For some time now, I've been intrigued by the term "foreign policy realist." This label has been generally applied to the set of politicians and news media commentators who find themselves at odds with the foreign policy of the Bush administration.
A little research reveals that these same folks have been aligning themselves under their own particular worldview since the 1970's. They first united under the "fighting Communism is pointless" approach of candidate George McGovern in 1972. They came into power during the Carter administration and oversaw such foreign policy successes as the Iranian revolution and the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. Detente and nuclear disarmament were the banners they carried forward. They resurfaced during the Clinton administration, speaking of "peace dividends," grooming the idea that terrorism could be contained through law enforcement, and recharacterizing outlaw nations as mere "states of concern."
A little more exploring reveals that the "realists" are cut from the same ideological cloth as the leftist intellectuals who fawned over Stalin's Soviet experiment and the national socialism of the Nazi party during the 1930's. The Nazis eventually fell out of favor with the intelligentsia when it became undeniably obvious that they were not the intellectual soul mates of the American left, and when the Nazi's intentions of dealing with undesirable people through imprisonment and death could no longer be ignored. Relations between the Soviet Union and the American Left were much more cozy.
But what is the common thread that ties the 1930's intellectuals with today's realists? The answer would appear to be Marxism, or more generally, the notion of an ultimately just and beneveolent socialist state. Ideologies have a surprising longevity, and one of the core ideologies of the American Left is the superiority of a true Marxist state to an economy controlled by laissez-faire capitalism. Indeed, the field of Humanities at the university level is still dominated by discussions of Marx and Freud as though their work still represents the cutting edge of economics and science. In the closed loop of academia, theories beget more theories, and the utopian dream of equality is born again with each successive generation of professors and students. It's a pity that very few intellectuals take a break from reading academic journals and dare to evaluate how well socialism has performed in the real world.
Stalin's great Soviet experiment ignited the passions of intellectuals 80 years ago, for it promised the first, and spectacularly large, implementation of a classless society in which all citizens shared wealth and responsibility equally. So a few million unfortunate souls died? You've got to break a few eggs in order to make a perfect omlet. We were so fortunate to have a great progressive thinker like Walter Duranty who could explain the nuances of communism in language that the masses could understand.
Mao's People's Revolution in China was greeted by the intellectual left with equal satisfaction. In fact, the 1950's and 1960's were ripe with "people's revolutions" around the world - Cuba, Korea, Vietnam. That these revolutions were the work of a handful of zealous Communist disciples, and not the work of the "people," seemed to go unnoticed in Leftist circles. Any nation that succeeded in freeing itself from the evil enslavement of capitalism represented the true hope for mankind.
These were the seeds that were planted in the fertile young minds that attended the better universities in the 1960's. These kids, mostly from stable upper middle class homes with plenty of money, had little to do other than sit around and ponder what they had been taught: The poor of the world deserve a chance to be free. They do not deserve to be the slaves of empires or greedy capitalists sitting in luxury offices in New York and London. America is committing a moral outrage by waging a war in Vietnam against a people that merely wishes to live freely and equally with one another. How many innocent women and children will be murdered by the United States and its mercenaries in the name of the almighty dollar? The American economic and military machine is the greatest source of evil in the world today.
And so the stage was set for today's reality-based community, a self-derived name indicating that non-conformers are out of touch with reality.
But what is reality? It's the notion that there is a new world-wide morality - a set of ethical values (secular humanism), laws (the ICC and EU), and economics (benevolent socialism), derived from the work of twentieth-century intellectuals, that eclipses traditional American morality and ethics (derived from Christianity) and economics (derived from free-market capitalism). Those who are in touch with reality appreciate the superiority of this new world morality, and are working to ensure that it uproots and replaces the archaic, repressive, religion-based system advocated by greedy, selfish American conservatives.
It's good old anti-Americanism, only with a satisfying new name and the endorsement of Western intelligentsia. In fact, the intelligentsia even created their own world-wide organization to promote this new morality. It's called the United Nations.
I shouldn't leave Israel out of the picture, either. The Israeli experiment proved that a successful democratic society with a thriving free-market economy could be carved out of one of the world's most backward regions. Israel succeeded; the great socialist experiments of Eastern Europe, founded at the same time as Israel, failed. So now Israel sports the same bull's-eye as America, only perhaps a little smaller.
To me, this is the only way that world events of the last fifty years can make any sense at all. Realists claim to be against "imperial aggression," that is, against the manipulation of a smaller country by a larger one for the larger nation's political gain. But nary a peep of protest was sounded from the left as the Soviet Union rumbled through Eastern Europe, into Afghanistan, and installed proxy governments in Cuba and Vietnam. Imperial aggression clearly wasn't the problem. Only when the United States stepped into a foreign fray, in Vietnam or Grenada or Lebanon, or Iraq, did the lamentations of the Left begin.
To the realists, there can be no greater setback for the world than for an American victory, and there have been far too many of them. It wasn't the fault of evil, sadistic madmen, wallowing in the loot that they plundered from their impoverished and emotionally broken populations, that the great Marxist utopias of the twentieth century collapsed. No, it was the fault of America, who refused give these struggling nations a chance, while at the same time lavishing billions of dollars in aid on Israel and on every dirty right-wing Third-world dictator who promised not to go Red. It was America who forced the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. It was America's blockade that turned Cuba into a glorified slum with free healthcare clinics. It was all America's fault.
And when the suffering can't be blamed on America, the realists are silent. Nothing we can do about the Taliban but accept them as the rulers of Afghanistan. Rwanda? A tradgedy - not a genocide - but there's nothing we can really do. Zimbabwe? Robert Mugabe just wants what's best for his people, famine is just an unfortunate side effect. Send CARE a check today, won't you? North Korea? Who? Hadn't heard from them in years, that is until Bush started threatening them with his silly Axis of Evil rhetoric. Now they're acting in self defense. Wouldn't you, if a big imperialist bully were picking on you? Iraq? The sanctions were working just fine (as long as you weren't one of the 300,000 Iraqis who ended up in the mass graves). Saddam was never a threat.
And so we come to today's big foreign policy gamble, Iraq. Sure, it's risky - as risky as the Israeli experiment was sixty years ago. But the risk of democracy isn't what really worries realists. Democracy isn't the issue. The ponderous socialist bureaucracy of Europe has elections. What really troubles realists is the thought of America helping yet another nation to develop a free market economy - and not just any nation, but a former totalitarian dictatorship nestled deep within a region that has never seen capitalism really work.
So the intellectual Left, and their ideologues and allies in Europe and in America's Democrat Party, have fought our efforts in Iraq tooth and nail. And in doing so, they've been forced to defend (and in some cases support) a brutal murdering dictator and a group of revolting, head-chopping religious fanatics and thugs. Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows.
I have no doubt that if the effort to invade Iraq was carried out by blue-helmeted UN troops and managed by UN and EU politicians who were intent on creating a benevolent socialist bureaucracy in Iraq, the realists would have no complaints. That's the world they want.
Anything but a little bit more of America.
UPDATE 2-11-05: I changed some grammar and clarified some thoughts. Hopefully it reads a little clearer now than in my original post.
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