The Left needs a new life
Pookie
Victor Davis Hanson
Into the Tar Pits
Dinosaurs either evolve or die.
There was a time when the political lines about foreign policy were well
drawn. Those on the Left felt that American democracy and global capitalism
did not necessarily offer the rest of the world a much better alternative
than either Soviet-sponsored Communism or third-world thuggery. Instead, in
this view, American realism favored order, but not spreading liberty or
social justice abroad - and only managed to promote overseas more of the
unfairness and racism that we supposedly suffered from at home.
Everything from Vietnam to Nicaragua was seen through this reductionist
prism, assuming a haughty United States at odds with indigenous reformers
the world over. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the
capitalist juggernauts China and India, the globalization of the world
economy, radical social and economic changes here at home, and the spread of
Islamic fascism, none of those old views makes sense anymore.
President Bush was criticized by many Democrats on both practical and
political grounds for ostracizing Yasser Arafat, the past beneficiary of a
rigged vote. Yet most are silent now about the news that local elections are
now taking place for the first time in nearly a decade. Why voting all of a
sudden now? Was the president right in seeing the removal of this so-called
national liberationist as a key to democratic change on the West Bank?
The old critique of American policy in the Middle East was driven by charges
of petro-imperialism - that we would do any and all things to secure fuel
for our gas-guzzlers. But China now satisfies most of its skyrocketing oil
appetite from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Oman. Unlike the United States, there
is no internal Chinese opposition to question the new superpower's oil
politics, which are heating up global energy markets. The so-called Peoples
Republic cares only about price and availability. It worries not at all
about its petro-trade's subsidizing Wahhabism, theocracy, or Islamic
extremism.
We may still rant about the American rejection of Kyoto. But is anyone
alarmed over the hundreds of coal plants sprouting up in India and China to
ensure billions of people that there will be enough energy for a possible
future lifestyle of the type we now take for granted in Santa Barbara and
Nantucket? In short, we will soon enter an age in which China may well
change the world's environment, affect the price of oil, and govern the
world's trade as much as the United States - and will care almost nothing
about what Western liberals say, secure either that its fraying socialist
veneer or sheer size and power will earn it a pass from the censure of
Western intellectuals.
If we thought indigenous liberationist movements of the Islamic world - who
have beheaded and killed to be free of Western religious tolerance, equity
for women and homosexuals, and voting and human rights - put an enormous
strain on the ossified Left, wait until Mao's old socialist utopia begins to
send ultimatums to the democracies of the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, and
South Korea. What will Earth First do when this socialist behemoth sprouts
its oil rigs in the Arctic tundra and pristine seas?
The international media is not up in arms about the murder of filmmaker Theo
Van Gough or the video execution of democratic activists in the streets of
Baghdad - at least not as they once had been over the televised shooting of
a Vietcong captain by South Vietnamese general Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Of course,
the democracy activists in Iraq were working only for freedom, not, like
Loan, for socialist tyranny. The only political consistency for the media's
reaction or lack thereof seems to be the particular affinity of the shooters
and victims for the United States: Pulitzer Prizes when a Communist is shot
by an American surrogate; snores when the murdered Iraqi idealists shared an
American vision of elections.
Consider further: The United States runs staggering trade deficits with most
of the world. Its dollar is at an all-time low. Its postwar international
protocols - from the World Trade Organization to the United Nations - either
favor the non-West or look unkindly toward the United States. The American
military, at great risk and cost, alone in the world saved Kosovars,
Afghans, and Iraqis from tyranny. For all the Vietnam-era rhetoric about
American meddling, the elected Karzai and the provisional Allawi are a far
cry from the Shah, Pinochet, or Somoza. We are doing things in the Middle
East that make no sense in terms of traditional economic or political
advantage - and yet still bring out 1960s-era stegosauruses alleging
imperialism and hegemony.
What has happened? Sometime around the 1980s, the Right saw the demise of
the Soviet Union as an opportunity to evolve beyond realpolitik to promote
not just anti-Communism but grassroots democracy, coupled with free-market
globalism from Eastern Europe to Latin America and Asia. In contrast, the
hard Left stayed in its knee-jerk suspicion of the West and continued to
give a pass to authoritarians from Cuba to Iran who professed socialism,
thinking that the world was a static zero-sum game in which somebody's gain
spelled another's loss - oblivious that real wealth could be created by a
change of mentality and technology and not mere exploitation.
As the old politics lie in ruin from hypocrisy and incoherence, the Left
needs to get a new life. Here are a few more suggestions:
Remember that multilateral inaction - whether in the Balkans, Rwanda, or
Darfur - is often calculated, selfish, and far more lethal to millions than
risky interventions like removing the Taliban and Saddam.
Quit idolizing Europe. It was a far larger arms merchant to Saddam than was
the United States; it supplied most of Dr. Khan's nuclear laboratory; it
financed much of the Oil-for-Food scandal; and it helped to create and
tolerate the Balkans genocide. It has never freed any country or intervened
to remove fascism and leave behind democracy - silly American notions that
are to be caricatured except when it is a matter of saving Europeans.
Stop seeing an all-powerful United States behind every global problem.
China is on the move and far more likely to disrupt environmental protocols,
cheat on trade accords, and bully neighbors. The newly expanded Europe has a
larger population and aggregate economy, stronger currency, and far less in
trade and budget debts than does the United States - and is already using
that economic clout for its own interests, not global freedom from dictators
and autocrats.
Don't believe much of what the U.N. says anymore. Its secretary general is
guilty of either malfeasance or incompetence, its soldiers are often hired
thugs who terrorize those they are supposed to protect, and its resolutions
are likely to be anti-democratic and anti-Semitic. Its members include
dozens of nations whose odious representatives we would not let walk inside
the doors of the U.S. Congress. The old idea of a United Nations was
inspiring, the current reality chilling.
Stop seeing socialists and anti-Americans as Democrats. When a Michael
Moore compares beheaders to our own Minutemen and laments that too many
Democrats were in the World Trade Center, he deserves no platform alongside
Wesley Clark or a seat next to Jimmy Carter or praise for his pseudo-dramas
from high Democrats. Firebrands like Al Sharpton and Michael Moore are the
current leftist equivalents of 1950s right-wing extremists like the John
Birchers. They should suffer the same fate of ostracism, not bemused and
tacit approval.
Ignore most grim international reports that show the United States as
stingy, greedy, or uncaring based on some esoteric formula that makes a
Sweden or Denmark out as the world's savior. Such "studies" always ignore
aggregate dollars and look at per capita public giving, and yet somehow
ignore things like over $100 billion to Afghanistan and Iraq or $15 billion
pledged to fight AIDS in Africa. These academic white papers likewise forget
private donations, because most of the American billionaires who give to
global causes of various sorts do so as either individuals or through
foundations. No mention is made of the hundred of millions that are handled
by American Christian charities. And the idea of a stingy America never
mentions about $200 billion of the Pentagon's budget, which does things like
keeping the Persian Gulf open to world commerce; protecting Europe; ensuring
that the Aegean is free of shooting and that the waters between China,
Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are relatively tranquil; and stopping nasty folk
like the Taliban and Saddam from blowing up more Buddha monuments,
desecrating Babylon, or ruining the ecology of the Tigris-Euphrates
wetlands.
Action and results, not rhetoric and intentions, are what matter. Cease
blaming others for declining popularity. There is neither a Karl Rove
conspiracy nor an envisioned red-state theocracy. No, the problem with our
Left is what killed the dinosaurs: a desire to plod on to oblivion in a
rapidly evolving world.
- Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
