TIME FOR LINCOLN-JACKSON DAY DINNERS?:

The coming foreign policy civil wars: part 1 – The Democrats: John Kerry’s confusions over Iraq reflect the internal struggle for the Democrats’ foreign policy soul (John C. Hulsman, 1 - 7 - 2004, Open Democracy)

It is vital to remember that the Democrats split exactly down the middle in the senate over whether to give the president the power to make war in Iraq; half (including Kerry) voted with him, half against. This schism mirrors the fundamental foreign policy differences between “New Democrats” – former President Clinton, secretary-of-state-in-waiting Richard Holbrooke, and Kerry himself – and old-school McGovernite Democrats, epitomised by both Howard Dean and maverick leftist candidate Ralph Nader.

The New Democrats are comfortable with using force for humanitarian as well as national interests (which they look at broadly; Liberia, for example, is somehow a example of the latter), and seek as a priority multilateral validation for their interventions – such as Nato intervention in the Balkans in the mid-1990s. In the Iraq process, their approach pushed for an increased United Nations role at an earlier stage.

For New Democrats, the United States’s international legitimacy is to a large degree bound up in multilateral institutions – even if these institutions (like the UN) lack direct democratic accountability, are filled with dictators, and contain “allies” like the French who attempt to use the institution to hamstring American foreign policy initiatives. In the case of Iraq, this leads New Democrats to believe that international legitimacy (what the UN Security Council’s permanent members think) is at least as important as how Iraqis themselves view the occupation.

This is not at all how today’s McGovernites operate. Along with the far right in the US, they advocate a quasi-isolationist policy – though for diametrically opposed reasons: the far right thinks America is too good for the world, while the far left thinks the world is too good for America.

In both cases such thinking leads to the same policy prescription – do little outside of America’s immediate borders. McGovernites, rightly traumatised by Vietnam, are deeply suspicious of any American foreign policy intervention. They see such ventures as largely driven by the corporate greed of the military-industrial complex, whose resulting inflated defense budget shackles average Americans with an enormous and unnecessary bill.

McGovernites scorn the notion that Iraq is a humanitarian mission; for them, it is about American control of oil. In their eyes, New Democrats are either naïve, gratifying the defense-friendly Republicans, or, even worse, hypocritical, cloaking their own greed behind fine-sounding phrases like “humanitarian intervention”.

The middle separates isolationists from transnationalists? Are there really no Jacksonians left in the Democratic party?

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 8, 2004 9:25 AM