Dangerous Nation?

Neoconservative Robert Kagan has penned a new book on American imperialism that was reviewed today in the New York Times by Geoffrey Wheatcroft.

The thesis of Kagan’s book, titled Dangerous Nation, holds that early America’s regard for power politics as “alien and repulsive” is groundless.

Wheatcroft takes exception to this premise and so do I.

Granted, America took its Manifest Destiny very seriously, and arguably pursued it as fanatically and ruthlessly against the Indians as the Germans did their own version against the Slavic East. But there is a significant difference, I think, between continental and global expansionism. As Wheatcroft argues — convincingly, I think — Americans, with a few noteworthy exceptions, ”really did withdraw from the temptations and perils of the world.”

There were exceptions, like the astonishing story of the campaign against the Barbary pirates of North Africa (the Islamofascists of 1804?), when the whole American fleet sailed 4,000 miles to the Mediterranean and the Marines landed on the shores of Tripoli. For all that, by the time this book ends, and for nearly two decades more, no American infantry battalion ever set foot in Europe, and the only great war the American people had ever fought was against each other.

And let’s not forget that from the 1860s to the 1880s, Chile had a larger navy than the United States — a fact even Kagan concedes — hardly evidence of a nation that has harbored imperial ambitions from its very beginning.

The GOP’s Socialist Legacy

I was rather amused that an op-ed by Richard Allen published in today’s New York Times did not once invoke the n-word — neoconservative —  in describing the life and work of the recently deceased Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, despite the fact that she was in many respects the very embodiment of neoconservative influence within the Republican party. 

Like most other neocons, she could point to a very exotic pedigree, at least by traditional GOP standards, and often did.

The very precocious granddaughter of a populist and socialist who organized several left-wing movements in Oklahoma, Jeanne Jordan, as she was then known, formed a Young People’s Socialist League, the youth arm of the Socialist Party of America, on the unlikely campus of Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, where she was a student. She recalled in 2002 May Day symposium:

It wasn’t easy to find the YPSL in Columbia, Missouri. But I had read about it and I wanted to be one. We had a very limited number of activities in Columbia, Missouri. We had an anti-Franco rally, which was a worthy cause. You could raise a question about how relevant it was likely to be in Columbia, Missouri, but it was in any case a worthy cause. We also planned a socialist picnic, which we spent quite a lot of time organizing. Eventually, I regret to say, the YPSL chapter, after much discussion, many debates and some downright quarrels, broke up over the socialist picnic. I thought that was rather discouraging.”

A Humphrey Democrat in the late 1960s, Kirkpatrick, along with other intellectuals and trade unionists with strong anti-communist convictions, were aligned with the Social Democrats, USA, which formed the successor organization of the Socialist Party of America. She eventually grew disillusioned with the Democrats and conventional left-wing views on communist containment as the McGovernite wing tightened its grasp within Democratic ranks in the 1970s. But even as this disilluisionment with the Democrats intensified, she still expressed trepidations about aligning herself too closely with the GOP.  (Incidentally, click here for a perversely interesting socialist perspective on the neoconservatives.)

“Listen, Dick, I am an A.F.L.-C.I.O. Democrat and I am quite concerned that my meeting Ronald Reagan on any basis will be misunderstood,” Allen recalls her saying shortly before her first get-acquainted meeting with presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Of course, the rest is history. Kirkpatrick apparently managed to repress her strong unionist sentiments to join forces with the Reagan administration, serving as ambassador to the United Nations and bringing many socialist intellectuals into her staff — the so-called “State Department socialists” who soon gained prominence and influence in the Reagan administration and the Republican party.

After denouncing the Democratic party as the “Blame America First party” at the 1984 GOP Convention, she formally became a Republican in 1985 and, for a time, even toyed with seeking the party’s nomination for president, fearing that George H.W. Bush, the presumed successor to Reagan’s legacy, would waver in his opposition to communism.

I have to concede a grudging degree of admiration for Mrs. Kirkpatrick. Nevertheless, reflecting back on the last quarter century of significant neoconservative presence within the GOP policymaking circles, I can’t help but wonder what my party would look like today without them.

Frankly, judging from our track record within the last few years, I’m not so sure it would look that bad.

The Truman Show?

“Who could have imagined an idiot like Truman one day would be  considered a great president?” my father would ask with some exasperation as the 33rd president’s historical stock began rising a generation ago.

Dad, a staunch Republican, always treated HST with a measure of contempt. “The little bantam rooster,” was his pet name for the feisty Missourian.

I never quite saw it that way. There was, after all, a Lincolnesque quality associated with the man — a quality borne out in David McCullough’s superb biography of this 20^th century giant.

Truman, after all, was the quintessential self-made man, someone who had suffered one business failure after another, who despite being underestimated in every quarter, somehow managed to rise despite the odds. More than that, though, he was an intelligent man, more worldly that most people realized — someone who revered education and read voraciously, striving to fill in those intellectual gaps he missed in the course of his financially deprived youth.

Aside from that, he was the genuine commodity, someone who never took himself too seriously, who was perfectly at ease with himself and who never recoiled from the awesome burden associated with his office. Borrowing a description of a far less politically sensitive age, he was “a man’s man” in every sense of the word.

It’s precisely because of this respect for the 33^rd president that I recoil whenever I see comparisons drawn between him and the 43^rd president.  (Yes, I’m a Republican, but I think I know greatness when I see it — and,for that matter, when I don’t.)

I know the standard arguments: Bush has consistently defied expectations; he’s “grown” in office; he’s willing to make the tough decisions. In short his has been a vastly underestimated — or is that “misunderestimated” — presidency.

Frankly, I just don’t see it. There’s very little Trumanesque about the guy. I mean, we’re talking about a guy who never did much of anything until he sobered up and got religion 20 some years ago. Before that, his only claim to fame was as the alcoholic comic relief of the Bush and Walker clans.

He’s never displayed so much as one iota of intellectual curiosity that I know of, Ivy League credentials notwithstanding. Moreover, as Andrews Sullivan observed recently, he’s never made any attempt to learn on the job, to master the intricacies of 21^st century warfare, much as Lincoln did those of the 19^th and Truman those of the 20^th.

Introspective? A voracious reader? Hardly.

Trumanesque? No, unless you‘re referring to the Jim Carey character.