While there have been many critiques of the recent State of the Union, and many have rightly focused on the bald faced lie of George Oilman's announced (and quickly repudiated) energy policy. However, just as important is his foreign policy fantasy. As Andrew Bacevich wrote in the Los Angeles Times in a piece titled
What Isolationism? In his speech, the president presented a fiction to avoid a debate on a tough policy question.
Bacevich, a professor, veteran (West Point grad), and recovering conservative, has a brilliant critique of the president's foreign policy, follow me down to read all about it.
The first thing that Bacevich does is knock down the shrub's straw man:
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Bush worked himself into a lather about the dangers of "retreating within our borders." His speech bulged with ominous references to ostensibly resurgent isolationists hankering to "tie our hands" and leave "an assaulted world to fend for itself."<small snip>
But who exactly are these isolationists eager to pull up the drawbridges? What party do they control? What influential journals of opinion do they publish? Who are their leaders? Which foundations bankroll this isolationist cause?
The president provided no such details, and for good reason: They do not exist. Indeed, in present-day American politics, isolationism does not exist. It is a fiction, a fabrication and a smear imported from another era.
Now that the straw man is gone, Bacevich engages in a small history lesson about the creation of the isolationist straw man and the foreign policy debate he calls "George Washington versus Woodrow Wilson," or what could be called "realist vs. idealist"
Wilson was a big ideas man, he liked to think on a grand international scale, and while the Fourteen Points are a brilliant base for foreign policy in an ideal world (Bring Back the League!), he was a little light on implementation. Washington, on the other hand, was a realist and he believed American international policy should be, according to Bacevich, "based on a lively appreciation for the limits of power and the fragility of the American experiment."
So, instead of having a debate about the issue of policy and the danger of the United State's present position where
we don't have enough soldiers, enough money or enough friends to persist in this crusade, much less to implement the Bush Doctrine elsewhere to bring freedom and democracy to the entire Mideast.
We instead have to deal with
an America intoxicated with its self-assigned mission of salvation while disregarding prudential considerations will court exhaustion, both moral and material...Contriving phony charges of isolationism to dodge tough, practical questions is not only dishonest, it is reckless and irresponsible.
To read the full article, go here.
And for George Washington's Farewell address, and some comments on the domestic policy side of it (by me) go here.