Peter Beinart: Dems need to remain true to Wilsonianism in international affairs
... To revive the collective security tradition, Democrats must first conquer a fear: not of military adversaries overseas, but of political adversaries here at home. For several generations now, liberals have lived in terror of being labeled “soft” on national security. The policymakers of the early Cold War—men like Dean Acheson, Hubert Humphrey, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson—saw colleagues and friends destroyed during the McCarthy years, and the experience haunted them to their graves. Baby boomers, coming of age during Vietnam, saw Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan exploit the popular impression of Democratic weakness to win electoral landslides. And, most recently, a younger, post-Cold War generation has listened to George W. Bush assail Democrats as appeasers in the war on terror, and ride the accusation to victory in the elections of 2002 and 2004.
As a result, for many Democrats shaped in the eras of Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush, the simple act of envisioning a liberal foreign policy has been radically inhibited. In Washington, where discussions of policy can rarely be disentangled from discussions of politics, the assumption that Americans tend to be naturally “Jacksonian”—hawkish, nationalistic, and unilateralist—blunts intellectual inquiry before it even begins. Democrats don’t wait for Karl Rove to tell them that Joe Sixpack considers them weak and naïve; they tell each other. The result has been a party that devises its foreign policies under such heavy political constraints that, were those constraints suddenly to be lifted, many Democrats would be hard-pressed to articulate the principles that lie beneath. Democrats have become so accustomed to not saying what they truly believe about foreign policy—because they assume these beliefs, once exposed, would invite political disaster—that they have nearly forgotten what the beliefs were in the first place.
The contrast with the development of modern conservative foreign policy is instructive. When William F. Buckley, James Burnham, and the other founding editors of National Review set out in the 1950s to devise a conservative approach to the Cold War, they did so in the full knowledge that their views were wildly outside the political mainstream. (In fact, Buckley and Burnham did not even live in Washington.) Yet they continued to elaborate and refine them, making few concessions to political necessity, until in 1976 and 1980, when Ronald Reagan brought first the Republican Party, and then the entire country, around to their worldview.
The point is not that Democratic foreign policymakers should ignore political reality. Sometimes external events—the fall of China, the Soviet atomic test and the Communist invasion of South Korea in 1949 and 1950, the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and of course 9/11—force liberals to trim their ideological sails in the face of conservative gusts. But liberals, and I include myself in this indictment, tend to internalize these moments so deeply that even after the political constraints have been washed away, they cannot see that the storm has passed. The awful irony of Vietnam, David Halberstam argued in The Best and the Brightest, was that by 1964 and 1965, when Lyndon Johnson set America on the path to quagmire, the fears of a right-wing backlash that haunted him into doing so were vastly overblown. But Johnson, so deeply scarred by McCarthyism early in his career, could not see how much the political landscape had changed by the mid-1960s.
2008 is a similar moment. Politically, the storm has passed, and yet Democrats remain so traumatized by the past that they have trouble seeing present circumstances for what they are. Analogies with the 1970s and 1980s, and with 2004, hang darkly over Democratic foreign policy discussions. Yet in two fundamental ways, the analogies are misplaced. In 1980, after the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Americans were newly—and justifiably—scared. That fear was dramatically revived in the years following September 11, 2001. According to one 2002 poll, even a plurality of Democratic voters preferred the GOP on matters of national defense....
Read entire article at World Affairs Journal (Summer issue)
As a result, for many Democrats shaped in the eras of Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush, the simple act of envisioning a liberal foreign policy has been radically inhibited. In Washington, where discussions of policy can rarely be disentangled from discussions of politics, the assumption that Americans tend to be naturally “Jacksonian”—hawkish, nationalistic, and unilateralist—blunts intellectual inquiry before it even begins. Democrats don’t wait for Karl Rove to tell them that Joe Sixpack considers them weak and naïve; they tell each other. The result has been a party that devises its foreign policies under such heavy political constraints that, were those constraints suddenly to be lifted, many Democrats would be hard-pressed to articulate the principles that lie beneath. Democrats have become so accustomed to not saying what they truly believe about foreign policy—because they assume these beliefs, once exposed, would invite political disaster—that they have nearly forgotten what the beliefs were in the first place.
The contrast with the development of modern conservative foreign policy is instructive. When William F. Buckley, James Burnham, and the other founding editors of National Review set out in the 1950s to devise a conservative approach to the Cold War, they did so in the full knowledge that their views were wildly outside the political mainstream. (In fact, Buckley and Burnham did not even live in Washington.) Yet they continued to elaborate and refine them, making few concessions to political necessity, until in 1976 and 1980, when Ronald Reagan brought first the Republican Party, and then the entire country, around to their worldview.
The point is not that Democratic foreign policymakers should ignore political reality. Sometimes external events—the fall of China, the Soviet atomic test and the Communist invasion of South Korea in 1949 and 1950, the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and of course 9/11—force liberals to trim their ideological sails in the face of conservative gusts. But liberals, and I include myself in this indictment, tend to internalize these moments so deeply that even after the political constraints have been washed away, they cannot see that the storm has passed. The awful irony of Vietnam, David Halberstam argued in The Best and the Brightest, was that by 1964 and 1965, when Lyndon Johnson set America on the path to quagmire, the fears of a right-wing backlash that haunted him into doing so were vastly overblown. But Johnson, so deeply scarred by McCarthyism early in his career, could not see how much the political landscape had changed by the mid-1960s.
2008 is a similar moment. Politically, the storm has passed, and yet Democrats remain so traumatized by the past that they have trouble seeing present circumstances for what they are. Analogies with the 1970s and 1980s, and with 2004, hang darkly over Democratic foreign policy discussions. Yet in two fundamental ways, the analogies are misplaced. In 1980, after the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Americans were newly—and justifiably—scared. That fear was dramatically revived in the years following September 11, 2001. According to one 2002 poll, even a plurality of Democratic voters preferred the GOP on matters of national defense....