Matthew Ferry's List: Foreign Policy

• The new focus on individuals, or lone wolves, rather than groups, constituted a key change in the latest law. The legislation has been criticized by some, with a Communist Party leader dubbing it "The French Patriot Act." Human Rights Watch slammed it as being too broad and vague, and for harming freedom of expression and movement. 

• The policy of punitive house demolitions – discontinued in 2005 – was reinstated, and the residency of East Jerusalem Palestinians has been revoked over attacks.   

     

• Under Russian law, terror suspects can be detained for up to 30 days without charge. The European Court of Human Rights has held Russia responsible for various rights violations in the North Caucasus region in relation to counterterrorism. These include unprosecuted abuses by local law enforcement such as alleged torture, abduction-style detentions, and attacks against suspects and their families. Amnesty International also recently slammed Chechen authorities for carrying out punitive home demolitions.   

     

• Among its contentious provisions, the law allows the police to instantly seize the passports and travel documents of those suspected of going abroad for terrorist activities.   

     
• During the post-9/11 War on Terror, the George W. Bush administration detained suspects as “enemy combatants” – meaning they were subject to military law and could be detained without charge, although they did have access to a lawyer.
• President Bush opened the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in January 2002 to hold terror suspects detained overseas. The majority of the 136 remaining inmates have been held for 10 years without being tried for any offense. The United States recently released 10 detainees, who were never charged with any crime, to Uruguay and Afghanistan.
• Following 9/11, China intensified its crackdown on opponents of Chinese rule in Xinjiang. Beijing has blamed violence in the region – which has also spread elsewhere – on terrorists and religious extremists with overseas ties, also alleging that they are being trained by the Islamic State.

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• So political leaders -- those in Congress and those vying for the White House -- can generally buck the public on foreign policy without losing votes. It is not that politicians entirely ignore voters’ foreign policy views. But, at least compared with tax and entitlement issues, politicians have considerable rope to pursue their own agendas. Only in rare circumstances, such as very unpopular wars, do voters hold politicians to account on foreign policy.
• No state menaces U.S. borders or regularly checks U.S. military actions abroad, as the Soviet Union once did. Trade accords matter a good deal for certain industries, but most of us barely notice them. For the majority of Americans, even the war in Iraq brought little worse than marginally higher tax rates and unsettling TV images. With bigger things to worry about, such as job security and health care, Americans have little incentive to inform themselves about foreign policies; it is rational for them to remain ignorant. 
• Realists and other reliable skeptics of intervention are essentially confined to the academy, while true isolationism has become virtually extinct in Washington.
• By the Cold War’s end, realists and other advocates of restraint had been marginalized, despite the fact that their views remained popular among the public; the interventionists, on both the left and right, had successfully established a new elite foreign policy consensus. To this day, anyone seeking prominence as a beltway foreign policy wonk, or a future political appointment, quickly learns that it is necessary to hew to the interventionist conventional wisdom.
• The Cold War provided the United States with a permanent set of private military contractors and a vast domestic infrastructure of military bases. Regions that were previously indifferent to foreign events, or even flat-out isolationist, developed a direct economic interest in military manufacturing.

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