I sympathize with E.J. Dionne. I do. But, in the midst of his righteous outrage he gives one of those classic bromides.
The budget disaster [Bush] stuck us with requires little elaboration. But notice all the stories in the wake of the [New Hampshire GOP] debate about Republicans moving back toward isolationism. The lesson here is that reckless interventionism inevitably produces a backlash into potentially reckless non-interventionism.
Let’s think about “reckless non-interventionism” for a minute. The classic example is Munich 1938, when the Allied Powers still had time to check Hitler’s ambitions but chose appeasement and a temporary peace instead. We can envision a repeat of this in the modern age, either through failing to prevent nuclear proliferation or through letting a terroristic threat fester unaddressed until it bites us in the ass. But, let’s be real. There are no Hitler’s in the world today who can rival and dwarf American military power within five years if we let our guard down.
Of all the faults we can ascribe to the Republicans, this has got to be last one on the list. We suffer so much more from our propensity to intervene than from any inclination not to, that Dionne comes off looking like a nitpicker at best and an idiot at worst.
I would love for the GOP to explore non-interventionism. It will be forever before it reaches a reckless or irresponsible level.
I would say if he was able to go down that road unchecked and we had another Darfur on our hands the price of non-intervention would have been pretty darn high especially since this was one place both our NATO allies and many governments in the middle east wanted us to intervene.
Yup. Wonder why ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Manmade_River
http://watersecurity.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/egyptian-water-security-vs-ethiopian-development/
Israel’s Chronic Water Problem
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/scarcity.html
The quick and the dirty is an infomercial hosted on its own channel on YouTube : Home – the Home Project
My almost never used Topical Index at http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com has a list ‘Water – Wealth & Power’ sparked by an old post ‘End of an Era’ dealing with the loss of usable drinking water. The Home Project link is there, of course.
Oh. The relevance of a resource stealing culture with a worldwide network of military bases working hand in glove with the British Empire and Commonwealth to thieve resources worldwide – especially mining – to a desire to ‘just get along.’
What do you think ‘Yankee Go Home’ means? It isn’t as if the phrase hasn’t been around for a while. Why people starving and dying under the whip of the slaver can’t be more agreeable. Terrible manners.
Christ on a crutch. Et tu E.J. Dionne?
Please, somebody, anybody, tell me “compassionate conservatism” isn’t going to win again in 2016? Please? Because if we’re at the point where E.J. Dionne is waxing nostalgic even a little bit for Bush’s domestic agenda, we are so fucking screwed.
http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/history/
Since ‘the Bible for Iraq’ setting out the importance of re-fragmenting Iraq to destabilizing the whole area of the Indian subcontinent – including the Kashmir/India/Pakistan/China dysfunction – is likely still stamped Secret ( the wargame ‘Post Saddam Iraq : Desert Crossing’ ) and the Kurd/Turkey ethnic struggle ( is it really ‘Iraq’ any more ? ) I thought a look at the pattern of deception employed in installing puppet governments might show why U.S. ‘popularity’ is a negative value.
Notoriety, not so much ! Nor the Brits either.
Oh. ‘Democratic’ party running things when the balloon went up. In Kosavo too !
How did the GOP miss being the villains ? Rather like Afghanistan/Pakistan/Egypt/Libya etc. of late.
It’s too bad that the debate in the US has gotten so hung up over the war powers of the Presidency. There are trends going on relative to the UN that Europe is picking up on that are going right by the US. The Security Council and the UN Human Rights Council are having substantial debates about how exactly to enforce actions against states that are carrying out “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes”. The US, Russia, and China (to name the big powers with this attitude) have an absolutist view of sovereignty that makes the idea of effective enforcement of UN resolutions difficult and weighted toward inaction.
The US has been most interventionist when it acted unilaterally, not when it acted within a UN framework. The classic case of isolationism was Republicans during the period between World War I and World War II. And the failure to stop the World War I allies from taking punitive action against a changed regime (the Weimar Republic) weakened that first German attempt to live outside of a monarchy and brought dictatorship. The failure of the League of Nations to be able to act on its decisions created a global power vacuum that caused Hitler and Stalin to think they could have their way. The designers of the UN structure sought to avoid that trap without encouraging too much intervention. And the President and Congress decided not to repeat the disastrous policies that saw the US advocate the League of Nations and then fail to ratify the treaty.
Just as the scars of World War I fueled the delegitimizing of war as a policy and spawned an activist peace movement, the scars of World War II resulted in a penchant for “police actions” instead of having situations deteriorate into general war.
It is striking what has happened in my lifetime. Nuclear war has been delegitimized as has biological and chemical war; the US has foregone the neutron bomb and South Africa and putatively Libya have foregone nuclear weapons programs. The Cold War provided an international experience of living in a hair-trigger world for 42 years. And the wisdom that led to the more or less peaceful unraveling of the Soviet empire. And end to the Cold War. Most of the many wars that have occurred since the end of the Cold War have been internal wars. The big exceptions: the First Gulf War; the Afghanistan War; and the Iraq War.
What has been proved during this period is the impracticality of conventional warfare. Thus all the doctrines of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism. Asymmetric warfare is all that is left as a real military strategy. And bluffs and threats. The growth in multilateral efforts to keep combatants apart has contributed to this.
What has happened during this period is that the world began relying on the US to police their regions (and the US was quite willing to push this role). That period has ended. The US is no longer seen nor does it anymore see itself as indispensable.
But…a precipitous retrenchment of US foreign policy into the isolationism of the 1930s could make a more, not less dangerous world. The US as the largest economic unit (for now) and third most populous nation (and largest by far military budget) should not disengage from efforts to create regional mutual security organizations. This is why it was important that Secretary of State Clinton go to the African Union; they have taken on security responsibilities in several African countries (recently Somalia). And why it was important that the Arab League bring a request for a resolution to the UN. And why it will be equally important that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization be the vehicle for ensuring that the frontline states do not destabilize Afghanistan. (That’s still a tall order, not the least because the US is not and should not be a player is what is essentially within the security interests of Russia, China, India, and Pakistan acting as regional powers. If those four can agree not to use Afghanistan as a proxy, there is the possibility of stability.
So the debate between interventionism and non-interventionism is a false one. What is required is specific to the situation of a particular time and place. The real debate is when there is a threat to peace and stability or the threat of a government committing crimes against its own people, who should intervene, how should they intervene, and when in terms of a particular situation should they intervene. The UN and regional security organizations are feeling their way along in figuring this out. In the midst of the continual jockeying for power among nations.
For the US, there needs to be a re-examining of what exactly is in its national security interest. It is more important to leave Iraq and Afghanistan on schedule with no US footprint left behind — no bases, no super-embassies, no CIA facilities. Than anything related to Libya, which is now primarily a European refugee issue. A serious refugee issue that potentially could swing France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark hard right. That and the failure of the international finance community to deal realistically with the economic collapse of 2008 (and the austerity policies in Portugal, Greece, Ireland, and possibly Spain) could potentially destabilize Europe in a way that we have not seen since World War II. If there is any direct US national security interest Libya, it has to do with quickly ending the flow of refugees that is putting pressure on European domestic politics. The collapse of the European Union would be catastrophic.
It is distressing watching US politicians trying to sabotage the very international institutions their predecessors worked so hard to put into place after World War II. And purely to have some political football to kick around in campaigns. It is distressing because it is like folks striking matches near an open gas can.
BTW, watch how Turkey begins to deal with the situation in Syria. It looks like US diplomacy has farmed out to Turkey what would have been previously seen as primarily a US-Israeli issue. That seems like a smart move to me.
I think there are legitimate arguments for intervention on occasion. I’m not sure about Libya.
But I do believe that if we’d blindly followed a policy of not going to war or using our military except when we were directly attacked, we’d be a lot better off overall.