- The era of "Cowboy Diplomacy" is over, writes
Time magazine.
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- The Bush Doctrine "The world's worst regimes
will not be allowed to acquire the world's worst weapons" is
being defied by Iran's Ahmadinejad and North Korea's Kim Jong-Il, with
impunity.
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- The White House seems to have lost interest in its democracy
crusade, after free elections advanced the prospects of the Muslim Brotherhood
in Egypt, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas on the West Bank. In Ukraine,
the victors of the Orange Revolution have made a mess of things, and the
pro-Putin forces are making a comeback.
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- Neither the Afghan war, in its fifth year, nor the Iraq
war, in its fourth, goes well. U.S. casualties are not falling, while the
death toll among Afghans and Iraqis mounts toward levels where they may
have to be described as not simply insurgencies, but civil wars.
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- America is a spectator in the Palestinian conflict, wringing
its hands, but backing Israel as she seeks to starve to death a Hamas that
came to power in elections Bush himself sponsored.
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- What has happened? What has rendered impotent the robust
cowboy diplomacy of George W. Bush, a policy of preemptive strikes and
preventive wars, of crusades for global democracy and ridding the world
of tyrants, a policy declared in his "axis-of-evil" address and
Second Inaugural?
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- Answer: Bush has run up against the limits of power.
Strong as our military may be, it is but one-tenth of the size of the U.S
forces that conquered Germany and Japan. U.S. air and missile power, and
U.S. special forces guiding warlord armies, can knock over a Taliban regime,
with few losses. U.S. armored divisions, backed by unrivaled air and missile
power, can roll over an Iraqi army and unhorse an Iraqi regime.
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- But building a nation is another matter. As the French
learned in the Ruhr in 1923, "you cannot dig coal with bayonets,"
Americans are discovering you cannot build a democratic nation on Islamic
soil in Texas-sized nations like Iraq and Afghanistan without a massive,
long-term occupation, if a slice of the population looks upon the regime
you support as a sock puppet of American imperialism.
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- Why has Bush decided diplomacy is the better part of
valor in dealing with Iran and North Korea? Consider the alternative.
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- Pyongyang is a formidable power with a million-man army
and 11,000 artillery pieces on the DMZ. Iran is three times as populous
and four times the size of Iraq. Should Bush attack either, he could end
his term with U.S. forces fighting three major wars.
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- But if the military option carries too many risks, multilateral
diplomacy appears to offer little hope. China and Russia will veto any
tough UN sanctions on Iran or North Korea. They have no desire to pull
America's chestnuts out of the fire. Is the United States, then, "the
pitiful, helpless giant" Nixon warned we could become?
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- By no means. Though the neocon bombast about our being
"the unipolar power," the "indispensable nation," "the
benevolent global hegemon" was always fatuous, America remains the
first military, economic, cultural, and political force on the planet.
We are simply not omnipotent indeed, far from it, as always.
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- What is needed is fresh thought on foreign policy now
that Cowboy Diplomacy is being abandoned by Bush. We are at what Walter
Lippmann called a "plastic moment," when a new foreign policy
can be imposed to meet a changed world. And the place to begin is by returning
to basics. What are the vital interests of the United States, and who threatens
them?
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- On the terrorism front, the president has done well.
Since 9/11, 85,000 Americans have been murdered, but not one due to a terrorist
attack. While we need to be vigilant, there is no need to frighten ourselves
to death over terrorism. We are all going to die, but few of us by terrorist
attack.
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- As we cannot ensure Iran and North Korea are free of
nukes without invading, and we are not going to invade, we should put both
on notice, as we did Moscow in the missile crisis, that if any WMD used
in an attack on the United States is traced to either, a full retaliatory
response will follow. But if they wish such relations as we had with China
and Russia in the late Cold War, they are on offer.
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- Then, we should pull our troops out of Korea, where they
are hostages in harm's way. If the South wishes to appease the North, let
them run the risks and assume the consequences.
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- As one reviews the ledgers of his foreign policy, Bush
seems to have alienated or antagonized just about everyone on earth, with
precious little to compensate us for our war losses. And if we are about
to jettison his cowboy diplomacy, perhaps it is time to look again at the
successful policies Bush and the neocons dismissed and deplore. For, unlike
theirs, these policies never failed America.
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- What are they? The anti-interventionism of the Founding
Fathers from Washington to Wilson, and the conservative policy of containment
and deterrence pursued by Eisenhower and Reagan.
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- Both deserve a hearing in the politics of 2008
one that neither McCain nor Hillary will give them.
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- PROGRESSIVE REVIEW Copyright 2006 by NextEra Media. All
rights reserved. Feel free to forward this, in its entirety, to others.
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