Sunday, September 8, 2013

Partisanship Beyond The Water's Edge

How else to explain the different Republican responses to George W. Bush's call to destroy non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and Barack Obama's call to destroy real ones in Syria?  This piece attempts to give some historical significance to this discrepancy, but only goes back as far as the early 1990s.  The history of this hypocrisy, however, goes back farther than that.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Republicans were primarily isolationist:  if an overseas conflict didn't directly affect the interests of the United States, it should be completely ignored.  That changed with the end of World War II, with the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union as the two major world powers.  Suddenly, we were on the world stage, whether we liked it or not--and our principal rival embraced an economic system that appeared to threaten our way of life.  At this point, the major political parties diverged significantly in their approach to the Soviet rivalry, with Democrats urging containment as the most efficient way of allowing the Soviet system to collapse under its own weight (which it did), and Republicans attempting to turn the Cold War into a hot one at every opportunity, even to the point at which a Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson, escalated our involvement in an unwinable war in Vietnam because he was afraid of the domestic backlash from Republicans.

In fact, it is Vietnam that showed the Republicans how they could control foreign policy without even directly controlling the government, using traditional American fear of foreign influences as the fuel for their fires.  Thereafter, the mantra of Republican foreign policy was "toughness," i.e., acting as the overseas equivalent of the lone Western gunslinger who clears out the frontier town's bad guys.  Never mind that real-world foreign policy requires a more nuanced approach, as John Kennedy showed during the Cuban missile crisis.  If you could frame foreign policy in terms of American legend, and not international reality, you could win popular support and elections simply by appearing to embody the myth, even when some of your actions appear to go in a different direction.  Thus, during America's misguided eight years under Ronald Reagan, you had Reagan the tough guy, taking out the easy menace of an island nation, but willing to take a softer approach in dealing with Gorbachev, a far more deadly adversary than Grenada ever could be.

Then came the inevitable collapse of Communism correctly predicted by Democrats, and doubted by Republicans who, by this time, had a great deal invested in the economics and politics of "toughness."  All of a sudden, in a world in which everyone seemed to be moving toward democracy, where was the argument for "toughness"?  And what was going to happen to the supposed Republican "edge" in foreign policy?  The answer, as it turned out, was to pretend that Communism collapsed because the Communists were "scared" of Reagan's defense build-up, even though that had done nothing to change the actual military strategy the Soviets were pursuing.  On this shaky foundation, they have attempted to build the argument that they, and they alone, are to be trusted in responding to foreign and military crises.

The problem with doing so, however, is that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact satellite governments left Republicans without a real rationale for having an interventionist policy in the first place.  Thus, we have seen the GOP flip-flop on foreign and military policy among the Clinton, Bush and Obama years--reverting to an "isolationist" stance under Democratic Presidents, but finding excuses to intervene when they controlled the White House, using 9/11 as an excuse to invade a nation that had noting to do with 9/11.

Unfortunately, this approach has done as much, if not more, to divide the nation and pollute our political discourse than any domestic controversy.  The old adage that "partisanship stops at the water's edge," from which our nation drew tremendous political and military strength in the past, has been abandoned in favor of one that puts the most fundamental aspect of our nation's existence--our ability to co-exist with other nations--into the partisan quiver of arrows that is bleeding our nation to death.

Nothing has illustrated the damage done by this strategy than the current national argument over intervention in Syria.  Intervention in Syria, on the limited basis that the President has proposed, is absolutely essential to stop the spread of real WMDs.  However, because of the human and financial treasure spent on a war against WMDs that didn't exist, we no longer have the will to fight.  We are, in terms of our ability to unite in the face of an external threat, in a far worse position than we were in the post-Vietnam years.  All because the party of "toughness" decided that partisanship stops nowhere, if it can be used to cement its hold on power.

How long our country will last, in that case, is an open question.  The tighter the grip a party has on a country, the greater the likelihood is that the country in question will be crushed--not from without, but within. 

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