Just Foreign Policy

Causes: International, International Human Rights, International Peace & Security, Promotion of International Understanding

Mission: Just Foreign Policy is an independent and non-partisan mass membership organization dedicated to reforming U.S. foreign policy through coordinating the broad majority of Americans to advocate their interests and values. Although just foreign policy will focus exclusively on foreign policy, we appeal directly to Americans for whom foreign policy is not a primary concern. We have seen through the Iraq war that unnecessary military actions can undermine civil liberties and democracy at home, and can be used to remove pressing domestic issues from the political agenda to the detriment of the great majority. During the Cold War, the United States spent trillions of dollars on an arms race with the USSR, as well as wars such as Korea and Vietnam. Yet we were able to create Medicare, Medicaid, and enact large enough increases in Social Security to drive the poverty rate among the elderly down from 35 percent in 1959 to less than 12 percent by the end of the era. But for a number of reasons-fiscal, economic, and political-our current circumstances are very different. For example, at the height of the Vietnam War in 1968, the U.S. gross federal debt was 43.5 percent of our economy and falling. Today it is over 67 percent and rising. Maintaining our current foreign and military policy and possible large increases in military spending (for example if we have an arms race with China, whose economy will be larger than ours within a decade) will lead to serious declines in U.S. living standards. U.S. foreign policy therefore threatens to impede-perhaps as never before-the country's economic and social progress. It has become extremely important to the lives of all Americans, and we cannot afford to leave it in the hands of the "experts" without influence from the public. Eventually the United States must move towards a more multilateral approach to foreign relations-one that relies less on raw U.S. military and economic power and more on international law and treaties, co-operation, and diplomacy. Our goal is to accelerate this transition through education, organization, and mobilization of concerned citizens.