[Originally published in the Rutland Herald.]
The Republican Party has long said that the Democrats are uneasy with power and disinclined to use it. There is probably some truth in that. However, until now, there has been no absolute truth about the Republicans’ claim of their ability and inclination to use power. From Eisenhower to George H.W. Bush, Republican presidents have been spotty in that arena – until George W. Bush.
Many administrations come into power in the United States married to their own concept that those who came before them were fools and that they alone know what really has to be done and how to do it. Fortunately, in the post-war era those administrations came to power in the middle of the very stable Cold War. That gave them time to reflect and learn after coming to power unpressured by world events, and to incorporate some realities into their policies. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has had no such luxury. The events of 9/11 have accelerated world events and taken from this administration the opportunity to learn through the safety of inactivity and innocuous experimentation.
The Bush administration’s foreign policy reflects some very hard-nosed underlying attitudes about the United States and its newly aggressive role in the world. On the surface, it would appear that this administration has decided that whatever is good for America is good for the world. If the Kyoto agreement, land mine treaties and expanded World Court jurisdiction are bad for America, don’t sign them, whatever the rest of the world seems to want. This president has said that the only successful model in the world is the American model with its reliance on free enterprise and elective democracy. Any country that has that system is OK. Those that haven’t, unless you need them for the moment (as in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan) are bad.
We are clearly embarked on a revolutionary new foreign policy based entirely on this administration’s definition of American interests and essentially oblivious to the needs and desires of the rest of the world. If it’s good for us, we’ll do it. The companion to that is that in the case of terrorism, if it’s good for us, you do it, too. That would seem to be the primary area in which coalition-building is part of administration foreign policy.
American foreign policy in the post-war period was characterized by coalition-building and containment. We built NATO and SEATO specifically to contain the challenge of communism from the USSR and China. Even though our communist protagonists, particularly the Soviets, were armed to the teeth with “weapons of mass destruction,” preemptive military attack against our enemy was never seriously considered. We tacitly accepted mutually assured destruction (MAD) as both sides knew they could not survive the guaranteed retaliation after a first strike. It worked throughout the second half of the century, and it worked in an environment which had its share of murderous dictators, Stalin being the preeminent example.
This approach seems no longer acceptable, despite the fact that it served us so well. Apparently, we are now living in a preemptive world. This represents the most revolutionary change in U.S. foreign policy in the past hundred years. The United States is on the threshold of becoming an aggressor nation. We are about to attack Iraq because of something they may be able to do to us in the future and the same may prove true of North Korea and even of Iran, the third member of the “axis of evil.” Will Americans be comfortable in the role of arrogant bully to the world?
How did we get here? The enabling factor was 9/11. Unqualified support for the president in the aftermath of 9/11 has emboldened him to go ahead with a number of very conservative agenda items that might well not have flown in a different environment. Having been successful in the move to label anyone who disagreed with administration policies as unpatriotic, the scene was set, among other things, for this revolutionary change in American foreign policy, all undertaken as part of the “war on terrorism.”
The Democratic Party has absolutely disappeared – abdicated in the face of this conservative Republican onslaught. Because of this abdication, we have not been given the opportunity to discuss and debate our radical, new foreign policies.
It has never been healthy or successful in the past for foreign policy, or for that matter, any important policy to change radically without public discussion and debate. Perhaps such a process would have ended with Americans convinced of the need for such changes. Perhaps the new world we live in, populated as it is by terrorists and rogue nations armed or soon to be armed with terrible weapons, is justification enough for this revolution. Perhaps it is not.
This is a situation in which mistakes carry the potential to plague us for generations to come. It is no time for bravado. It is a time for caution and careful reflection. We are not getting that now, and all too few people are calling for it.
Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who lives in Williston.
