The Time of Our Lives
Page 29
This week I spoke to a few U.S. senators about the meaning of the Syria drama. They were a mix—some had given supportive soundings early on; all had been taken aback by the public reaction, the wave of calls and emails. There was gossip. Apparently some White House staffers have a new nickname for the president: “Obam-me,” because it’s all about him and his big thoughts. I guess the second-term team is not quite as adoring as the first.
Two senators spoke of their worry about what the Syria mess—the threat, the climb down, the lunge at a lifeline, the face-saving interviews—signaled to the world about U.S. credibility. If an American president says there’s a red line and the red line is crossed, there can be no question: America must act. No one said this but I think I correctly inferred a suggestion that the American people may not be willing right now to appreciate the fact that in a world full of bad guys the indispensable nation must show it is serious.
It seems to me U.S. credibility is a key issue in the Syria drama, but the problem is not that the U.S. public is newly unconcerned with it. The problem is that the public now sees the issue of U.S. credibility very differently from the way many lawmakers understand it.
For weeks I’ve been going back in my mind to a talk I had with a deeply accomplished, America-loving foreign policy expert. He, too, felt credibility was at issue. He said the other leaders of the world are no longer certain we are a great military power. I started to answer but someone joined us and the conversation turned. But I wanted to say no, the world thinks we are a great military power. They know all about the missiles and tanks and satellites, they’ve seen our soldiers. They know our might. The world is no longer certain we are a great nation, which is a different problem.
The world knows a lot about us, and in ways removed from specific military actions. Their elites come here, and increasingly their middle class. They know our unemployment problem—it’s not a secret. They take the train from New York to Washington and see the abandoned factories. They know about our budget problems, they know who holds our bonds. They read about the kids who are bored so they killed the visiting Australian baseball player, and the kids so bored they killed a World War II veteran. They read about the state legislator who became a hero for defending late-term abortions—they see the fawning interviews. They go home with the story of the guy who spent his time watching violent videos and then, amazingly, acted out his visions of violence at the Washington Navy Yard. They notice our mass killings are no more than two-day stories.
And of course it isn’t only “the world” that sees this—Americans see it. And they are worried about their country. Deep down they, too, wonder if we are still a great nation or will be able to remain one. They think our economy is in a shambles and our government incapable, at the moment, of creating the conditions that will allow it to come back. They fear our culture is rotting our children’s heads.
And so, asked to support a strike that could spark a response that could start a real war, they say no, not now and not in Chinatown. But this is not a turning inward, it is not about fortress America. They do not think they are protecting an unsullied beacon of light from the machinations and manipulations of the cynical Old World. They have fewer illusions than their policy makers do!
They are not “armchair isolationists.” If you’ve ever taken a walk in one of our cities or suburbs—if you’ve ever taken a walk in America—you know we have all the people in the world here. You can barely get them off the phone back home with Islamabad, Galway and Lagos. Longtime Americans deal every day, in the office and the neighborhood, with immigrants and others from every culture and country. And so many of the new Americans are trying desperately to adhere to America, to find reasons to adhere. They are not unaware of the larger world. They came from the larger world. They’re trying to love where they are.
They know this place is in need of help and attention. They care about it. That impulse should be encouraged and lauded, not denigrated as narrow-minded or backward. They’re trying to be practical. They’re Americans trying to take stock in their nation and concluding: “We have got to get ourselves in order, we have got to turn our attention to getting stronger. Then we will be fully credible in the world.”
What I am saying is that the old, Washington definition of credibility, which involves the projection of force in pursuit of ends it thinks necessary, and the American people’s definition of credibility, which is to become stronger and allow the world, and the young, to understand you are getting stronger, are at variance. And that will have implications down the road.
The public’s sense of U.S. credibility, and how it is best secured and projected, probably began to vary more broadly from Washington’s when the Great Recession hit home, five years ago this week.
Political leaders have got to start twigging on to this. It’s not as if it just happened. They can argue for any foreign military action they think necessary, but the American people will not be of a mind to support it until they think someone is really trying to clean up America.
A diplomat might say, “But the world will not go on vacation while America gets its act together!” True enough, and that fact will demand real shrewdness from America’s leaders, who in the past few weeks got quite a lesson in how Americans on the ground view American priorities.
On Setting an Example
The Wall Street Journal: November 16, 2007
I thought I’d say a word for the Beaconists.
This election year we will, sooner or later, be asked to think about, and concentrate on, what American foreign policy should be in the future. We will have to consider, or reconsider, what challenges we face, what the world really is now after the Cold War and after 9/11, what is needed from America, and for her.
In some rough and perhaps tentative way we will have to decide what philosophical understanding of our national purpose rightly guides us.
Part of the debate will be shaped by the tugging back and forth of two schools of thought. There are those whose impulses are essentially interventionist—we live in the world and must take part in the world, sometimes, perhaps even often, militarily. We are the great activist nation, the spreader of political liberty, the superpower whose meaning is made clear in action.
The other school holds profound reservations about all this. It is more modest in its ambitions, more cool-eyed about human nature. It feels more bound by the old advice attributed to one of the Founding Generation, that we be the friend of liberty everywhere but the guarantor only of our own.
Much has changed in the more than two centuries since he said that: many wars fought, treaties made, alliances forged. And yet as simple human wisdom, it packs a wallop still.
Those who feel tugged toward the old Founding wisdom often use the word “beacon.” It is our place in the scheme of things, it is our fate and duty, to be a beacon of liberty. To stand tall and hold high the light. To be an example, to be an inspiration, to encourage. We do not invent constitutions and impose them on other countries; instead they, in their restlessness, in their human desire to achieve a greater portion of freedom, will rise up in time and create their own constitution. And because they created it, and because it reflects their conception of justice, they will hold it more dearly.
So we are best, in the world as it is now, the beacon, not the bringer, of freedom. We are its friend, not its enforcer.
As a foreign policy this sounds, or has been made to sound, unduly passive. We’ll sit around being a good example and the rest of them can take a hike. But if you want to be a beacon, it’s actually a hard job. It involves activism. You can’t be a beacon unless as a nation you’re in pretty good shape. You can’t be a beacon unless you send forth real light. You can’t be a beacon unless you really do inspire.
Do we always? No. We’re not always a good example for the world. And so, for the coming holiday, a few baseline areas, some only stylistic, in which we could make our light glow brighter in—and for—the world.
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To be a beacon is to speak softly to the world, with dignity, with elegance if you can manage it, or simple good-natured courtesy if you can’t. A superpower should never shout, never bray “We’re No. 1!” If you’re No. 1, you don’t have to.
To be a beacon is to have a democracy in which issues of actual import are regularly debated. Instead our political coverage consists of daily disquisitions on “targeted ads,” “narratives,” “positioning” and “talking points.” We really do make politicians crazy. If a politician cares only about his ads and his rehearsed answers, the pundits call him inauthentic. But if a politician ignores these things to speak of great issues, we say he lacks “fire in the belly” and is incompetent. So many criticisms of politicians boil down to: He’s not manipulating us well enough! We need more actual adults who are actually serious about the business of the nation.
To be a beacon is to keep the economic dream alive. We’re still good at this. The downside is the rise in piggishness that tends to accompany prosperity. It is not good to embarrass your nation with your greed. It disheartens those who are doing their best but are limited, or unlucky, or just haven’t made it work yet. It is good when you have it not to keep it all but to help the limited, and unlucky, and those who just haven’t made it work yet. Keep it going, Porky.
To be a beacon is to continue another thing we’re good at, making the kind of citizens who go into the world and help it: the doctors, the scientists, the nurses. They choose to go and help. The world notices, and says, “These are some kind of people, these Americans.”
To be a beacon is to support the creation of a culture that is not dark, or sulfurous, or obviously unwell. We introduce our culture to our new immigrants each day through television. Just for a moment, imagine you are a young person from Africa or South America, a new American. You come here and put on the TV, for even the most innocent know that TV is America and America is TV, and you want to learn quickly. What you see is an obvious and embarrassing obsession with sex, with violence, with sexual dysfunction. You see the routine debasement of women parading as the liberation of women.
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Conservatives have wrung their hands over this for a generation. But really, if you are a new immigrant to our country, full of hope, animated in part by some sense of mystery about this country that has lived in your imagination for 20 years, you have got to think: This is it? This ad for erectile dysfunction? Oh, I have joined something that is not healthy.
Sad to think this. They want to have joined a healthy and vibrant and well-balanced nation, not a sick circus.
I haven’t even touched upon poverty, the material kind and the spiritual kind. I haven’t touched on a lot. But if we were to try harder to be better, if we were to try harder to be and seem as great as we are, we wouldn’t have to bray so much about the superiority of our system. It would be obvious to all, as obvious as a big light in the darkness.
To be a brighter beacon is not to choose passivity, or follow a path of selfishness. It would take energy and commitment and thought. We’ve always had a lot of that.
A happy Thanksgiving to all who love the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.
Can the Republican Party Recover from Iraq?
The war almost killed the GOP. Whether it can come back is yet to be seen.
The Wall Street Journal: March 21, 2013
The air has been full of 10th-anniversary Iraq war retrospectives. One that caught my eye was a smart piece by Tom Curry, national affairs writer for NBC News, who wrote of one element of the story, the war’s impact on the Republican Party: “The conflict not only transformed” the GOP, “but all of American politics.”
It has, but it’s an unfinished transformation.
Did the Iraq war hurt the GOP? Yes. The war, and the crash of ’08, half killed it. It’s still digging out, and whether it can succeed is an open question.
Here, offered in a spirit of open debate, is what the war did to the GOP:
• It ruined the party’s hard-earned reputation for foreign affairs probity. They started a war and didn’t win it. It was longer and costlier by every measure than the Bush administration said it would be. Before Iraq, the GOP’s primary calling card was that it was the party you could trust in foreign affairs. For half a century, throughout the Cold War, they were serious about the Soviet Union, its moves, feints and threats. Republicans were not ambivalent about the need for and uses of American power, as the Democrats were in the 1970s and 1980s, but neither were they wild. After Iraq, it was the Republicans who seemed at best the party of historical romantics or, alternatively, the worst kind of cynic, which is an incompetent one. Iraq marked a departure in mood and tone from past conservatism.
• It muddied up the meaning of conservatism and bloodied up its reputation. No Burkean prudence or respect for reality was evident. Ronald Reagan hated the Soviet occupation of the Warsaw Pact countries—really, hated the oppression and violence. He said it, named it and forced the Soviets to defend it. He did not, however, invade Eastern Europe to liberate it. He used military power sparingly. He didn’t think the right or lucky thing would necessarily happen. His big dream was a nuclear-free world, which he pursued daringly but peacefully.
• It ended the Republican political ascendance that had begun in 1980. This has had untold consequences, and not only in foreign affairs. And that ascendance was hard-earned. By 2006 Republicans had lost the House, by 2008 the presidency. Mr. Curry quotes National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru at a recent debate at the American Enterprise Institute: “You could make the argument that the beginning of the end of Republican dominance in Washington was the Iraq War, at least a stage of the Iraq War, 2005–06.” In 2008 a solid majority of voters said they disapproved of the war. Three-quarters of them voted for Barack Obama.
• It undermined respect for Republican economic stewardship. War is costly. No one quite knows or will probably ever know the exact financial cost of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is interesting in itself. Some estimates put it at $1 trillion, some $2 trillion. Mr. Curry cites a Congressional Budget Office report saying the Iraq operation had cost $767 billion as of January 2012. Whatever the number, it added to deficits and debt and, along with the Bush administration’s domestic spending, helped erode the Republican Party’s reputation for sobriety in fiscal affairs.
• It quashed debate within the Republican Party. Political parties are political; politics is about a fight. The fight takes place at the polls and in debate. But the high stakes and high drama of the wars—and the sense within the Bush White House that it was fighting for our very life after 9/11—stoked an atmosphere in which doubters and critics were dismissed as weak, unpatriotic, disloyal. The GOP—from top, the Washington establishment, to bottom, the base—was left festering, confused and, as the years passed, lashing out. A conservative movement that had prided itself, in the 1970s and 1980s, on its intellectualism—“Of a sudden, the Republican Party is the party of ideas,” marveled New York’s Democratic Sen. Pat Moynihan in 1979—seemed no longer capable of an honest argument. Free of internal criticism, national candidates looked daffy and reflexively aggressive—John McCain sang “Bomb, Bomb Iran”—and left the party looking that way, too.
• It killed what remained of the Washington Republican establishment. This was not entirely a loss, to say the least. But establishments exist for a reason: They’re supposed to function as the Elders,
and sometimes they’re actually wise. During Iraq they dummied up—criticizing might be bad for the lobbying firm. It removed what credibility the establishment had. And they know it.
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All this of course is apart from the central tragedy, which is the human one—the lost lives, the wounded, the families that will now not be formed, or that have been left smaller, and damaged.
Iraq and Afghanistan have ended badly for the Republicans, and the party won’t really right itself until it has candidates for national office who can present a new definition of what a realistic and well-grounded Republican foreign policy is, means and seeks to do. That will take debate. The party is now stuck more or less in domestic issues. As for foreign policy, they oppose Obama. In the future more will be needed.
Many writers this week bragged about their opposition to the war, or defended their support of it. I’m not sure what good that does, but since I’m calling for debate, here we go.
I had questions about an invasion until Colin Powell testified before the U.N. in February 2003. In a column soon after: “From the early days of the debate I listened to the secretary of state closely and with respect. I was glad to see a relative dove in the administration. It needed a dove. Mr. Powell’s war-hawk foes seemed to me both bullying and unrealistic. Why not go slowly to war? A great nation should show a proper respect for the opinion of mankind, it should go to the world with evidence and argument, it should attempt to win allies. A lot of people tracked Mr. Powell’s journey, and in a way took it with him. Looking back I think I did, too.”
Mr. Powell told the U.N. Saddam Hussein must be stopped and asserted that Iraq had developed and was developing weapons of mass destruction. That turned out not to be true.