WE RULE, KEEP IT UNDER YOUR HAT:

Loud and clear: Bush claims to enjoy reading about Theodore Roosevelt but he ignored Teddy’s famous foreign policy maxim: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’ (Jonathan Alter, 9/23/02, Newsweek)

White House aides told The New York Times that President Bush edited the new “National Security Strategy of the United States” heavily “because he thought there were certain sections where we sounded overbearing and arrogant.” Can you imagine how it read before he edited it? Like something out of Dr. Strangelove?

This is a blunt, straightforward document in the style favored by the president. Such clear language, free of nuance, can be refreshing, as it was at the United Nations on September 12. (And even in the West Point speech from which much of the new doctrine was taken). But diplomats have a reason, beyond fecklessness, to write gauzy prose that must be parsed and decoded: It helps their country’s diplomacy to write diplomatically. There’s a reason why, after hundreds of years, nations talk to one another with care: Too much clarity can be destabilizing.
 
Bush and his CEO brethren — conditioned to believe in clear, corporate vision statements and contemptuous of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo — cut straight to the chase. “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States,” the document says.

Now just because this is undoubtedly true doesn’t mean we should say it. In the past, the United States has always said we need the capacity to fight two big wars at once, deter aggression, stay strong, etc. But we’ve never quite rubbed the face of our competitors in their own inferiority before. If you sit on, say, the Chinese Central Committee and had been counseling better relations with the United States, would this help your cause? Or would it help the cause of hardliners who are determined to expand the Chinese military and catch up with us?

That one’s a no-brainer.

In an early and excellent book, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair (1986), Michael Beschloss demonstrated that one of the reasons that President Eisenhower was pretty laid back about the Cold War was that as a military man with access to surveillance photos and other intelligence, he understood just how inferior their military was to ours. Mr. Beschloss argues that Ike and Khruschev arrived at a kind of modus vivendi where in exchange for our not revealing that we had massive superiority the Soviets agreed not to even bother trying to catch up. This enabled Ike to largely ignore our own defenses and Soviet posturing, but, because he and Khruschev kept this information to themselves, it unfortunately had the undesirable effect of misleading the American people and the rest of the world into believing that the Soviets were our peers.
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 23, 2002 3:52 PM