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This essay is not a policy conversion or recapitulation by one of the
co-authors of the PNAC blueprints for neocon American empire. Kagan does not
see government through the labels of party, but through the lens of
isolationalist versus interventionalist.
He advocates that like-minded Democrats in the White House would not
balance the reign of power in the traditional American pattern between parties,
but establish a permanent political power inherent in both political parties
that would continue war policies that benefit the post-9/11 military industrial
complex. This striking candor appears to confirm what others have said dominated
our foreign policy since the end of WW2 and the Yalta conference, for better or
worse. Kagan is not speaking for a unified moderate center as much as he is
framing the language and political debate to a single unified permanent policy
of war, that calls for global permanent military bases and outposts, citing the
now familiar mantra that post-911 reality “is what it is” as if that cannot
change or shouldn’t be challenged. Of course, policy can and should be tweaked this way and that to adjust
to changing realities. On foreign
policy the two parties may not differ as much as they do on domestic policy. But
voicing the conclusion before the debate is ideologically autocratic, and must
be rebuked. Democracy is a messy affair, but much preferred to the
alternative. kwc If Power Shifts In 2008 By Robert Kagan,
Washington Post, Sunday, May 28, 2006; B07 Could the United
States be better off with a Democrat in the White House in 2009? Here are a
couple of reasons the answer might be yes, even if you're not a Democrat. The Democrats need to
take ownership of American foreign policy again, for their sake as well as the
country's. Long stretches in opposition sometimes drive parties toward
defeatism, utopianism, isolationism or permutations of all three. What starts
off as legitimate attacks on the inevitable errors of the party in power can
veer off into a wholesale rejection of the opposition party's own foreign
policy principles. Republicans in the 1990s, after supporting an expansive
internationalism under Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush, drifted toward
quasi-isolationism against the Clinton administration's quasi-internationalism.
During Woodrow Wilson's two terms, the internationalist party of Theodore
Roosevelt began transforming itself into the isolationist party of William
Borah. During the Nixon-Ford years, the party of John F. Kennedy became the
party of George McGovern. Eight years of Bill
Clinton brought the Democrats mostly out of their post-Vietnam trauma and
revived liberal interventionism. But the George W. Bush years have driven many
back. Buffeted between the administration's failures and their party's
left-wing critics, the Clintonites either disavowed what they once believed or
kept their heads down. Lately they're starting to show signs of life and could
still take the reins again if the right Democrat won in 2008. That wouldn't be
such a bad thing. No one can claim any more that the old Clinton foreign policy
team is less competent than the Republicans who succeeded it. But what happens
to these Democrats if their standard-bearer loses in 2008? The case for electing
a Democrat is not only to save the party's soul, though that's a worthy task,
but to pull the country together to face the difficult times ahead. The last
time the Democrats were in office, the world seemed a comparatively manageable
place. They have not yet had to deal with the post-Sept. 11 world. Since the
only post-Sept. 11 foreign policy Americans know is Bush's, many believe -- especially
many Democrats -- that if only Bush weren't president, the world would be
manageable again. Allies could be easily summoned for the struggle against
al-Qaeda or to bring pressure on Iran or to replace American troops in Iraq.
Threats could be addressed without force, through skillful diplomacy and soft
power. Maybe some of the threats would disappear. This is fantasy. The next president, whether Democrat or
Republican, may work better with allies and may be more clever in negotiating
with adversaries. But the realities of the world are what they are, and the
imperatives of U.S. foreign policy are what they are. The diffuse threats of
the post-Cold War world simply don't unite and energize our European allies as
the Soviet Union did, and even a dedicated "multilateralist" won't be
able to get them to spend more money on defense or stop buying oil from Iran. A
smarter negotiating strategy toward Iran might or might not make a difference
in stopping its weapons program. Soft power will go only so far in dealing with
problems such as North Korea and Sudan. In fact, the options
open to any new administration are never as broad as its supporters imagine,
which is why, historically, there is more continuity than discontinuity in
American foreign policy. If the Democrats did take office in 2009, their
approach to the post-Sept. 11 world would be marginally different but not
stunningly different from Bush's. And they would have to sell that not
stunningly different set of policies to their own constituents. In this respect 2008
would be another 1952. The
Republican Party had been out of power for 20 years when Dwight Eisenhower took
office, through Munich, World War II and the first years of the Cold War. Many
Republicans imagined that everything that went wrong in the world during those
two decades was the fault of Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats. FDR
"tricked" us into war with Japan. Then he gave away Eastern Europe at
Yalta. Then Harry Truman adopted the disastrous strategy of containment. These
were the years when Joe McCarthy, Robert Taft and anti-containment
"realists" such as Walter Lippmann flourished. But when Ike and the
Republicans finally took over management of the Cold War, years of railing
against "cowardly containment" gave way to broad if shaky acceptance. The country could
benefit from a similar passing of the baton in the 2008 presidential election.
At the end of the day, of course, a president's personal qualities and
worldview are usually more important than the party she or he represents. The
Democrats, like the Republicans, could nominate a candidate no sensible person
would entrust with American foreign policy. For that matter, the Republicans
could nominate someone capable of winning broad Democratic support, which would
partly address the debilitating national divide on foreign policy. But
eventually America's post-Sept. 11 foreign policy will probably be better if
both parties have a shot at shaping it. Robert
Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and
transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund, writes a monthly column for
The Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/26/AR2006052601595.html?nav=hcmodule |
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