The good old days weren’t always good: Peter Bienart’s reactionary foreign policy

No one would call New Republic Editor-at-Large Peter Bienart a “reactionary” from face value or first glance. And yet if we used the popular definition of reactionary as someone who is an “extreme conservative” or someone who supports the values of the past, then Bienart fits that definition given his latest writings on foreign policy and how it pertains to the Democratic Party and liberalism in general.

In his new book The Good Fight: Why Liberals---and Only Liberals---Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, Bienart wants liberals and the Democrats to dip back into their past, back to the days when the Democratic Party was the party of internationalism and interventionism around the world. Back to the days of such presidents as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Back before Vietnam shattered the liberal consensus on foreign policy into itsy-bitsy pieces.

Bienart should be commended for knowing his history. He knows that the Democrats since the 20th Century has been the party of war, especially when the eastern progressives and internationalists seized control of the party with Wilson’s nomination and election and stayed in control for 60 years, from 1912 to 1972. He knows his own magazine, The New Republic, was for years the biggest cheerleader of that foreign policy (especially after TNR booted John Flynn from its masthead in the 1940s). When Bob Dole attacked Walter Mondale during the Vice-Presidential Debate of 1976 by using the term “Democrat wars,” Bienart would certainly nod in approval.

But that all changed in 1972.

That year, a former Republican college professor from South Dakota named George McGovern became the nominee of the Democratic Party. As the Democratic Party nominee, he was the most unlikeliest you could find: a mainline Protestant, ex-Republican professional from a rural, Republican state. Not the sort of person who lead a largely urban/Southern/Catholic/Baptist, labor union party. Not only that, but he was basically challenging the party’s orthodoxies in foreign policy, policies that had been set for the past 60 years. He was not an interventionist. He was not someone who was going to fight the Cold War everywhere around the world. His campaign slogan was not “Pay any price, bare any burden, support any friend, oppose any foe.” No, it was “Come home, America.” Come home, America? Who did he think he was Robert Taft?

And that, ultimately is the problem liberals have with foreign policy. They would argue vehemently they are not isolationists and yet that is where their McGovern instincts would lead them to go, especially if they oppose using force in most cases. They say they are internationalists and want America to be a force for good in the world and yet they cannot help but criticize decisions of the past, decisions taken by fellow liberals in most cases, that were also well-intentioned but whose well-intentions are cast in an ugly anti-American critique. Who’s going to support such people who can’t even say the kindest words about the U.S’ past, present and future role in the world? Not only that, but their spending priorities in regards to defense would leave the nation virtually defenseless.
(It is for these very reasons that paleoconservatism and paleolibertarianism has the only honest and simplest foreign policy around on the non-interventionist side: Defend the nation and mind our own business, just like Washington envisioned.)

Bienart knows this as well too and that’s why he thinks the Democratic Party should reject this incoherent masquerade and go back in time to halcyon days of liberal interventionism and internationalism that held sway in both parties during the Progressive Era and from World War II to the Vietnam War. Bienart believes the Republicans and their neoconservative script writers are botching the world so badly and screwing up the War on Terror so much, that only a robust liberalism of the Roosevelt/Truman/Kennedy kind can save the day.

If only.

What Bienart doesn’t realize, or maybe he does but doesn’t want to admit, is that very people who centered themselves around this foreign policy are Republicans themselves now. Since the McGovern take-over, these old Scoop Jackson Democrats (named after former U.S. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a stalwart of the liberal consensus) made their move from a party that didn’t want them anymore to the Republicans to go along with thousands of Southern Democrats and other white ethnics whose interest is in an interventionist foreign policy. THEY’RE the one’s running the GOP now, and Iraq is THEIR war. A war fought in the crusader mode of Wilson’s 14-points in World War I, Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter in World War II and Kennedy’s New Frontier in the 1960s. War on Poverty, War on Terror, what’s the difference? So long as we’re at war with something or someone. Just because they call themselves “conservatives” when they’re really right-wing social democrats, doesn’t mean they’ve changed their tune. They’ve made the same failures in Iraq as they made in Vietnam, complete with a Texan in the White House and an arrogant SOB from the Midwest as defense secretary. They’ve told the same kind of lies, they’ve made the same kind of disastrous meddling decisions with the military effort, and they’ve once again underestimated and misunderstood the enemy and once again have bogged down our troops (men and women now) in an unwinnable war surrounded by a hostile population backing a puppet government.

Why should the Democrats adopt the same kind of failed and discredited policies once more? There’s a reason why Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy ran anti-war campaigns against Johnson/Humphrey Administration in 1968 and it wasn’t because they were bored.

Now, Bienart will conviently skip over such history and go right to the Clinton Administration to show how an affective liberal foreign policy can be operated. And of course the centerpiece of liberal war-fighting will be the U.S.’ bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo crisis of 1999. He will say it had all the earmarks of a successful policy due to U.S. working in coalition with our NATO allies, working with the UN and the international community to end the crisis and force the Serbs to capitulate without the single loss of one U.S. soldier or airman’s life.

What he will not say is that liberals can lie their way to war just as easily as so-called conservatives can. Mr. Bienart will not say that The Ramboulliet Agreement was a lie, designed to be rejected (as the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to the Serbs in 1914 was designed to be rejected) as to provide an excuse for NATO bombing. He will not say that the allegations of Serb atrocities were bogus and fabricated. He will not say that it was the bombing itself that caused massive numbers of refugees. He will not say that the Kosovo Liberation Army was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. He will not say that post-war Kosovo is basically run by the Albanian mafia which terrorizes the minority Serbs and Gypsies with killings, destruction of holy sites and other vandalism and that the “international community” has been powerless to stop. He will not say that such actions by NATO weakened our relations with Russia and turned a potential ally and partner into a suspicious and potentially hostile foe. He will not say how the potential independence of Kosovo could destabilize all of southern Europe.

The Clintonians and their left-wing social democratic allies stumbled onto this kind of foreign policy late in their administration when the incoherency of current leftist foreign policy became unsustainable for them. The pressure to do something from within the Washington establishment and the ethnic lobbies became too much to bare anymore after years of doing nothing. Yet from this, it is obvious that the old liberal consensus foreign policy has no popular constituencies other than the echo-chamber in Washington. No leftists outside the Beltway are especially eager to see Iraq problems solved with a series of Great Society programs for Baghdad the way Bienart wants. They just want to relieve themselves of this mess too. And if they are successful in beating Sen. Joe Lieberman, perhaps the most effective spokesperson for the old liberal consensus, in the Connecticut Democratic Primary with their candidate Ned Lamont on Aug. 8, they will have spoken loud and clear they wish not go back into the past to solve foreign policy problems of the future.

However, regardless of how the election in Connecticut turns out, it still leaves the left split widely between failed foreign policy and no foreign policy. It’s not a dilemma I would wish on anyone. Perhaps they should become paleos to avoid it.

--Sean Scallon