CAMPAIGN 2004
Once Were Warriors
On foreign policy, are the Democrats again the party of Truman?
BY WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
Sunday, January 25, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
Are the Democrats coming back to their roots? It is still very early in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but with more than 80% of Iowa caucus-goers endorsing candidates who voted at least to authorize the U.S. strike against Iraq, it is beginning to look as if the Democrats are ready to put the antiwar temptation behind them in order to challenge George W. Bush for the White House.
That would be good news for the Democrats. No antiwar candidate can win a national contest in 2004. It would also be good news for the country and for the world. The illusion that a Democratic administration would abandon the vigorous prosecution of the war on terror is one of the few hopes to which America's enemies can still cling.
Historically, the Democrats have been America's war party. Bob Dole got into trouble during his 1976 vice presidential campaign when he denounced World War I and World War II, along with Vietnam and Korea, as "Democrat Wars," but most of America's foreign wars began with Democrats in the White House: add the Mexican War, the Cold War and the War of 1812 to the Democrats' count. Republicans, even including the Federalist and Whig predecessors to the GOP, could only claim the Spanish American War and the Gulf War before the War on Terror and George W. Bush.
"Vote for a Republican," people used to say, "and you get a Depression. Vote for a Democrat, and you get a war."
Most of the Democrats' wars were, to use what is becoming a popular phrase today, "wars of choice." The War of 1812 was, strictly speaking, unnecessary; unbeknownst to Congress, Britain had already revoked the Orders in Council before war was declared. In the Mexican War, James Knox Polk sent U.S. forces into disputed territory well before exhausting all diplomatic avenues. More recently, the Vietnamese and Korean conflicts were, if not quite wars of choice, wars whose primary purpose was not to safeguard either the territory or the citizens of the U.S., but its broad strategic interests. U.S. interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo were also wars of choice; the United States faced no direct military threat as a result of Serbian madness and misrule. The Cold War was preventive; the Soviet Union did not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. in 1947. Of all the wars of all the Democrats, only the two world wars were clearly wars of necessity--and some historians argue that a more evenhanded policy by President Wilson could have kept the U.S. out of World War I as well.
In the 19th century, idealistic and pacifist war critics were found mostly among Federalists, Whigs and Republicans. Republican senators like George Norris and William Borah continued the tradition--as did the Republican Rep. Jeannette Rankin, who voted against both World War I and World War II. As progressives gradually moved into the Democratic Party through the New Deal period, the Democratic Party became the natural host for America's partisans of protest. Franklin Roosevelt's former secretary of agriculture Henry Wallace led his Progressive Party out of the Democrats to punish Harry Truman for initiating the Cold War. During the Vietnam War, Democratic senators like William Fulbright and Eugene McCarthy led the opposition.
Had a Democrat been president on Sept. 11, 2001, a combination of political calculation and personal conviction would have almost certainly pushed the administration toward a vigorous prosecution of the war--just as both the Truman and Carter administrations were caught up in confrontations with the Soviet Union. Many of the Democrats who served the Clinton administration were instinctive hawks. Madeleine Albright is one of the most passionate antitotalitarians in American life and has always called herself a child of Munich rather than a child of Vietnam. Richard Holbrooke has the talent and the toughness to play the role of a latter-day Dean Acheson.
In any case, a strong Democratic president in the White House, backed by the kinds of public majorities that have backed the Bush administration's prosecution of the war, would have been able to tame and control the party's antiwar wing and--whatever the protest on the Kucinich-Nader fringe--put the Democrats solidly in the center of public opinion on the war. This is the strategy towards which both President and Sen. Clinton seem to be heaving the party, but until the Iowa voters spoke Monday night, it was not clear whether this push would succeed. With Iowa voters signaling that opposition to the war is not their main priority, the moderates seem firmly in the saddle.
In fact, the mainstream Democratic candidates are mostly noticeable for the very small differences between their proposals and the foreign policies of the Bush administration. Looked at carefully, it is more style than substance: They would be nicer to the U.N. and to the Europeans than President Bush was, in the hope that this would bring more support for U.S. foreign policy.
But what if, in office, they kiss the frog and it doesn't turn into a prince? What if Jacques Chirac, for example, continues to oppose American foreign policy even if President Kerry or President Edwards tries to be nicer to him? President Clinton kissed a lot of frogs and didn't get much help on issues like Iraq. And to some degree, a Democratic president's hands will be tied. The Senate is unlikely to ratify either the Kyoto Protocol or the treaty establishing an international criminal court no matter who is in the White House next year. If Old Europe and the U.N. refuse to help the U.S. in Iraq in a pragmatic and timely fashion, then the Democrats would be stuck with something that looks a great deal like the Bush foreign policy.
Republicans faced a similar problem in the Truman years. As Truman and Acheson developed the strategy that became known as containment, Richard Nixon described the State Department that put together the Marshall Plan and NATO as "Dean Acheson's cowardly college of communist containment." Truman's policies in Korea--avoiding all-out war with China and settling for a stalemate--were unacceptably weak. We needed something more muscular: unleashing Chiang Kai-Shek in Taiwan, and rolling back communism in Europe rather than merely containing it. And in the meantime, we needed a much more vigorous prosecution of security risks in the U.S. government.
Once in power, the GOP was step by step forced into accepting most of Truman's foreign policy. Chiang remained on Taiwan; no U.S. tanks rushed into Hungary in 1956. The Eisenhower administration worked behind the scenes to crush Sen. Joseph McCarthy--and accepted a compromise peace in Korea. Republicans continued to blame Truman and Roosevelt for decisions (at Yalta, for example) that made these policies necessary, but at the level of policy they bowed to the inevitable and carried on with containment.
The war on terror is still very young, and history rarely repeats itself exactly. Still, it is more likely than not that when the Democrats get back in office, they will fight the war on terror in ways that won't be completely unrecognizable to the Republicans fighting it now.
Mr. Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "Power Terror Peace and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk," forthcoming from Knopf in April. |
