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Imran Siddiqui
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The Potterverse
Jan 1970
time: 00:30
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Interesting article I saw on The New Republic.com by one of their few center-right guys. I thought it was a very interesting article, on how basically Bush's foreign policy is focused on domestic goals, and thus is more like Nixon, rather than the hero of the neoconservatives, Reagan.
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=salam072803
quote:
The Bush administration has frequently been described as "more Reagan than Reagan," whether as fulsome praise or as fiery condemnation. Both men are unapologetic conservatives and both are best known for championing an assertive American role in the world, a position Bush came to relatively late in the day and that Reagan had held from the start of his political career. Still, the comparison is misleading. If anything, Bush is more Nixon than Reagan--not because of allegations of deceit, but because Bush, like Nixon, increasingly uses his foreign policy as a weapon in the domestic culture war.
Historical myopia has led many to believe that Bush is Reagan without the silver tongue. But because Reagan was so focused on the Soviet threat, and because he began public life as a Cold War liberal, he believed that politics should end at the water's edge. He fought alongside hawkish Democrats like Scoop Jackson against those who opposed a stronger defense. While far from flawless, it is difficult to imagine Reagan, who vividly remembered the excesses of the McCarthy years, tarring Democratic allies by juxtaposing them against images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. This approach had resonance beyond domestic politics. Reagan's opposition to the Law of the Sea Treaty, a sweeping effort to regulate the world's oceans that included onerous redistributive measures, is but one example. In a move characteristic of his forays into the West's war of ideas with the Soviets and the Third World Left, Reagan focused less on the initiative's threat to American national interests than its negative implications for global innovation, investment, and trade--an argument tailor-made for international consumption. And so opposition to American policies in allied countries, however strident on the margins, never reached the fever-pitch it has in recent years. Reagan's worldview wasn't that of a narrow nationalist; rather, it was a right-wing internationalism that closely resembled the neoconservative idealism of Paul Wolfowitz and others, which is precisely why he remains the patron saint of the neocons.
Nixon, by contrast, was well aware of the domestic uses of foreign policy and was happy to avail himself of them. Nixon revisionists will often point to the fact that affirmative action and school desegregation policies were instituted on his watch, which is true enough. At the same time, Nixon, as the self-designated tribune of the "silent majority," railed against the counterculture, as well as run of the mill coastal liberals, and used coded racial language in an effort to woo George Wallace's unreconstructed segregationists. By focusing his ire on domestic enemies, Nixon was able to circumvent the basic and inescapable fact that he was deeply unlikable. And conflating his domestic enemies with a policy of vacillating weakness abroad made the pitch that much stronger, and so anti-communism became a crucial cultural weapon--ironically, even as the policy was abandoned in substance in the era of détente. In May of 1970, flag-carrying workers in hardhats, allegedly egged on by union leader Peter Brennan, attacked antiwar protesters. At the end of the month, Brennan presented Nixon with a hardhat, which the president wore proudly before those assembled. After his reelection, Nixon named Brennan secretary of labor, a strangely apposite capstone to a cultural moment that captured a great deal about his administration.
Nixon also used brazen foreign policy tactics, such as the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam in 1972, to sucker-punch his domestic critics and help shield himself from the increasingly unpopular involvement in Southeast Asia and the corrosive political effects of rising inflation. Opponents of these tactics were tarred by their association with the marginal upper-middle-class activists that Nixon had already written out of the "silent majority." Meanwhile, because Nixon (or rather Kissinger) had in fact decided that the United States could no longer sustain its postwar policy of containment, this strategy of demonizing the left had the added benefit of protecting him from a potentially more dangerous assault from the right.
Perhaps not surprisingly, former Nixon speech writer William Safire has been one of the few to note the Nixonian dimensions of Bush's foreign policy. Take Safire's July 7 conversation with Nixon from beyond the grave:
Q: With unemployment rising and the federal deficit ballooning--and all the Democratic candidates accusing him of having gone to war under false pretenses--how come Bush's approval rating hasn't nose-dived?
RN: Because he keeps his eye on the ball in center court. He's a war president fighting a popular war and doesn't let anybody forget he's winning. Afghanistan and Iraq are the first two battles in that war on terror. The more the elites here and in Europe holler, the solider the Bush support gets.
Difficult as it is to take a figment of William Safire's imagination seriously, this is a powerful insight: While diplomatic squabbles and reckless off-the-cuff remarks are to be avoided, one needn't try too hard. In either case, the inevitable dust-up once again demonstrates Bush's populist bona fides. Wearing a flight suit has the same effect. Liberals are exercised and conservatives cheer lustily.
Indeed, it is the often-truculent nationalist conservatism of Nixon-Ford veterans Cheney and Rumsfeld, both widely despised among all those who aren't American conservatives, and not the bleeding-heart conservatism of the Reaganite Wolfowitz that sets the tone for this administration. On Kyoto and the International Criminal Court, the president chose not to marshal the many good reasons why said treaties were disadvantageous for the world as a whole; instead, as conservatives like Jeffrey Gedmin and Gary Schmitt have noted, he made "America First" arguments and left it at that. But these gestures do more than that. They also antagonize and alienate many Americans, including the so-called Tony Blair Democrats who went to bat for regime change.
Ditto for the president's "bring them on" comment when discussing rogue Baathist guerrillas. Many in the mainstream and on the right (myself included) are impressed: Bush sounds bold and determined, thus appealing to our bloodthirsty Jacksonian impulse. That revenge will be had for these cowardly attacks is the clear implication. And yet it's a message designed just as much to be used as a cudgel against dovish liberals and those on both the right and left who prefer a more sober and statesmanlike approach--the "nattering nabobs of negativism," in Spiro Agnew's memorable turn of phrase--as it is to appeal to the hawks among us. Polarization is the inevitable result.
For Bush, in fact, the polarization strategy is arguably even more important than for Nixon. That's because there is no equivalent of the alienated counterculture of the late '60s and the early '70s, the hippie freak demographic that proved to be Nixon's most effective ally in realigning American public opinion. Antiwar elements today are just as upper-middle-class and college-educated as they were, but they are careful to disassociate themselves from cultural anti-Americanism. Many on the center-left actively support Bush's efforts to remake the Middle East; to the extent they're critical, they want him to go further--to spend more money and to solicit more in the way of international support. It is a disagreement on means, not ends. Were the Democrats able to successfully convey that they embraced a policy of strength and that they would be more responsible stewards of such a policy--that their approach would be more successful in managing the transition to a democratic and sovereign Iraq, for example--the Bush team would be in serious jeopardy.
This applies more broadly. As Bush abandons the fiscal conservatism that was so important to his father and embraces corporatist as opposed to pro-market policies, like bloated agricultural subsidies and steel tariffs, disdain for pointy-headed elites, along with tax cuts, is the glue that holds together his coalition--marginalizing his critics on the left and quieting potential criticism on the right.
In this, Bush resembles another president, namely Bill Clinton. Though the left of the Democratic Party had every reason to despise Clinton--the man who sold them out on trade, welfare reform, and any number of other issues--with a virulent passion, they doggedly defended him during the impeachment scandal. His foibles marked him as one of their own: a partisan of the sexual revolution and thus, in a strange leap of logic, of left-liberalism broadly conceived. Meanwhile, conservatives, who in many cases ought to have embraced Clinton as more or less one of their own, were frequently influenced by the strongly anti-Clinton right-leaning press and by a general distaste for his aura of sleaze--which too often led them into self-destructive adventures. Amid the passions raised by the war in Iraq and its aftermath, Bush has had a similar effect. Unfortunately, the stakes today are far higher. |
(edit: bolded for the whiners  )
Last edited by Imran Siddiqui on 05-08-2003 at 04:03
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mrmitchell
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Summary, please. I'm not lazy but I can't hang out for long.
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Spiffor
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CPA - Evil Clone brigade
Nov 2001
time: 06:30
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I don't think Bush is an idealist at all. It is possible he took the Iraq operation personally (as soon as he was elected, I was under the impression he intended to raise hell in Iraq), but this personal involvement wouldn't have brought such a costly war if there weren't many strategic reasons in it.
For the sake of the argument, let's say the US went to Iraq to liberate Iraqis of their opressive despot (I don't believe it at all, but let's pretend). We can now see that:
- there has been no peacemaking operation of Liberia despite the huge expectations from the population.
- Bush took the "America first" approach when it came to every international decision currently: Kyoto, the World Court, etc.
- The roadmap for the ME took a real pragmatic approach: UN, EU and Russia take part in the thing, which demands some concessions to be made. The surge of energy put in peace talks between Israel and Palestine came also from the attempt to calm down the Arabic population long term (which would in turn reduce support for terrorism).
- The foreign policy regarding Norht Korea is highly pragmatic, with an alternation between dialogue and tension (I guess both are diplomatic tools to achieve the same end: to make NK stop threatening everybody).
- I have yet to see Bush complain about individual liberties in so many of his allied countries. The whitewashing of Bush's allies' crimes is definitely a pragmatic approach. The most blatant example is that the US agreed to stop yelling at Russia over Chechnya as soon as it got Russia's support in war on terror.
All of those seem pretty pragmatic to me, don't you think ? However, don't get me wrong. I can't blame a leader for not being idealistic. Had Bush given the finger to Russia, China, Pakistan and the like over civil liberties, the war on terror would have been much, much less efficient. Had Bush tried to remove all bloody paranoid dictators on Earth, he could as well have a 10 times bigger military budget.
However, I think the Bush team will try to favor the rule of law in countries where it has enough influence, and where it is affordable. Kabulistan and Iraq are good playgrounds to experiment, and maybe Liberia in the near future will as well. But I sure think his trace 'idealism' is very low priority in comparison with
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Lord Merciless
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Idealists are more dangerous than pragmatists.
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Spiffor
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CPA - Evil Clone brigade
Nov 2001
time: 06:30
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quote:
Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Spiffor, would you consider Reagan an idealist? |
I don't know enough about the specifics of Reagan's foreign policy. I don't know about the deals and compromises he may have done or not.
Reagan for sure wasn't a pro-democracy idealist. He was more than nice with pro-American dictatorships. Again, in the cold war context, especially after Carter's policies, I cannot blame his for taking this pragmatic approach.
But I don't know if he was an anti-communism idealist. His propaganda sure looked like it, with the medieval 'evil empire' and other crusadelike crap like that. But I don't know if his most important policy towards the USSR (the arms race) was first aimed at destroying communism, or aimed at protecting American interests no matter that may be*.
Except for the arms race, I know of no policy that really looks idealistic to me. When both camps were tired of racing, he signed the disarmament treaty. He maintained relationships with communist countries. He didn't seem to favor ethnical unrest in the USSR (or I missed something).
I guess Reagan was sure driven by the willingness to reduce USSR's influence, but I don't think how this goal is different from US' interests at the time, and how it is different from all previous coldwar policies (except Carter's)
*I must admit I'm a bit puzzled as to why the two superpowers would enguage in an arm race when both already have thousands of nukes. I mean, how does it matter that the other side get more nukes ? There are already more than enough to make the whole world glow !
(I admit there must be some strategic usefulness to the arm race, other than chest thumping - otherwise the crippled USSR wouldn't have ruined itself even more doing this adventure. But I have no idea what this use mioght be)
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Jon Miller
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I use to consider Bush to be as bad as any dem
now I think he is worse thana good portion
hence will be voting dem this next time
Jon Miller
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05-08-2003 03:30
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