PARADIGM'N IN THE ROUGH:

George W. Bush -- grand strategist (Tony Blankley, February 11, 2004, Townhall.com)

The Boston Globe -- the respected, liberal newspaper owned by the New York Times -- ran an article last week that Bush critics might wish to read carefully. It is a report on a new book that argues that President Bush has developed and is ably implementing only the third American grand strategy in our history.

The author of this book, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, which is to be released in March, is John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett professor of military and naval history at Yale University. The Boston Globe describes Professor Gaddis as "the dean of Cold War studies and one of the nation's most eminent diplomatic historians." In other words, this is not some put up job by an obscure right-wing author. This comes from the pinnacle of the liberal Ivy League academic establishment.

If you hate George W. Bush, you will hate this Boston Globe story, because it makes a strong case that George Bush stands in a select category with Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and James Monroe (as guided by his secretary of state, John Q. Adams) in implementing one of the only three grand strategies of American foreign policy in our two-century history. [...]

In another recent article, written before the Iraqi war, Professor Gaddis wrote that: "(Bush's) grand strategy is actually looking toward the culmination of the Wilsonian project of a world safe for Democracy, even in the Middle East. And this long-term dimension of it, it seems to me, goes beyond what we've seen in the thinking of more recent administrations. It is more characteristic of the kind of thinking, say, that the Truman administration was doing at the beginning of the Cold War ... "

Is President Bush becoming an historic world leader in the same category as President Franklin Roosevelt, as the eminent Ivy League professor argues? Or is he just a lying nitwit, as the eminent Democratic Party chairman and Clinton fundraiser Terry McAuliffe argues? I suspect that as this election year progresses, that may end up being the decisive debate. You can put me on the side of the professor.

It is the nature of paradigm shifts that when you are in the midst of one is terribly to difficult to recognize that fact. But a short while later what seemed revolutionary and controversial at the time comes to be seen as the accepted wisdom. The four most likely candidates for emerging paradigms at the moment are:

(1) The grand strategy referred to here--that the West should hasten the End of History by forcing failed states towards liberal democracy post haste

(2) The Third Way/compassionate conservatism--which basically holds that you can satisfy the desire for a social safety net using private free market solutions rather than top-down government bureaucracies.

(3) The collapse of Darwinism

(4) Recognition that Eric and Julia Roberts are the same person

(Editor's Note: Twenty years ago he was swearing that soon everyone would recognize the truth about: Japan's inevitable decline; the longbow theory of democracy; David and Goliath; and Magic Johnson. Okay, two out of four isn't too bad.)

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 11, 2004 9:40 AM