Just Foreign Policy is an independent and non-partisan membership organization dedicated to reforming U.S. foreign policy by mobilizing and organizing the broad majority of Americans who want a foreign policy based on diplomacy, law and cooperation.
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 like the economy 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. 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. 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 will lead to 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. 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.
Just Foreign Policy is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization.