Muscular liberals and neoconservatives hate each other only because they are so much alike.
The media and the Washington foreign policy elite breathed a sigh of relief when Barack Obama thumped John McCain in the election. Had John McCain won, there was always the chance that the neoconservatives would have beaten out the Republican realists for his foreign policy soul. With a victory by the liberal Obama, however, the stake would finally be driven into the heart of the “jingoistic” neoconservative vampire.
Yet even after Obama takes power, an evil foreign policy ghoul will still hover over the White House — this time wearing the benign clothes of a compassionate angel. Obama’s top foreign policy advisors include Susan Rice, a member of the “muscular liberal” crowd — you know, the same crew that includes the bombing progressives Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke. In a National Public Radio interview during the campaign, Rice decried President George W. Bush’s invasion and nation-building adventure in Iraq, while at the same time advocating U.S. intervention and nation-building in Darfur, Sudan.
Muscular liberals and neoconservatives hate each other only because they are so much alike. Although neoconservatives feel less favorable toward any U.N. or other multilateral veneer for the mailed U.S. fist than muscular liberals, they still love to invade other nations for righteous reasons — that is, to save the world or make it more like us.
But I should not criticize a president — whether Democratic or Republican — before he even takes office and actually does something. Perhaps Obama will directly address the foreign policy demons in his own party. He originally had good instincts about a rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, but over the course of the campaign, tempered his position as the U.S. surge seemed to “work.” No doubt, behind the scenes, his foreign policy “experts” have warned him of all the alleged pitfalls of such an expedited exit.
By paying off, arming, and training the Sunni militias in Iraq (the U.S. had previously done the same thing with the Iraqi forces, which had been infiltrated by Kurdish and Shi’i militias), the Bush administration has tamed down the violence until it is safely out of office, but this also likely will make a future civil war among the groups even more intense. Obama should pay attention to his instincts — not his advisers — and take advantage of the lull in violence to get out while the gettin’s good.
Also, Obama should avoid a confrontation with Russia over deploying a U.S. missile defense in Europe. The ham-handed Russians have not made it easy. Without even first publicly congratulating Obama on his election victory, the Russians threatened to deploy short-range missiles that have the range to hit the defense facilities in Poland. This response from Russia seems to fulfill Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s prediction that the young, inexperienced president would be rapidly tested in an international crisis.
Although Russia’s reaction to the proposed deployment of missile defense is somewhat understandable given its suffering from repeated U.S.-led expansions of the historically hostile NATO alliance right up to its borders, the blustering Russia has now made it hard for the neophyte president to abandon the system without fulfilling John McCain’s prediction of his foreign policy weakness. Instead, the Russians should have quietly waited to see what the new president would do about such defenses; Obama previously had expressed some skepticism about the need for rapid U.S. deployment of the costly and questionable system. Publicly calling out Obama on the issue before he even took office made it hard for the new president to wisely terminate deployment plans without seeming to have backed down. Nevertheless, Obama has many legitimate excuses to abandon the expensive and unneeded system without referring to Russian opposition.
The cutback of this unnecessary weapon system should be just one of many. At minimum, the Defense Department should also cut the Army’s Future Combat Systems, the Navy’s new destroyer, and the Air Force’s Joint Strike Fighter. Barney Frank, the Democratic Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is on the right track by advocating a 25 percent reduction in the defense budget.
More generally, two endless foreign quagmires and the U.S. financial and economic crisis have brought home, like a cold slap in the face, the fact that U.S. imperial and interventionist foreign and defense policies, advocated by both neoconservatives and muscular liberals, have brought strategic overextension that is unaffordable in times of yawning budget deficits and economic frailty. Obama should fight off the ghosts of foreign policy past, even within the Democratic Party, and opt for “change.” More restrained and affordable foreign and defense policies would be politically saleable to the nation in times of economic peril. “Yes, we can” (retract the empire).
I agree that we should pull the troops home in order of when we originally deployed to the area. Hmmm in case that is hard to understand pull them from places like Germany, Bosnia, Korea, Japan, UK, and all those other spots followed by Iraq and Afghanistan. Then use these troops to establish border security.
As far as cutting defense expenditures I suspect that you are not a student of history and wrongly believe that FDR brought the country out a depression with his welfare programs, unfortunately the facts do not agree with that feel good assessment. Maybe instead of reductions we need a good war to jump start the economy!
Quite interesting that you point out the military likeness between the neocons and the lib. illuminati. I had never thought about that before. It’s not that libs are against war, they are against wars that weren’t started under liberal administrations.
Yes, at last we can return to the non-interventionist, small-military-budget, peaceful and harmonious years of the glorious Clinton administration! And then with any luck the next round of Saudi nutjobs won’t miss their mark the next time they want to fly a plane into the white house…
This is old news.
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2007/08/21/who%e2%80%99s-crazier-the-far-left-or-the-far-right/
Who’s Crazier: The Far Left, or the Far Right?
The answer is: they’re both equally nuts. In certain cases, although the foundations of these philosophies are based on polar opposite assumptions, the actual policies they propose are virtually indistinguishable from one another.
People like to visualize the difference between Left-Right political views by drawing a straight line. “Moderates” are in the middle, and the farther one moves left or right from the center, the more “liberal” or “conservative” these views become.
To an extent it’s a helpful tool to identify political ideas. However, when the opinions they represent approach the ends of the line, something curious happens. Rather than just continue out ad infinitum, they begin to curve back and form a circle. In certain cases, although the foundations of these philosophies are based on polar opposite assumptions, the actual policies they propose are virtually indistinguishable from one another. …
Ivan, I am hard pressed to find an area in which we disagree here. I can only hope that President-elect Obama does not make Hilary Clinton his Secretary of State.
Mikey G, you demonstrate a good surface understanding of history, recalling that events like World War II bolstered the US economy. Unfortunately, our modern nation has an economy that relies on technological development and services- things that can benefit from a war, but not in the way you are thinking. In the 1940s, the United States worked on an industrial production economy. A giant war, requiring lots of machines to be built and engaging lots of workers, was a great help to the economy. But now, in a war, we have American companies design the weapons, and build them somewhere else- we reap little relative benefit. And don’t tell me the government should force companies to build here, with American workers- these corporations should be allowed to do what they please, for better or worse.
The evidence? A war wont jumpstart the economy; two of them have not in the last six years.
Citizen543,
We’ve an alternate theory that’s been bandied in these pages regarding the FDR-WWII rebound that goes something like this: Hoover and FDR’s pre-war economic policies, meant to stimulate recovery, instead deepened, broadened and prolonged the depression. FDR wasn’t so obsessed and enamored of his policies he could not experiment and/or reverse himself, but overall, he stuck to his guns despite a dismal ROI. Thus, his initial, highly anti-capital policies continued the initial soaring unemployment in his first term (24%), which he (according to some sources) managed to cut by half in time for the 1936 election. [Arguments can be made both ways, but I tend to be skeptical because New Dealers and their descendents intentionally altered unemployment accounting methods to make things look rosier. FDR skeptics contend real unemployment (including many New Deal make-work schemes) amounted to 19.1% as late as 1938.] Rauchway and other defenders claim the U.S. as the first country to emerge from the Depression and that it was the war that turned the corner for us. He is wrong on two counts. First, Germany began its recovery in 1934, a full seven years earlier; and, second, both the U.S. and Germany paid their way out of recession using manipulated currency resulting in staggering debts. Germany then paid off its debt through conquest and plunder.
Virginia Postrel argues ( http://dynamist.com/articles-speeches/nyt/war.html ) the real reason for the WWII rebound was America was ‘under-producing’; that war is strictly an expense and, therefore, should be weighed against the alternatives for least cost (i.e., if war is cheaper than containment in the long run, then war makes better economic sense despite the cost). Taking her argument further, the real reason the U.S. economy rebounded, then, seems to be: FDR tabled the socialist voodoo economics to bolster the war effort. Essentially, he relaxed the command-economy constraints, allowing a partial return to free-market dynamics. To the extent he allowed businesses to self-manage, the economy improved. Where before he’d taken the side of labor, he now told labor to shut up and get back to work. Where before he’d controlled lending and rates, he now let the market decide. Even so, inflation and currency devaluation continued as before (or still more aggressively), doubling the price of goods by war’s end. Accepting Postrel’s argument, WWII does not prove war to be an economic stimulus; it merely proves it can disrupt an anti-economic policy holding things back.
This still leaves the question unanswered, though, are there ever circumstances in which war is an economic stimulus. The other great example we have for this is the American Civil War. Civil War profiteering (racketeering) was complained of mostly because it was at the expense of soldiers. Yet, it was so profitable gouging the government almost every businessman and grocer wanted a piece of the action and Congressional corruption became staggeringly offensive. Inflation and soaring prices, then as later were a problem, but not so great it caused significant disruption to the Northern economy. By war’s end, there were winners and losers, but overall the economic situation was robust.
Still, this may be misleading, because, in the same period, we saw the greatest western expansion, industrial invention, banking innovation, transportation and communication growth, steam revolution, and land utilization. Mid-century may simply have been a period of extraordinary opportunity which, coupled with war excitement, stimulated optimism. I tend to agree with Postrel in assuming the Civil War was an expense, and that war profiteering merely tapped growth in other parts of the economy diverted to war.