Joe Klein is still going strong at Swampland. His latest post returns to his central concern about the Iraq War, and that is the prospect that revulsion against the war will translate into a new strain of isolationism. It’s a serious concern that Joe Klein consistently treats with a total lack of seriousness. Here is what he wrote:
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, one of the wisest Democrats on national security issues, made an important–and overlooked–point at the Dems noon press conference today: Bush’s implausible escalation is going to increase public skepticism about any U.S. policy actions in the region (and, I’d add, the world). Some of the public skepticism is justified: Never again should the U.S. take military action alone unless we’re attacked. But there’s a long war still to be fought against Al Qaeda and other extremist elements. It’s not World War IV as the neocons insist; but it is an episodic, potentially dangerous situation in a part of the world that Bush has made markedly less stable because of his actions. It needs to be pursued in concert with a broad coalition of other nations, especially our NATO allies.
I’d hate to see a crypto-populist isolationism be the end result of Bush’s policies. The new era of global problems–viruses like terrorism, environmental threats, Aids and transnational corporate depredations–are going to require America to be more a part of the world than ever before. But I suspect we’re in for a heavy-duty bout of isolationism, another collateral effect of Bush’s arrogant unilateralism. I wonder which left or right wing populist will try to exploit it.
The blogosphere has branded this kind of talk as Higher Broderism, in honor of the Beltway’s elder punditman, David Broder. For the more cynical it appears to be little more than apologetics in the service of some military-industrial complex. And it certainly is that, even if the service is indirect and uncompensated (or compensated indirectly).
To tell the truth, I don’t know why Beltway pundits seem so overwhelmingly wedded to the idea of the United States as the sole hegemon, with a military budget that exceeds that of the next six powers combined. Here’s a quote pulled from Michael Lind’s latest book, The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and The American Way of Life.
“Americans should be glad that their defence capabilities are as great as the next six powers combined,” the neoconservative journalists William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote in 1996. “Indeed, they may even want to enshrine this disparity in U.S. defense strategy.
People like David Broder and Joe Klein seem to agree with Kristol and Kagan. But, Lind goes on to make an important point.
It is all but certain that the U.S. public, confronted with a choice between slashing middle-class entitlements, dramatically raising taxes, and limited military expenditures, will force their elected leaders to limit military expenditures, thereby dooming dissuasion as an element of the hegemony strategy.
Lind’s analysis depends on the American people actually confronting an unambiguous choice. If they ever do get such a choice then Mr. Lind is probably right about how they would decide it. But the choice is never unambiguous because demagogues are always circulating with appeals to military strength and patriotism, and threats of terrorism (or communism, or whatever). Some of you may recall the treatment Howard Dean received when, in the 2004 campaign, he said “We won’t always have the strongest military.” John Kerry immediately attacked.
Dean’s statement “raises serious questions about his capacity to serve as Commander-in-Chief. No serious candidate for the Presidency has ever before suggested that he would compromise or tolerate an erosion of America’s military supremacy,” charged Chris Lehane…
Dean’s comment was politically stupid. A country that outspends its six-closest rivals on defense does not need to plan for the day when they are not the preeminent power. They need to stop spending so much goddamn money on defense. The gaffe was typical of Dean and part of the reason he never earned my trust with the nomination. The whole spectacle, though, served to hammer home the difficulty any politician faces that tries to argue for less defense spending, less intervention, or less militarism.
Knowing that the people can be so easily swayed by appeals to strength and patriotism and threats of terrorism, a responsible journalist would provide context to the debate. But that is not how people like Joe Klein operate. He is more afraid that the debacle in Iraq will give rise to ‘crypto-populist isolationism’ than he is that we will be dragged into more costly and stupid wars.
Part of this can be explained in a positive light. Klein explains it thus:
The new era of global problems–viruses like terrorism, environmental threats, Aids and transnational corporate depredations–are going to require America to be more a part of the world than ever before.
It would certainly be bad if Americans suddenly withdrew from the international community on issues like HIV/AIDS. On the other hand, it would be nice if we would embrace the rest of the world on issues like terrorism, environmental threats and transnational corporate depredations. For my part, I see only hopeful signs on these issues from the Democrats. It seems to me that Joe Klein is worried about something that is very unlikely to transpire. And that is part of the reason I have such a hard time taking him seriously.
The debacle in Iraq definitely has its risks. Klein mentioned in an earlier post that we might see $200/barrel oil. The whole region could become so engulfed in war that oil simply cannot get to the market. And, if that happens, it would probably cost millions of jobs all over the world. We should try to avoid such a fate. But Klein isn’t really explaining what he fears from isolationism. He doesn’t seem to even define it.
Let me return to Michael Lind for a moment.
“Benevolent global hegemony” is how two neoconservative writers, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, described “America’s international role” in 1996. The grand strategy of U.S. global hegemony that became the new consensus of U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s rested on three policies: dissuasion, reassurance, and nonproliferation.
Dissussion meant the the United States would try to monopolize as much of the world’s military strength as possible, in order to deter “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
…Reassurance meant that, in return for their agreement not to chalenge U.S. global hegemony, the United States would agree to provide security for the other great powers like Japan, China, Russia, and Germany in their own regions and in regions of concern to all the great powers, like the Middle East…
Coercive nonproliferation was the third element of the strategic triad of U.S. hegemony. In order to deter challengers and reassure deferential allies, the United States had to maintain an ability to threaten or punish threatening states.
I know I am quoting a lot of Lind here, but I want to use one more piece. It’s critical.
The grand strategy of U.S. global hegemony was the strategy that dared not speak its name…American policymakers could not openly say that the United States, out of fear of great power competitors, sought to keep China and Russia weak, Germany and Japan demilitarized, and the European Union incapable of acting as a coherent entity in foreign policy. A publicly acceptable rationale that could justify permanent U.S. military hegemony in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East was necessary.
That rationale began as rogue states and morphed into the the threat of terrorism. Terrorism is a real, not invented, threat. However, terrorism that is directed at the United States and its citizens is a reaction to the U.S. global hegemony strategy. Our strategy and terrorism are caught in a self-reinforcing loop. Every terrorist act is used to justify more hegemony and every act of raw hegemony inspires more terrorism. The question is: can the price of terrorism be kept at an acceptable level, or do we need to crank down on the hegemony.
What are the benefits of hegemony?
Joe Klein doesn’t ruminate on the costs and benefits. He just supports hegemony. And he sees the Iraq War as a threat to the U.S. hegemony strategy because it may cause the American public to doubt the wisdom of the strategy that dare not speak its name.
I want to conclude here with one more piece of Lind. This really gets to the heart of what is wrong with Joe Klein’s worldview.
Speaking perhaps for many in the U.S. foreign policy establishment, [Michael] Mandelbaum concludes that it may be necessary to keep the American public in the dark because “the American role in the world may depend in part on Americans not scrutinzing it too closely.” In the same cynical spirit, the neoconservative defense analyst Eliot Cohen writes, “The United States needs an imperial strategy. Defense planners could never admit it openly, of course.” Yet another neoconservative, Thomas Donnelly, writes of a global strategy allying the United States with Britain, Japan, and India against other great powers as “the de facto plan of the Bush administration, though officials dare not speak its name.”
Nothing could be more repugnant to America’s traditions as a democratic republic than a grand strategy that can be sustained only if the very existence of the strategy is kept secret from the American people by their elected and appointed leaders.
That is, in a nutshell, what Joe Klein does for a living. He may not even be conscious of it, but his hippie bashing rhetoric is a cudgel being used to beat down close scrutiny of the U.S. grand strategy. And if liberals deserve to be bashed, it isn’t for scrutinizing this grand strategy, it’s for failing to realize that it was Clinton that implemented it. The real threat to the Establishment is that Bush’s folly will undermine that public support for U.S. global hegemony and that we will fall behind a populist that offers us universal health care rather than the maintainance of our empire.
