“Coercive foreign intervention fosters an environment in which constraints on government are loosened, accountability is diminished, and domestic citizens, whether willingly or unwillingly, become more accepting of increases in the scope of government power.”
– Tyranny Comes Home
“Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost,” said Nobel laureate, Robert Southey. So too, are the tactics learned during foreign interventions, that far too often return to our citizens in the form of expanded social monitoring and decreased liberty. War grows the size and scope of the state, usually with our approval. Now, under the pretense of protection, America’s military presence has grown to 130 countries, with 800 bases around the globe. It is in these arenas that military men and women hone their authoritarian skills, before unknowingly bringing them home to inflict on their own people.
In Chris Coyne’s 2018 book, “Tyranny Comes Home”, Coyne reveals how the boomerang effect of foreign policy affects our civil liberties at home, a direct consequence of our dalliances abroad. Government experimentation with the suppression of resistant populations during times of war becomes useful domestically. Most specifically, the rebound is seen in the militarization of police forces and the expansion of domestic surveillance, which began as tools to use exclusively against foreign foes.
For many returning veterans, a job with local police departments or federal bureaus seems a natural fit. Trained in guns and military tactics, their skills are easily adaptable from fighting enemies abroad to ones at home. But the oath that a police officer takes in the United States is very different from that of the soldier. Police are charged with serving and protecting the domestic population. In that role, they are constrained by rights outlined in the Constitution, including rights assigned to the accused. Similarly, under the laws of federalism, state and local police have been historically decentralized and autonomous, matching forces to the needs of regional populations.
Military personnel, on the other hand, are tasked with the extermination of threats and instilled with a mindset of foreign conquest, i.e., us versus them. Military members are conditioned to accept orders without question, making them more susceptible to employing objectionable practices to reach noncivil ends. When these two worlds blend, the police are transformed into fighting units using combative methods with American citizens becoming the “thems”, or the enemies. Then as police forces take on more nationally directed work, namely the war on drugs and terror, they become a subset of the federal government and begin shifting their operations toward the direction of a national authority.
Wars in foreign countries have had the deleterious effect of turning the United States into a national security state. The National Security Agency (NSA), established in the early 1950s, was the result of the restructuring of existing surveillance and wartime programs. While previous surveillance programs were executed on an ad hoc basis, with the operations disbanding at the end of a conflict, domestic surveillance is here to stay. What started as the collection of data for a few, would grow into an expanded invasion of privacy for the many. Now, the NSA regularly collects information from phones, emails, and text messaging, as technology has made the gathering of data easy and less costly. Having developed partnerships with various technology and telecommunication companies, the NSA is also privy to online personal data, often without individual warrants. These violations are accomplished without the knowledge of individual citizens and any public scrutiny, while domestic spying continues to spread to other bureaucracies of the government, including the CIA and FBI. The modern national security state has expanded to include the use of drones, some with zoom lenses and radar imaging, eliciting privacy concerns as many domestic agencies are not required to disclose their use. While these new technologies are important in eliminating crime and bringing perpetrators to justice, there is an enormous potential for abuse, with a general lack of oversight.
Since it is the nature of government to grow and expand, it should be unsurprising that growing empires abroad will result in imperialism at home. Amped up by tales of monsters around the globe, we not only accept but demand that the scope of governments expand to meet these new threats. Cloaked under the moniker of a new normal, we are now finding that the freedom we gave up in exchange for security rarely turns out as planned. Not only does it regularly fail to provide the promised safety, but instead creates unforeseen dangers in its place. The size and scope of the government we have today are a dismal reflection of the indifference of the people. Yet, with the increasing losses of civil liberties and privacy, we may start to see a growing population who fear the government more than any existential threat from outside.
We are now experiencing the bad karma that has returned to our cities from proactive foreign policy in nations around the world. In 2007, President George W. Bush suggested that we must fight our enemies over there, so we won’t have to face them over here. Instead, it is the mentality of those returning from abroad we now confront. The good news is the tacit consent that allowed the government to grow, can be withdrawn by the masses at any time. The question is, will we do so?
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