Democratic Realism As American Foreign Policy -- NOT Liberal Internationalism
D. Spencer Hines
internationalism is the foreign policy of the Democratic Party and the
religion of the foreign policy elite.
It has a peculiar history. It traces its pedigree to Woodrow Wilson’s
utopianism, Harry Truman’s anticommunism, and John Kennedy’s militant
universalism. But after the Vietnam War, it was transmuted into an
ideology of passivity, acquiescence and almost reflexive
anti-interventionism.
Liberals today proudly take credit for Truman’s and Kennedy’s roles in
containing communism, but they prefer to forget that, for the last half
of the Cold War, liberals used “cold warrior” as an epithet. ******
In the early 1980s, they gave us the nuclear freeze movement, a form of
unilateral disarmament in the face of Soviet nuclear advances. ******
Today, John Kerry boasts of opposing, during the 1980s, what he calls
Ronald Reagan’s “illegal war in Central America”— and oppose he did
what was, in fact, an indigenous anticommunist rebellion that ultimately
succeeded in bringing down Sandinista rule and ushering in democracy in
all of Central America. ******
That boast reminds us how militant was liberal passivity in the last
half of the Cold War. But that passivity outlived the Cold War. When
Kuwait was invaded, the question was: Should the United States go to war
to prevent the Persian Gulf from falling into hostile hands? The
Democratic Party joined the Buchananite isolationists in saying No. The
Democrats voted No overwhelmingly — two to one in the House, more than
four to one in the Senate."
Charles Krauthammer
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DSH