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Bush's 'Americanized' foreign policy.
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.
(edit: bolded for the whiners
)
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.
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
)
.
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