Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald
Study after study has demonstrated that, when it comes to foreign policy, there is a wide gap between American elite decision-makers and the general public. And it has grown in recent years, given the massive amount of money and soldiers lost in the inconclusive wars waged since 2001, in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
While America’s leaders are internationalists and promote globalization and the economic development of foreign nations, most Americans are more concerned with domestic matters, including their own economic welfare and security.
Will this lead to a new wave of isolationism, a recurring theme in U.S. politics?
The Republican Party was historically isolationist. Three Republican presidents between 1920 and 1932 kept America out of “foreign entanglements” in Europe. America’s armed forces were puny.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat, was by inclination more of an internationalist, yet he too was unable to swing American public opinion towards war and the defence of democracy abroad, even as Hitler, Mussolini and Japan were conquering large parts of Europe and Asia in the 1930s.
The U.S. did not have a defence treaty with a single country — including Canada — until 1940. It was only the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that changed all that.
The Cold War saw a sea change in Republican attitudes, and Republican presidents after 1952 were committed to a world-wide system of alliances, particularly NATO, to contain the expansion of Communist states such as China and the Soviet Union.
Even so, it was Republican Dwight Eisenhower who ended the Korean War after his election in 1952, and it was Richard Nixon who slowly wound down the Vietnam War. He also ended the confrontation between America and China.
For all his bravado, Ronald Reagan made sure to stay out of any major conflicts during his eight years in office. But all of this changed with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism in Europe.
The 1991 Gulf War saw Washington engage in warfare in Iraq, followed by Bill Clinton’s wars in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999, in the former Yugoslavia. Wilsonian liberal interventionism on behalf of “democracy” and “human rights” became the order of the day. (It didn’t, however, extend to the genocide in Rwanda.)
But George Bush’s wars after 2001 have led to war-weariness — they seemed endless and with no genuine resolution.
Barack Obama won election against John McCain in 2008 as the “anti-Bush,” but his own foreign policy is totally incoherent.
A “dove” by nature and philosophy, he seems unable to make up his mind as to whether to fight terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, and so he takes half measures such as drone strikes against jihadis in Yemen and Pakistan, and “leading from behind” in the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya in 2011. He has no idea what to do about the war in Syria.
The disputes between Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and the Palestinians, are other headaches he wishes would go away, even as they consume his days.
So what now? If we assume that Hillary Clinton gains her party’s nomination for president in 2016, where does that leave those Democrats who seek a less aggressive foreign policy? Unlike Obama, she supported George Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, and she’s definitely more of a foreign policy “hawk” than Obama is.
She is also an enthusiastic supporter of increased military support to those battling terrorists in Iraq and Syria.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, is in the midst of a real period of soul-searching. It has voices who call for a more robust military policy abroad, even if it costs taxpayers money, but it also now contains many who feel America has over-stretched itself and faces huge problems at home.
Today, 63 per cent of Republicans believe the Iraq war wasn’t worth it, according to a recent poll. So the long-dormant isolationist wing of the party may be reviving, and coalescing around the improbable candidacy of libertarian Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Paul has long been wary of foreign intervention and also has spoken out against foreign aid programs.
In an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal in June, Paul recommended that Washington shouldn’t take sides in Iraq’s civil war.
Responding to attacks by McCain and former vice-president Dick Cheney, Paul noted that “Many of those clamouring for military action now are the same people who made every false assumption imaginable about the cost, challenge and purpose of the Iraq war.”
Paul would face long odds, including opposition from the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower warned Americans about as he left office. Still, stranger things have happened.
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