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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (102047)	6/19/2003 10:09:55 AM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 281500

An addendum to my previous observations: Actually, both the McGovernite Left and the Goldwater/Reagan Right were attacks on Realism, as expressed in the policy of containment. The Left found it distasteful to dirty our hands in propping up unsavory regimes, engaging in "black ops" measures, and getting tied up in limited wars for the sake of thwarting ostensible Soviet strategic objectives, and therefore began to drift to "anti- anti- communism", if not actual fellow traveling. The smartist version of this was actually formulated by Norman Mailer, who pointed out that the Communist world was not monolithic, and therefore had antagonisms of its own, especially after the Chinese split with the Soviet Union in the mid- '60s. Thus, in his argument, even if the Communism gained more territory, it would splinter even further and not represent a strong cumulative threat, but would metastasize in various directions. The obvious objection to that is that the proliferation of states hostile to the United States makes the world intrinsically more dangerous, even if they are not working in a terribly coordinated fashion. On the other hand, Goldwater represented the conservative view that the doctrine of containment was immoral and dangerous. Containment, and, later, detente, was associated with Realism. In the view of the Right, containment ceded the captive nations of Europe to Communism, and resigned the expansion into China and Korea, instead of opposing it. By depending on internal decay, it made the dominance of Communism a matter of generations, and by accepting the status quo, made it at least as likely that American vigilance would weaken, as that Communism would fall. Neoconservatives, who had been "Cold War" liberals, saw the growth of the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party as tending to validate the Right's criticism of containment, and call for a more activist engagement with the Soviet Union.........

To: Neocon who wrote (102047)	6/19/2003 1:25:57 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

First, you have no recognition of the meaning of the ascendency of the neoconservatives in establishment circles. Dumb me. How could I have forgotten that? Your current nemeses are exactly the one's most prone to pursuing an activist pro- democracy agenda. I am quite well aware of that but read it as cover for empire building not human rights concerns. I don't doubt that some neocons may in fact believe the democracy talk. But I don't think the Bush foreign policy is based on it. Witness the failure of Afghanistan for one. And, unfortunately, there are likely to be future failures. In which the point is to create client states which don't harbor terrorists, to use their language, rather than to create genuine democracies with growing economies. As for the debates you invoke, one can argue that much of that was about broad or narrow definitions of national self interest. Kissinger, as the most articulate spokesperson, had fairly narrow. I tried to use the adjective "narrow" in describing those aims. The striking thing about Carter is that the justifications went beyond either narrow or broad definitions of self interest and into claiming moral grounds. Again, that was central to Carter's efforts. And it's implementation was consonant wiht those justifications. As for Clinton, which is the point I thought you would address, the Bosnia-Kosovo and even Haiti bit I invoked was justified on the basis of broad definitions of self interest and, sometimes, on moral grounds which transcend it. That argument is less clear. So, the short of it is, I recognize that some neocons argue for a foreign policy which puts encouraging democracy and economic development above narrow definitions of self interest (realism). But the Bush administration has adopted that rhetoric only as a way to move populations, not as a serious self-justification. And then there is the militarization of foreign policy under the Bushies. Which will have the unfortunate effect of creating more terrorists. No serious attention to building better societies. And the failure to seriously, as I said above, build democracy and economic growth in Afghanistan.