TOO EASILY SLAKED:

Are the Jacksonians Sated? (Michael J. Totten, 03/22/2004, Tech Central Station)

A curious thing seems to have happened since Saddam Hussein's regime was overthrown in Iraq. America no longer feels like a country at war. [...]
 
America's Jacksonians have been sated.
 
Who are the Jacksonians?
 
In 1999 Walter Russell Mead wrote a celebrated essay for The National Interest called The Jacksonian Tradition where he described what he calls the four foreign policy traditions in the United States; Jacksonian, Wilsonian, Hamiltonian, and Jeffersonian.
 
Jeffersonians are principled pacifists. Hamiltonians seek a stable and orderly world made secure for the global economy. Wilsonians build international institutions that promote freedom and human rights. They also fight for a world that's safe for democracy. And finally there are Jacksonians, who are isolationist in peace time and ruthless in war time.
 
Jacksonians, when roused, fight unflinchingly to the finish. The very idea of a limited war is anathema. They demanded the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan in World War II, and they hardly blinked an eye at the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their complaint about the Vietnam War is that we didn't fight to win, not that we stayed on too long. When the first President Bush left Saddam Hussein in power after routing him in Kuwait, Americans of the Jacksonian persuasion were deeply unsatisfied.
 
After September 11, 2001, pin-point air strikes against terrorist camps in Afghanistan would have been woefully inadequate. Nothing short of the overthrow of the Taliban was acceptable. Though regime-change in Iraq was the brainchild of hawkish Wilsonian intellectuals, Jacksonians lent their support instinctively and overwhelmingly. They would no longer tolerate violations of the 1991 cease-fire they never thought Saddam deserved in the first place. [...]
 
President Bush's Middle East strategy is Wilsonian idealism in Jacksonian costume. Rhetorical flourishes like "good riddance" and "dead or alive" play well among Jacksonians, even as it drives more genteel Wilsonians and Jeffersonians to distraction.

Jacksonians are not "principled pacifists" but principled isolationists and theirs is the default position of America generally. Though they are ferocious once we're dragged into war, their attention span is rather brief and they tend to make us return to our splendid isolation before the underlying problems that caused war in the first place are dealt with.

Indeed, we can see in retrospect that those within the Administration who argued for doing Iraq in the immediate wake of 9-11 were probably right. By waiting until after Afghanistan they nearly didn't have enough backing to take out Saddam and folks just want it all to end now. (That's why leaving the al Qaeda elements in Pakistan was wise--no one will dispute going after them whenever.)

The great task before President Bush, the one that stands to make him a historic figure if he succeeds, is to convince the Jacksonians that his style of hawkish Wilsonianism is in America's (and their) best interest. The basic idea is that by hastening the End of History and pushing the world's most dysfunctional regions and states towards liberal democracy we can avoid getting pulled into their problems in the future. That is: it is always America that ends up dealing with the most pathological -isms; stopping genocides; intervening in civil wars; reversing invasions; etc.--why not act preemptively for once and settle these problems on our terms?

In trying to effect this revolution, Mr. Bush is squarely within the American rhetorical and intellectual tradition but running counter to the political tradition. If he pulls it off it will be an unparalleled achievement.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 22, 2004 3:05 PM