http://www.opinioneditorials.com/freedomwriters/dschneider_20050415.html
April 15, 2005 Foreign Policy Confusion at The American Conservative Magazine David Kenneth Schneider Claes G. Ryn calls President George W. Bush a "Jacobin Nationalist" in the April 11 issue of The American Conservative for, as the subtitle claims, "exporting the French Revolution to the World." Bush earns the Jacobin label for having replaced two terrorist regimes - of which Robespierre himself might have been proud - with nascent constitutional democracies conceived on the Anglo-American model, and reflecting their native cultures. This is the central contradiction in an article replete with confused categories and historical misconceptions. Two problems stand out above all the others: first, Professor Ryn believes that "the old American exceptionalism counseled isolation from the world," rather than independence, a radically different idea. Second, he seems unable to distinguish between French-style revolutions and American-style revolutions. Independence, Not Isolation: The Professor asserts that the foreign policy of the early republic was isolationist, and that it still should be. Any departure therefrom constitutes a departure from traditional republican principles. This both misses the point of our early foreign policy, and fails to account for two centuries of historical change. The classic formulation of our early foreign policy is the Farewell Address of 1796, in which George Washington counsels a policy not of isolation, but of political independence. This required maximum military and diplomatic independence. He sought to steer the new republic clear of permanent alliances motivated by excessive affection or enmity toward foreign nations. The founding generation maintained enough independence of action to lean toward France when necessary - as was done during the revolution - or toward Great Britain when circumstances warranted - as Jefferson was prepared to do had Napoleon moved to occupy New Orleans in 1802. Washington's policy of independence was designed to protect a young and weak nation until such time as it could take "the command of its own fortunes." It did not rule out bold action and engagement with the world as our power grew and as the international balance of power changed, so long as we maintained our independence, both political and diplomatic. Presidents from Washington on did not shun bold action to preserve our independence and assert our interests: Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory France; Monroe took Florida from Spain; Polk acquired Texas and California from Mexico, and Oregon from Britain. In the twentieth century Wilson and Roosevelt took us to war in Europe and Asia, thereby destroying the old European order and placing in the hands of the United States the responsibility of maintaining a peaceful global order in the face of an aggressive communist adversary. We have never been an isolationist nation. Even the implementation of the Monroe Doctrine, which is often misconstrued as isolationist, depended on diplomatic engagement with other nations, particularly Great Britain, whose navy was the guarantor of the international order. Since 1945, the United States has been that guarantor. In Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East, American power keeps the peace. The United States could not opt for a policy of isolationism without the risk of plunging the world once again into the kind of geopolitical instability that brought us the cataclysmic wars of the first half of the 20th century. In going to war against the Taliban and Ba'athist regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush acted just as his predecessors had. State-sponsored terrorists based in Afghanistan attacked us on September 11, 2001. And, from the end of the first Gulf War until 2003, we were in a quasi war with Iraq, an inherently unstable and intolerable situation in a region of prime geostrategic importance, now clearly producing terrorist forces that could inflict great damage on our security and independence. President Bush is not breaking with, but acting well within, the long established traditions of American foreign policy. American - Not French - Revolutions: Reading Professor Ryn, one could easily gain the impression that this rise of American power has left in its wake a series of murderous tyrannies. He says the president has replaced international communism with a universalist "new Jacobinism" - a reign of terror everywhere. To believe this we have to twist history and reality out of all recognition. We have to believe that the government of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan is a terror regime, and that the Taliban represented traditional Afghan politics and social organization. Of course we know that is not true. The "Jacobins" were the Taliban and their foreign terrorist allies - Muslim Fascists inspired by Hitler's Germany and Robespierre's France. Theirs was a French style revolution that swept away tradition and replaced it with mass terror. Bush's war against them was an American style revolution that replaced rule by force with constitutional structures and guarantees of fundamental rights. It ended the suppression of Afghan tradition, and allowed a return to the natural organization of Afghan society. The same thing is happening in Iraq. The Ba'athist regime was a successor to Mussolini's Italy and Stalin's Soviet Union, both intellectual heirs to the French Revolution. President Bush has removed a regime whose power was based on mass murder, and replaced it with a new constitutional order that will allow the free expression of Iraqi traditions and political aspirations. The revolutionary ideals of liberty and democracy have both French and American meanings. They are different. The French meaning implies, as Professor Ryn recognizes, the destruction of tradition and its replacement with structures conceived by an intellectual elite and enforced by terror. The American version of these ideals implies a system of ordered liberty that enshrines certain God-given rights in an essentially conservative constitutional structure based in tradition. It is the American, not the French, model that the president is promoting in the Middle East. Yes, the President said in his second inaugural that our policy is "to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." But he also said that "this is not primarily the task of arms," that "freedom must be chosen by citizens," that each country's democratic institutions will "reflect customs and traditions very different from our own," and that this is "the concentrated work of generations." This is hardly Rousseau's destruction of inherited societies and beliefs. This is rather the constitutional system of ordered liberty that now reigns in such diverse cultures as Italy, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, and that is now on the rise in Eastern Europe - all thanks to the application of American power, military, political, economic and diplomatic, over an extended period of time. Each of these cases involved the defeat of the French model by the American model of revolution. David Kenneth Schneider is a Doctoral Candidate at University of California, Berkeley [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! 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