The views expressed herein represent the views of a majority of the members of the Caravel’s Editorial Board and are not reflective of the position of any individual member, the newsroom staff, or Georgetown University.

When crafting foreign policies, many countries fail to take into account that the ideas they spread abroad can reappear at home. Trade policies and international wars are not the only phenomena that affect countries’ domestic spheres. The very ideas that countries purport abroad can, and will, come back around—essentially, a boomerang effect. In particular, anti-science rhetoric, militarism, xenophobia, and economic competition—all of which countries recklessly promote abroad for their own benefit—will reemerge in their own countries.

The Russian government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic relied heavily on xenophobia and anti-Western sentiment. It prioritized cutting off flights to other countries rather than consistent lockdowns. This xenophobia, combined with Russia’s downplaying of the pandemic, led to much lower than expected vaccination rates. The distrust and fear that Putin stoked have spread inside of Russia, engendering suspicion and mistrust that surrounds the vaccines.

The U.S. spends an estimated $778 billion on its military, more than any other country in the world. Is it any surprise that this government-sponsored aggression appears at home? As the militarization of the police and police brutality are exposed more and more often in the United States, it’s hard not to point to the aggressive nature that the U.S. military has curated for itself.

France, despite its liberal and secular appearance, is rife with Islamophobia. It has twisted the idea of secularism in its country (referred to in France as laïcite) to encourage anti-Islamic laws, including bans on hijabs in public spaces. But this Islamophobia has been a long time coming—In the 20th century, France took great pride in its colonizing mission, which emphasized imposing French culture and language. Hence, this has gradually imparted to France the idea that French culture, religion, and language are somehow superior. These ideas have led to increased xenophobia and Islamaphobia at home in France, as an influx of Muslim immigrants has made citizens fear for the preservation of “French” culture.

China’s economic system, where investment in industry far outstrips domestic consumption, makes it easy for Chinese policymakers to counter U.S. economic ambitions abroad. But the desire to counter the U.S. prevents China from creating a more sustainable, equal economic system at home.

Governments should heed the fact that the dangerous ideas and sentiments that they export and spread elsewhere for their own material gain will come right back home to splinter their own societies.

A Taste of Their Own Vaccine

Vladimir Putin has been on the receiving end of such a phenomenon in recent months, as Russia, whose vaccine Sputnik V was the first registered vaccine against COVID-19, has nonetheless had perilously low domestic uptake. Much of this is the consequence of years of anti-Western and xenophobic rhetoric that has now erupted into an unwinnable crisis, where perennial government stances have eroded the success of public health measures.

The Sputnik V vaccine is widely distrusted, despite its high efficacy. (Wikimedia Commons)

There’s no denying that Russia’s experience with COVID-19 has been rocky indeed, with its death toll due to COVID-19 being the fourth-highest globally. Despite this, Russia’s vaccination rates have been extremely low. While Sputnik V is a proven, safe, and efficacious vaccine—notwithstanding a lack of requisite data provision to WHO that has prevented its global authorization—and has been employed both within Russia and without to reduce COVID-19, under one-third of Russia’s population is fully vaccinated. This figure is still 20 percent higher than the 12 percent vaccination rate in July 2021, prior to a government mandate that workers in certain high-risk sectors, such as health care, be inoculated.

A major contributor to low vaccination rates in Russia is the fact that the government itself has apparently taken on anti-vaccination sentiment as a foreign policy point. Russia has spent years downplaying Western European and U.S. medical innovations, using troll accounts best known for their contribution to the contentious 2016 U.S. election to spew anti-vaccination rhetoric, including the long-disproven fallacy that vaccines result in autism. Amid outbreaks of measles and polio in Eastern Europe, state-sponsored bots and media have questioned vaccine efficacy as a whole and fueled anti-vaccine movements as a blatant campaign to foster mistrust and destabilize governments.

State news publications such as RIA and RT have tracked the failures of Western vaccines with obsessive closeness, amplifying the extremely rare complications associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine and, apparently, inadvertently furthering hesitancy to the Sputnik V vaccine as well. Thus, even those who do trust in the government receive contradictory information: on the one hand, that vaccinations are dangerous and tools of Western propaganda; on the other, that vaccines are the state-sponsored solution to COVID-19. In light of stubbornly low vaccination rates and widespread reports of faking proof of vaccination, recent propagation of such misinformation has become more muted. However, the damage has been done: in a logical progression of its criticism of Western vaccines, the Russian propaganda machine has led its population to reject all vaccines.

Russia’s anti-Western propaganda, once a tool for supporting the government’s aspirations to great power status, has come home to roost with the state’s abject failure to vaccinate its population against COVID-19, resulting in recent reinstatement of lockdowns even as the rest of the world cautiously reopens. By embracing a party line muddled by propaganda that capitalizes on the Western anti-vaccine movement, Putin and his government have contributed to thousands of unnecessary COVID-19 deaths and one of the worst ongoing pandemic situations globally.

The Front Lines at Your Front Door

One can see U.S. policy abroad coming home to harm citizens through the police force’s hyper-militarization. Today’s police are equipped with a military-grade arsenal that ranges from coffee pots and riot shields to mine-resistant vehicles, grenade launchers, and assault rifles. Since 2014, following the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, police have increasingly attempted to quell protests against their own brutality against people of color with incredible displays of the military equipment they possess. As the police respond to protests with military equipment intended for war zones, the divide between those who are part of the communities meant to be “protected” and those who are perceived to be the “threat” blurs, bringing the war-zone mentality of dangerous “foreign” enemies home to the United States. Certain citizens—particularly people of color, but anyone protesting against the state more broadly, as seen during the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests—become citizen-enemies, both responsible for the state and for its potential future demise through their protesting. Meanwhile, the police are enabled through the provision of military-grade weapons to respond in ways that not only disrupt peaceful protests but can escalate conflict well beyond the enforcement of the law.

The militarization of the police in the United States relies upon the prevailing “common sense” notion (perhaps prior to 2020, when a plurality of people polled by the Washington Post stated that police responded with “too much” force during the BLM protests) that the police are community protectors and should thus be kept safe through all possible means, including tactical military equipment. This is the same logic applied to the soldiers in foreign war zones, as Congress continuously increases the Department of Defense’s budget in order to keep troops safe. The 1033 Program, through which the Department of Defense can send weapons to police departments, predicated itself on the goals of protecting police officers and using the intimidating aesthetics of the weapons in high-crime areas to reduce crime.

Police in Minneapolis watch protests from the roof of a nearby building. (Wikimedia Commons)

From the equipment police use to the training they receive, it is obvious that the aggressive worldwide American military system (with its about 750 military bases in at least 80 countries worldwide) has come home to harm communities—especially communities of color. The U.S. military’s ad hoc, strategyless, and overly forceful responses to threats abroad returns to local communities as a police threat, and the harmful military strategy that has destabilized communities all over the world is active in the police system today and can be seen in the police’s responses to community unrest.

“THE UNCIVILIZING MISSION”

“What comes around” can be centuries in the making. In a previous piece, the Editorial Board criticized the French government’s application of laïcite, a secular doctrine used to govern the separation of Church and State. President Emmanuel Macron and other French politicians justify Islamophobic rhetoric and discrimination against French Muslims under the guise of defending secularism. However, historical observations reveal startling connections between the current abuse of laïcite and French imperialism of centuries prior.

Despite the immense heterogeneity of its colonial inhabitants and groups, the French Empire enacted the mission civilisatrice (”civilizing mission”) to forcibly assimilate the colonized into the values of French Republicanism during the 19th and 20th centuries. French colonial administrators implanted French culture and institutions into colonies as the noblest model for civilization, and under this model, French Republicanism became a universal and uncompromising model for the French Empire.

The remnants of this universalizing civilizational supremacy are still apparent today. The French government does not recognize membership based on race or ethnicity as those group-based distinctions would undermine the unity of French Republicanism. Despite numerous incidents of police brutality against Black and Arab people in France, there is no independent watchdog body that documents police assaults and breaks down the incidents by racial or ethnic identity.

The recent secularization crusade among French policymakers is yet another racist and assimilationist consequence of uncompromised French Republicanism. As French municipalities ban burkinis and France’s top administrative court approves the dissolution of anti-Islamophobia political associations, laïcite becomes a transposition of the mission civilisatrice back home.

Decades ago the poet and anti-colonial Martinican critic Aimé Césaire offered a chilling indictment of France’s imperialistic behavior. In Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire warned of “the boomerang effect of colonization,” or how the inherently oppressive conditions of colonization make violence and dehumanization acceptable to the colonizer. For example, French paramilitary officers infamously tortured and massacred thousands of suspected Algerian militants during the 1954-1962 Algerian War of Independence. At a pro-independence rally in Paris in 1961, the Parisian police killed hundreds of Algerian protesters and dumped their bodies in the Seine River. Emmanuel Macron was the first French president to commemorate the Seine River Massacre, but he refused to apologize for the atrocity—an unsurprisingly lackluster response, given that he adamantly rejected apology or reparations for French war crimes in Algeria in January 2021.

*Aimé Césaire was one of many anti-colonial writers who identified and criticized “the boomerang effect of colonization.”* (Wikimedia Commons)

The commonplace occurrence of French police brutality against immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities is unsurprising given the government’s inability to reckon with even the most egregious cases of colonial violence. As Connor Woodman explored in a five-part article series, “The Imperial Boomerang,” France is still entirely willing to experiment with the suppression of mass-dissent overseas before applying those practices to the metropole. Only months after France deployed troops on the Indian Ocean territory Réunion in late 2018, France drafted thousands of soldiers, police, and gendarmes in Paris to quell the “Yellowjacket Protests” in March 2019. In a further bit of irony, Macron sequestered the extra security from Operation Sentinelle, an emergency force established in the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris attacks. Just as the imposition of U.S. aggression abroad culminates into the militarization of domestic police, violence in the French colonies returns to the imperial core.

The Belt and Road Not Taken

China’s top diplomats assert that they’re not virulently anti-U.S. “wolf warriors.” But upon inaugurating China’s era of “big country diplomacy” in 2014, Chinese leader Xi Jinping made clear that China would be standing up to the world’s established power, the United States. In the past decade, economic and military competition between the two countries has become the norm.

China’s unique economic system has brought about the Belt and Road Initiative, perhaps the best economic weapon it can wield against the United States. The Chinese government has loaned other governments vast sums of money for various infrastructure projects and, in return, those governments have contracted Chinese producers to get the job done. China’s Belt and Road has friends abroad, and that fact seems to worry U.S. policymakers to no end. But the investment Chinese policymakers intend to push abroad in their quest for economic power will prevent China from becoming a more equitable country.

Manufacturing has powered China’s economy since its liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s. The country built and built and built—and now there’s not so much left to build. Chinese “ghost cities,” some big enough to house all of France, hint that China’s economy suffers a severe mismatch between supply and demand: there’s too much being produced, and not enough being consumed. Domestic demand for what’s being produced has remained worryingly low for more than a decade. So much of the country’s money is saved and invested every year because too few of China’s people are consuming anything.

The ghost city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia has everything a city needs—except people. (Wikimedia Commons)

Economists argue that China’s stopgap solution to their supply-demand mismatch was the Belt and Road initiative. Since too few people in China were buying Chinese goods, the logic went, the Chinese government could induce the rest of the world to buy up. Over the 2010s, cheap Chinese investment outdid U.S. economic diplomacy and pulled developing countries into China’s economic umbrella. Better anti-imperialist China than the “ill” United States, wolf-warriors insisted.

This model fails to work when foreign countries aren’t demanding Chinese goods. In both 2008 and 2020, faced with global economic crises that ruined other countries’ demand, China’s government resorted to its tried and true recovery strategy: build more at home. It didn’t matter that China escaped the worst effects of both the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic -- an economy reliant on exporting industrial investment goods abroad had to pour money into construction and state industries to keep its gears turning. But this non-exportable production only furthered the country’s fundamental economic mismatch.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his allies recognize that this model is flawed. Indeed, low domestic consumption marred China’s otherwise impressive pandemic recovery. Crisis aside, China’s spotty social safety net does not supplement the incomes of most of China’s urban poor, further arresting consumption growth. Without rising domestic consumption, economic recovery through relentless investment will chase speculative bubbles—as China’s recent real estate scare proves.

Since 2020, Chinese officials have proclaimed a desire to redistribute income to the lower and middle classes to boost consumption. But, as China analyst Michael Pettis has noted, the Chinese government somehow refuses to endorse raising wages or income transfers. Why? Because China wants to retain its export competitiveness and investment edge at all costs. Even if higher wages and income redistribution would balance China’s economy at home, it would whittle down China’s export machine—a consequence Chinese policymakers seem to want to avoid at all costs.

The United States and China are definitely tussling for geopolitical power, and China intends to win. If China is to compete with a coming wave of U.S. investment abroad—such as President Biden’s “Build Back Better World” agreement with the G7—sticking to a Belt and Road-style strategy may be China’s best bet. So much for a more equitable China, though.

What Happens in Vegas Doesn’t Stay In Vegas

States may think that what they do abroad will stay abroad, but that is far from the truth. Government officials throw their strategies and values out into the world, hoping to achieve something concrete in another country; but, like a boomerang, those phenomena will return to their countries of origin and affect the domestic populations in ways that policymakers never intended.

For years, the Russian government had promoted the idea that Western vaccines were untrustworthy and unsuccessful. The Kremlin also propagated misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and vastly undercounted the country’s COVID-19-related deaths in order to maintain an aura of control. As a result, Russians are hesitant to receive the state-sponsored Sputnik V vaccine, and hundreds of thousands of people have died. The United States’s hyper-militarized police forces are a direct result of the country’s hyper-militarized international presence. Police officers in training are taught to imagine that they are constantly under attack. Viewing the world as an environment of numerous potential threats and responding to such threats only through tactical force has caused immense harm to U.S. communities. France’s obsession with secularity and struggle with Islamophobia is a logical result of the country’s history of imperialism and colonization in North Africa. And if the Chinese government is not careful, its domestic economy and workers may suffer so that the country can ratchet up its globe-spanning economic spat against the United States.

The inherently oppressive conditions of colonization make violence and dehumanization acceptable to the colonizer. Anything that countries do abroad will become acceptable in their domestic environments, often causing harm to their populations. Will countries realize the effects of what they are doing, and will they care? Or will they decide that the changes occurring at home are acceptable, collateral damage in service of their international agendas?

Have a different opinion? Write a letter to the editor and submit it via this form to be considered for publication on our website!