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cloudboy -> RE: Obama ups the stakes... (8/7/2008 10:36:33 AM)
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quote:
Perhaps I should have been more clear.
The nuclear deterrent was exactly my point when discussing a hill not worth dying on. Lobbing missiles with the United States, over Cuba, was not likely from the Soviet perspective.
Much of my point comes down to finding a place in the middle. The United States, from the European point of view, is clearly too quick to war these days, and is not that effective at enemy identification. Europeans, from the American point of view, wants peace so badly, they are willing to ignore obvious evil, in hopes that it will somehow vanish. The United States apparently learned nothing from Vietnam, as is evidenced in Iraq. Europe apparently learned nothing from the Second World War, as was evidenced by their actions, or lack there of, dealing with the Serbs.
Perhaps both parties could put aside the notion that our way is the "one true way", and accept the world for what it is ... to the betterment of us all. Americans could stand to learn that the whole world isn't actually envious of us, and there really isn't a guy with a club behind every corner. Europeans could stand to learn that there are actually people that are just flat bad, and aren't going to respond to negotiations. You know ... some people just need killin'. Americans could stand to learn that Europeans were playing these games long before we were ever a nation, and we may want to listen to them a bit more. Europeans could stand to accept that when they have a big guard dog in their back yard, every so often it's going to eat the neighbors cat, and that when it barks at an intruder, sometimes its not the cable guy coming to check our connection.
That's a pretty good post. What I want is competence & pragmatism. This is why the Europeans are excited about Obama. They are tired of Conservatives driving American Foreign policy.
I, too, am tired of it for pretty much the reasons articulated below:
The first step toward undoing Republican dominance on foreign policy entails debunking the myth that conservative ideology enhances US national security. Here Peter Scoblic, the executive editor at The New Republic and former editor of Arms Control Today, does a great service in Us vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security. He considers five decades of arms control efforts in order to illuminate the common themes underlying hard-line conservative ideology on national security. He shows, most usefully, the continuity in conservative intellectual leadership across the years. John Foster Dulles wrote the Republicans' foreign policy platform in 1952, denouncing the Democrats' "futile and immoral policy of 'containment,' which abandons countless human beings to a despotism and godless terrorism." Barry Goldwater denounced the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which William Buckley's National Review termed a "nuclear Yalta." And during his first term, Ronald Reagan and the Reaganauts appeared to argue that doing away with an evil regime was more important than preventing nuclear war.
Scoblic shows that these men had in common several core premises. One cannot coexist with evil-doers, who are irreparably "fallen," and thus rollback is required. Negotiation is not merely pointless, it is costly "appeasement." And the United States should participate in only those international institutions that are servants of American power; those that constrain Ameri-can power are enemies of the national interest.
Scoblic's book offers a terrifying glimpse of the persistent tendency of one militant strand of conservatism to pursue conflict over peace, arms races over arms control, and ideology over pragmatism. His analytic history is particularly strong in revealing how, in a world of uncontrolled forces, conservatives sought to impose complete control, whether by pursuing technological fixes (like the nuclear missile shield) or treating US security as if it were something that could simply be willed. Because many conservatives presume exceptional American virtue —and believe that this virtue is self-evident to others—they have also consistently failed to see how aggressive US actions can appear abroad, and how the fear they generate can give rise to threatening behavior by others, who believe they are acting in self-defense.
Scoblic, who sympathetically describes Reagan's shift from denunciation to negotiation with Gorbachev over nuclear arms reduction, writes that it had not previously "even occurred" to Reagan that adopting a war-fighting strategy, beginning a widespread civil defense program, researching a missile shield, while increasing the military budget by 35 percent, starting a new bomber program, deploying a new ICBM, and deploying missiles in Europe could be construed as threatening.
Scoblic's account becomes most chilling at the end, when the same conservative voices that had long preferred confrontation to cooperation— such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—actually become dominant players in George W. Bush's executive branch.
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