by forbidding further encroachment by the Thirteen Colonies against neighbors, which is understandable even if how they thought they’d enforce such a measure is not.

The tension between adventurous trappers, prospectors, and settlers and the government was one of the enduring tensions of for the Thirteen Colonies and the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. Settlers’ going beyond the lands that the central government intended to protect was not exclusive to the colonial period. It would happen repeatedly and was the cause of conflicts between the United States and Mexico and dozens of Native American tribes whose lands were promised protection by the government only to be violated by settlers. Knowing that if they needed to they could rely on the protection of the Royal Army or the US Cavalry, Americans continued to push west ahead of their governments.

Neither is this phenomenon unique to the United States. Deriving from English Common Law principle of ‘Improvement’ that facilitated the Enclosure of common lands in the United Kingdom, this kind of settler colonialism was typical of the British Empire’s possessions in Africa and Australia as well. The British Raj is the exception; its history has much more in common with French methods of colonization. In Australia, South Africa, and Kenya the British Empire was drawn into repeated conflicts by settlers expanding past the established borders of imperial rule and turning to the Empire when conflicts arose.

The story of settler colonization is to a straightforward one of government sanctioned expansion into native lands. The history of the Thirteen Colonies and of other British settler colonies demonstrates an ongoing tension between settlers and their governments. It may appear to modern-policy makers that these tensions have little bearing on a world that has been blanketed with human civilization. This is not the case; there remain important swathes of land that humanity is only just beginning to explore. Brazilians are getting deeper and deeper into the Amazon jungle, against the wishes of their government. The possibility of creating new lands out of sand and steel in the oceans is becoming closer and closer to reality. As people reach deeper into the unpopulated places of the world and make previously inhospitable places prosperous policy-makers will have to be cognizant of how their own citizens and those of other nations will not only push the envelope, but beyond it.

Further Reading

John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-1900 (Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003)

Charles W. King

As Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies prepare to seize the port of Hodeidah in Yemen, the World Health Organization and the United Nations are reporting a rising death toll from cholera. They forecast 150,000 new cases in the next month. A faction of the Hadi government has split off, without the southern leaders the government is in peril.

Across the Gulf of Aden Somalia is suffering from increasing drought. Al Shabaab is capitalizing on the inability of the government in Mogadishu to provide the humanitarian relief. Instead of barring aid organizations as they did in 2011, Al Shabaab is taking responsibility for providing food and water to Somalis where the Somali Federal Government cannot.

In Egypt the government of President Adbel Fattah el-Sisi has passed legislation requiring 47,000 local and 100 foreign non-governmental aid organizations to get approval from a new regulatory body. That body has not yet been established, aid organizations predict that it will be more of a roadblock than a regulator

On June 1st the Economist reported on Mohieddine Manfoush, a Syrian dairy farmer who provides dairy to Damascus and dry goods to cities besieged by government forces. Small entrepreneurs who could not afford to flee the Syrian conflict are filling the gaps left by those who could.

Meanwhile the United States is increasing its military support for Kurdish and Iraqi forces, both through military aid and the increasing deployment of American Special Forces and support troops, including artillery batteries. In a recent statement Emmanuel Macron, the recently elected President of France, pledged French intervention in the event of the use of chemical weapons in Syria. While the West is focusing on guns, many of the states and non-state actors in the Middle East are focused on butter.

Islamic State’s rapid growth was fueled not only by foreign fighters, but by its enthusiasm for replicating the functions of the state. As it expanded across Syria and Iraq Islamic State repaired infrastructure, instituted and enforced law, and sought to reinforce its claim to the Caliphate not only through religious dogma but by mimicking state institutions. The entrenchment of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon owe more to their willingness to provide governance and humanitarian relief than their military effectiveness.

The recognition that legitimacy derives not only from military force but also from the ability to protect and provide for the welfare of the people is not a recent innovation. The People’s Republic of China is acutely aware of how its declining economic growth may affect its legitimacy with the Chinese people. In the nineteenth century Germany and the Ottoman Empire instituted widespread reforms to strengthen state institutions and quiet domestic unrest. Providing health and prosperity engenders stability and suppot.

In Yemen cholera cases are rising and a longer conflict looms. Al Shabaab is positioning itself as a reliable source of governance and aid in rural Somalia. The el-Sisi government is increasing its control of aid organizations in Egypt. The government of Bashar al-Assad has recognized the need control over the flow of vital goods including food in the Syrian civil war. As these humanitarians crises in the Middle East worsen, the United States and the West remain fixated on killing jihadists and preventing the use of chemical weapons, and are providing guns and missiles to that end. Middle Eastern governments and insurgents alike have recognized the importance of providing milk, water, and wheat.

Charles W. King

The discipline of anthropology has a problematic past. It was created by the imperial powers of the eighteenth century to apply scientific rigor to examinations of their imperial subjects in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The premise of these studies of subject peoples was to catalog how they were different from their European masters.  This is a process which social scientists now term ‘othering’. Describing persons as ‘others’ permits that would violate societal norms if taken against people you identify with. The ways in which imperial anthropologists described their subjects further established justification for European imperial domination. Cultures in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia were frequently described as emotional and matriarchal, in contrast to rational and patriarchal Europeans. For societies like those of imperial Europe that associated femininity with irrationality, and that prized the scientific and the rational as inherently morally superior describing a culture as matriarchal or emotional is a way of describing them as inferior.

Being inferior and being sub-human was a distinction made by imperial anthropologists or the government that funded them, it provided justification for the way those government wanted to treat their subjects. The historiography of slavery in the United States is an excellent example of this. To this day most American high school students are taught that slaves in the American South had a matriarchal culture. The historical record does not support this. Enslaved women were more equal to their male peers and had more access to positions of authority within enslaved communities, but only relative to free women at the time. Nowhere in the United States were enslaved women at the top of the hierarchy of enslaved people. What is a matter of historical record is that enslaved people in the United States were not considered to be human. This is a matter of record in speeches, laws, and court decisions and one of the frequent rationales for their supposed inferiority was a lack of a capacity for reason.

The historic purpose of anthropology as justification for enslavement and exploitation is something that the discipline continues to grapple with today. For policy-makers it is important to take lessons from anthropology’s attempts to reform their discipline. The western world continues to prize rationality, and it is easy to describe those it competes with as irrational, whether they are religious zealots, nationalist fanatics, or both. Previous articles have discussed the rationality and strategic value of suicide terrorism and nuclear weapons, and warned how treating these threats as the results of irrationality is unproductive and dangerous. A certain amount of ‘us versus them’ is inescapable in geopolitics, borders are drawn on maps and people self-identify as specific nationalities and cultures. Policy-makers must be careful not to exacerbate these perceptions. Doing so makes it easier to justify exploitation and the use of force, and harder to come to diplomatic agreements. Policy-makers must be wary of repeating the mistakes of their imperialist forebears who treated the rest of the world as resources to be enslaved and exploited and suffered a crippling backlash in the twentieth century.

Further Reading

Jane Burbank, and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History. (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2010).

Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York City, NY: Pantheon Books, 1978).

David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)

Charles W. King

Only after being attacked by the Imperial Japanese Navy at Pearl Harbor and very reluctantly the United States took its place on the world stage. Having retreated back to isolation on its own side of the Atlantic after the World War One; American involvement in World War Two and after marked a watershed moment in the popular conception of American history. For most America the superpower is fundamentally different in its approach to the world than America the isolationist. On the contrary, America the isolationist is a fiction, and American foreign policy has been consistent across its entire history. American foreign policy as a superpower in the twentieth century continued the priorities and methods of the United States not only during the nineteenth century, but also the eighteenth, including prior to the American Revolution.

In the decades before the turn of the twentieth century an increasing number of Americans advocated that the United States should pursue a policy of imperialism, acquiring overseas possessions like the British, French, and Germans. Theodore Roosevelt was one of imperialism’s advocates, but Alfred Thayer Mahan was its most important. Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History convinced Roosevelt and others that the United States needed a strong navy to ensure its continued prosperity, and a global network of coaling stations was an essential part of that plan. In 1898 the United States declared war on Spain, under the pretext of the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor. The war was swift and decisive, and as a result the US took the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico and Cuba became an American protectorate. For some the acquisition of overseas colonies after the Spanish-American War marks the change in American foreign policy, heralding how the US will engage with the world after World War Two.

The acquisition of overseas colonies was not a change in method for the United States but a change in target. The United States had been steadily expanding its territory for more than a hundred years. British prohibitions against the Thirteen Colonies expanding past the Appalachian Mountains were a major cause of the American Revolution. The Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican-American War, the California Gold Rush all continued the US’s westward expansion. In the eighteenth centuries while the British, French, and Germans sent their colonial settlers by boat to Africa, India, Asia, and Australia the US sent theirs West in covered wagons. Manifest Destiny was imperialism by another name. Westward expansion was an important engine of American prosperity, after reaching the Pacific continued prosperity demanded that American policy-makers look abroad.

From the establishment of Jamestown until the Spanish-American War the US’s mode of expansion was settler colonialism, the hallmark of European imperialism. Comparing American westward expansion with European colonization of Africa, India, Asia, and Australia runs counter to the idea of American exeptionalism. It is essential to recognize the long standing continuities of American foreign policy, of which expansion is only one. The United States continues its expansion today, no longer through settler colonialism, or imperial administration but through market access. This sobering assessment of American foreign policy and understanding of how the US continues to expand its influence today will help policy-makers to better understand why foreign nations are wary of American influence and produce better strategies to achieve foreign policy objectives.

Further Reading

Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, (New York, NY: Little, Brown, & Co.: 1890).

Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion 1890-1945, (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1982).

William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009).

Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).