I don’t want to pick on Markos, but I am finding the debate that is going on about the philosophy or brand of the Democratic Party to be vapid and misplaced. The Bush administration has been revolutionary. The reaction to the Bush administration has been unfocused largely because the administration has stalwartly refused to operate within any of the long-established paradigms that existed in Washington D.C. The situation was best captured in a Ron Suskind article in the New York Times Magazine in October 2004.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Prior to Bush’s ascendancy, there was a bipartisan consensus about the nature and moral rectitude of the American Empire. There were vocal critics of American imperialism on both the left and the right. But the guiding principles of American foreign policy were defined by the Truman Doctrine, and the philosophy of Dean Acheson. Eisenhower continued those policies under the tutelage of the Dulles brothers, while Kennedy famously said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Those assumptions were temporarily wrecked on the shoals of Indochina. Yet, even as Carter initiated a vicious guerilla war in Afghanistan and Reagan obsessed about leftist movements in Central America, the nation agreed on the necessity of enormous military budgets and didn’t question the special responsibility of America to “assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
With the breakup of the Soviet Union many expected a peace dividend. But the foreign policy establishment adroitly shifted the focus from the threat of communism to the threat of terrorism. Yet, under Clinton, the focus was on shifting NATO eastward, integrating the Eastern Bloc into Western Europe, and promoting democratic and free-market reforms throughout the former USSR. There would be no peace dividend. Instead, there would be any ever-increasing number of military outposts and bases…in Eastern Europe, in Africa, in the Arabian Peninsula, in Central Asia.
The guiding principles (bipartisan in nature) of the post-Cold War American imperialism can be seen in former Carter National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1998 book, The Grand Chessboard. Below, I’ll supply extensive quotes from Brzezinski’s book:
“Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power.”- (p. xiii)
“… But in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book.” (p. xiv)
“In that context, how America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.” (p.31)
“Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.” (p.35)
“The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.” (p.125)
“In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last.” (p.209)
“Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” (p. 211)
The ‘truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat’ is with us now. It is Islamofascism, or Islamic fundmentalism, or a nuclear Iran, or the grave threat of Saddam Hussein. This is not some conspiracy theory. This is neo-conservatism. Brzezinski represents the old consensus. He is no fan of the war in Iraq.
ZB: It leaves the realists still with the reality of other practical problems for which neoconservative solutions have been discredited. One would have to be close to insane to say that our experience in Iraq has been an unqualified success. If the Iraqis are smart enough to ask us to leave, and if we are smart enough actually to leave, the fact remains that the Iraq operation has gravely undermined American global credibility. It has even more seriously compromised us morally. It has shown the limits of our warfare capability for dealing with political conflict. It has cost tens of billions of dollars more than originally estimated. And it would take a very naive president to again succumb to the same people who first demagogued about the need to go to war, who vastly exaggerated the welcome we would receive, who mismanaged the political dimensions of the war.
As Brzezinski correctly divines, the neo-conservatives have discredited not only themselves, but the very imperial policies that have defined the political center of America for sixty years. It is this crippling realization that has paralyzed Senators like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry, as well as startled Washington insiders like Tom Friedman and Fred Hiatt. Ironically, it is the blunt instrument of American imperialism, our armed forces, that have been left to disabuse the Establishment about our prospects for success in Iraq.
We are still in the early stages of a much greater reckoning. The center is still holding, insisting that a withdrawal from Iraq will be a ‘disaster for the country’ and resisting anything that might further erode support for the war…such as rigourous oversight of government corruption, illegal domestic surveillance, the manipulation of intelligence, or the removal of Donald Rumsfeld from the Pentagon.
When we sit down to talk about what the Democratic Party stands for, we have to realize that the center of the Democratic Party has been just as discredited as the center of the Republican Party.
Moderates propose to put our foreign policy apparatus back in the hands of the ‘realists’ and to return to our prior strategy of working within the United Nations and NATO, respecting international law, adiding by treaties, etc. But, the old consensus has been wiped away. And not, as Brzezinski suggested, by an “increasingly multi-cultural society”, but by a remarkably raw showing of the true nature, aims, and costs of the imperial policies of the country’s wisemen.
The sheer cost of the Iraq adventure is debilitating enough. We have watched one allied government after another fall to the opposition. Blair recently announced that he will not back us on strikes on Iran. Latin America has drifted sharply to the left. The devastation in Iraq has alienated the United States from our Cold War allies to such a degree that no new administration or Congress can put the pieces back together again.
America cannot fight a global war on communism or terrorism without the consensus of likeminded foreign powers. And without that consensus, we cannot continue to maintain our foreign bases, nor can we continue to justify the military budgets that come at the cost of universal health care, education, and basic infrastructure.
America is turning inward. And, in reaction, the Democratic Party will surely shatter just as badly as the Republican Party.
The job for the new wave of Democrats is to articulate a new vision for America. No longer will it be our mission to “to assure the survival and the success of liberty” throughout the world. In the post-Bush era, it will be our mission to restore America’s moral standing, fix our budgetary problems, and mete out justice to the people and organizations that have brought on this catastrophe.
That is why the Democrats are wasting their time looking for any message about domestic affairs, or a gentle exit strategy from Iraq. We will find no peace between the new breed of Democrat and the Democrats in Washington that are still clinging to a bygone world.
The new Democrats and activists will correctly demand a platform that calls first for justice, and only later articulates what can be done domestically, on a hairstring budget.
Markos says:
…it’s clear that the future of the Democratic Party isn’t the current collection of constituency and issue groups. It’s committed, movement-building progressives who fight for higher principles than narrow self-interest, and sell that vision to an American public that isn’t as selfish and self-centered as Republicans would have everyone believe.
In this, he’s both right…and trite. The (near) future of the Democratic Party will not be based on issue groups, but for a different reason than Markos imagines. No issue groups, outside of ones specifically involved in our civil liberties and open government, represent the really pressing matters that concern the nation now. We have a rogue Presidency that is pursuing aggressive preemptive war based on manipulated intelligence, that has ‘lost’ billions of dollars, that is pursuing an extremely dangerous theory of the ‘unitary executive’, has been spying on American citizens, has authorized torture (even unto death). They have destroyed the centrist consensus on American Empire, and splinted our Cold War coailition to the winds.
The only message of the new Democrats must be accountability, including impeachment, a return to separation of powers, and no compromise with the Bidens, Clintons, or Kerrys.
The rationale for a bipartisan center is shattered. The Dems must move left.
