The Public Is Expected to Stay Away from Foreign Policy

The involvement of the people in the State's geopolitical plans is kept to a minimum.

People are generally quite ignorant about foreign policy because they have not bothered to educate themselves, whether formally or informally, in international relations, in diplomacy and in history. This is not a criticism, it is simply an observation. And it is not surprising because people generally do not see the connection between the State’s foreign policy and their own lives.

There is no incentive for people, busy living their lives, to study these subjects, unless the consequences of foreign policy start to impact their daily lives. But in the West, this has not been the case since 1945.

Further, since the public is often successfully hoodwinked into accepting the State’s foreign policy agenda, there is therefore usually little pressure on the government to communicate and explain much of it to the public.

For example, the military conflicts initiated by the Western nation-states in the last decades generated very little debate among the public or disclosure from governments, despite their reputation as open societies. Information, often scanty at that, often came after the fact, and this seemed acceptable to most people. Examples of this are NATO's attack on Libya, and France's incursions into Mali and Central African Republic. 

Indeed, geopolitical discussions are almost always held by politicians and officials behind closed doors, keeping the involvement and consent of the people to a strict minimum. When it is impossible to be completely silent about the realisation of geopolitical interests, the docile mainstream media can be relied up to manage the information flow in the interest of the State.

This is precisely the case with the current on-going conflict in Ukraine, which should be more accurately described as a NATO proxy-war against Russia, fought through the courageous but gullible Ukrainian people.

The role of the mainstream media is also important in making sure the “right” geopolitical language is maintained in the public discourse. It is generally difficult to find any serious and objective geopolitical analyses in the mainstream media. Such analyses are available, but mostly by independent experts and on alternative media websites such as The Grayzone, Consortium News, Globalresearch.ca, Strategic Culture Foundation, The Duran, and others.

Of course, the emergence of the Internet has weakened the effect of main stream media control of the public. This is the reason the internet is perceived by the political and military establishment as a growing threat. When John Kerry was Secretary of State, he once made the admission that "this little thing called the Internet ... makes it much harder to govern." This is why many attempts to monitor and control it, technically and legally, are being undertaken by governments in a number of countries, as recent disclosures have shown, like the ones from Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Wikileaks.

Before the existence of the Internet, the only way for the layman to really learn about the geopolitical interests of his nation-state and what his government was doing to (try to) realise them, was to read specialised foreign policy papers that most people hardly knew existed (and if they did, they did not have easy access to them).

To the state’s annoyance, sometimes it is impossible to keep the public in a fog. Sometimes the people anyway opposes the realisation by the State of certain geopolitical interests. For instance, during the Vietnam war and before the Iraq War in 2003, public opposition in the USA to the official foreign policy of Washington DC became very strong, but in the former this only started many years after the beginning US involvement, and in the latter it didn’t prevent the attack from taking place.

Indeed, when opposition become strong and united across the political spectrum and across population strata as happened in those two cases, the State then usually tries to realise its objective anyway, by simply ignoring public opinion and relying on clever and misleading communication.

This has often worked reasonably well, not least since public opposition and public attention are usually only temporary; in the long term, it is often possible for the government to count on a high level of indifference among the people on question of geopolitics and foreign policy. Again, this public indifference is not particularly surprising, since geopolitical interests are not shared by the people.