In a recent editorial for Fox Nation, Joe Bilello expresses the wish that President Obama were a cowboy instead of a community organizer. The idea of a cowboy foreign policy has been around so long that it was parodied as far back as Dr. Stangelove (1964), when Major Kong (Slim Pickens), having taken off his helmet and replaced it with a cowboy hat when he realizes he is about to engage in nuclear combat, ends up riding a hydrogen bomb to its target, while waving his hat and letting loose with a cowboy yell. It was parodied again in Apocalypse Now (1979), when Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) sports a cavalry hat as commanding officer of a bunch of helicopters that have taken the place of horses. Though humor is the point of such parodies, yet they also suggest the danger of trying to apply Western logic to American foreign policy. Still, the temptation to make such analogies seems to be irresistible. Who can forget George W. Bush’s reference to the posters in the Old West that said, “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” in talking about Osama bin Laden?
Nor is it limited to America. In an interview with Brian Williams, Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, said “a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” clearly an allusion to Western movies. Even more explicit is the recent remark made by Jordan’s King Abdullah, who said that Unforgiven (1992) is an indication of the kind of revenge he intended to exact upon ISIS for burning a Jordanian pilot alive.
King Abdullah was specific about which cowboy he wanted to compare himself with, William Munny (Clint Eastwood) of the aforementioned movie. Usually though, it is a generic cowboy hero that is alluded to, or more specifically, a generic John Wayne character. But there is definitely more than one type. In fact, in the editorial by Joe Bilello, he refers to the anger he wished Obama would have expressed over the death of Kayla Mueller. But that made me think of the movie The Searchers (1956), in which Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) is determined to find his niece Debbie (Natalie Wood) and kill her because she has been defiled by the Indians. Presumably it is not Bilello’s desire that Obama use special forces to kill any American women being held by ISIS for similar reasons.
In other words, if someone says he wants to have a cowboy for our president, we need to know which cowboy or which Western he has in mind. Perhaps Shane (1953) would be a good place to start. The title character, played by Alan Ladd, is a gunslinger with a guilty past (that’s us) who wants to hang up his guns (that’s us too), but finds out that there is one more job he must do. So, he ends up killing Ryker (Emile Meyer), the evil rancher who hates homesteaders, and Wilson (Jack Palance), the really evil hired gun. Then, he says to Joey (Brandon de Wilde) to tell his mother “there are no more guns in the valley,” after which he rides off.
That was what was supposed to happen in Iraq. We would kill off Saddam Hussein and a few other evil people, and peace and democracy would flourish, possibly even spreading to other countries in the Middle East. Instead, what we got was chaos and bloodshed. It would be as if after Shane left the valley, the homesteaders started fighting amongst themselves to get control of the land Ryker had been hogging. Then Little Joey has to go find Shane and tell him he really made a mistake taking his gun out of the valley, and now he has to come back and take care of the mess he caused.
The Magnificent Seven (1960) is probably more to the liking of John McCain and Lindsey Graham. In that movie, the Mexican peasants are provided with arms, and when the bad guys are killed off, a residual force is left behind in the form of Chico (Horst Bucholz). But I suspect internecine warfare would have broken out among the peasants before long, with little that Chico could do about it.
Well, right or wrong, it’s too late for that now. Perhaps, given the situation in the Middle East today, we should look to A Fistful of Dollars (1964) as a guide to what we should do. In that movie, instead of peace-loving farmers being brutalized by ranchers or bandits, we have a town with two bosses, the heads rival gangs, who sell guns and whiskey to the Indians. The Man with No Name (Clint Eastwood) collects gold from each boss as he plays one side against the other until both gangs are wiped out, after which he rides out of town. That might be a good idea. We could encourage the Sunnis and the Shiites to fight a holy war against each other until everyone is dead, and then we could leave Middle East once and for all.
The problem with that idea is that a lot of the countries in the Middle East prefer to let us do the fighting. In fact, that problem extends beyond that region, for there are countries in Western Europe and Southeast Asia that allow us to provide for most of their defense, while they enjoy economies unburdened by huge military expenditures. For that reason, if we are going to have a foreign policy modeled on a Western, I suggest High Noon (1952). Knowing that four men are going to try to kill him, Marshal Kane (Gary Cooper) tries to get various people in town to help him. Because the four killers are likely to take over the town after they kill Kane, it would be in the self-interest of the decent folk to assist Kane in the fight, but for one reason or another, no one is willing to be deputized. When Kane finally kills the four men, he looks at the townspeople with disgust, removes his badge, and throws it into the dirt.
That’s the kind of cowboy I want our president to be.