The American Cause
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Mike Pence is one of the few members of the current GOP House leadership with any credibility when he criticizes bailouts (he opposed the TARP when it was first proposed), so that isn’t the problem with his recent address to The American Spectator’s Robert Bartley dinner. Pence refers to a “great American awakening” in response to “runaway federal spending, bailouts and takeovers by both parties.” He might be right, but even if there weren’t such an awakening he wouldn’t be wrong to speak out against these things. What is amazing about the beginning of this speech is how quickly it turns from an area where the GOP may now have some advantages (i.e., fiscal and economic questions) to foreign policy, where it has nothing at all worthwhile to say. Fiscal conservatives can rightly point to mounting debt, a weakening dollar and an unsustainable entitlement system and can offer something in the way of a remedy or at least a serious alternative, but the moment the subject turns to foreign affairs they become ridiculous idealists and paranoid alarmists.
Pence begins:
On the foreign stage, the American people know that weakness arouses evil. They know that bowing and kowtowing to foreign dictators only diminishes our standing in the world. And they know that standing idly by while the Ayatollahs in Iran crush innocent civilians, clamoring for free elections, is totally inconsistent with our history of standing with those who stand for freedom around the world. Ronald Reagan didn’t stand before the Brandenburg Gate and say, “Mr. Gorbachev, that wall is none of our business.” The American cause is freedom and in that cause we must never be silent again
This is idealistic claptrap at best, but what worries me is that Pence may actually think this is a serious criticism of Obama’s foreign policy. In 1956, our President did not confuse the American cause with the cause of Hungarian rebels, admirable and courageous as those rebels were, and WWIII was avoided. Indeed, it was the empty rhetoric of rollback fanatics who led those Hungarians to believe that they would receive U.S. support if they rose up. They believed the fantasy that “the American cause is freedom,” and they were killed as a result. That is precisely what Pence is urging our government to do with respect to Iran. In other words, he is calling on our government to give Tehran a pretext for even bloodier repression.
Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that we accept the fairy tale that the Georgian government of Mikheil Saakashvili has been representing the forces of freedom and democracy in the Caucasus. By Pence’s standard, because “the American cause is freedom,” we would be obliged to have come to the defense of Georgia when Russia retaliated against Georgian escalation. To do anything else would be to betray our principles, right? If our government were as foolish and reckless as Pence’s rhetoric would have it be, we would have been entering into new major international wars on a regular basis in recent years. At the very least we would have been sacrificing American interests to take sides in foreign political conflicts in which we have no real stake.
Idealists love to make commitments that our government is then bound to keep or else be accused of “betraying” the cause of freedom. What Pence does not make explicit is that the national interest often diverges from the interests of foreign dissidents. How could it be otherwise? Pence has a lot of fun throwing around accusations that Obama has been “bowing and kowtowing” to other governments, but Pence plainly wants to subordinate U.S. interests to the causes of political dissidents around the world.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
Who cares what Mike Pence or any other Republicans thinks about foreign policy? The Repubicans in Congress are irrelevant to policy in the U.S and have zero influence. What the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is much more important because those groups are in the one, dominate party and they are growing in power.
Daniel should stop wasting time ripping the Republicans when the Republicans are irrelevant to politics. Why not take a few days and study what the Democrats and especially the CBC and CHC are saying since they are the ones who control policy in the U.,S?
An awesomely bad coment, chock full o’ lies.
If what you said were true, current US policy would look really, really, really different – both foreign and domestic.
It’s peripheral to your point here, of course, but there is no debt crisis, no dollar crisis, and no entitlement crisis.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/deficit-hysteria/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/notes-on-the-dollar-panic/
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=05&year=2007&base_name=social_security_as_signifier
superdestroyer, Daniel cares about what Pence and other Republicans think about foreign policy, because he would like them to be actually relevant and have a positive influence on it. The Black and Hispanic caucuses control policy in the US? You are out of your mind. There are one black and one hispanic Senator; 41 black and 24 hispanic reps. How do “they” control anything?
BarryD, what are the lies?
There are a few reasons I bother to look at what Pence and other Republicans say about foreign policy. First, they spend a great deal of time pretending that they have some authority on this subject, and they then try to derail policy initiatives that seem to me to be better than what they propose. They do not control anything directly, but they can undermine the administration when it is doing some of the right things, such as scrapping the missile defense program in central Europe, repairing relations with Russia (however inconsistently) or attempting to engage Iran. Second, foreign policy errors drove them out of power in Congress and turned the country against the party as a whole, but they refuse to believe this and refuse to learn anything from their mistakes. If we are to have even a minimally functioning political system, the opposition party cannot be allowed to drift into irrelevance on major policy questions. It may not do much good, but critiques of the GOP on foreign policy coming from the right stand a better chance of changing their thinking than if they come from somewhere else. I doubt that I can persuade many mainstream Republicans, but if I can make clear to others that their current arguments are worthless that could eventually contribute to some re-thinking on their part.
Another reason why I keep talking about Republican foreign policy arguments is that the combination of hawkish intervention and empty “freedom” rhetoric has to be beaten out of the party. These ideas are destructive, and unless the GOP changes when it is out of power these will be the ideas that prevail in some future Republican administration. That may not occur for another seven or eleven years, but there will eventually be another Republican President, and he will need sound counsel. He isn’t going to get it if this kind of thinking goes unchallenged during the time in the wilderness.
Elvis, I never used the word crisis for any of these things. There is mounting debt, the dollar is weakening, and the largest of our entitlement programs (Medicare) is unsustainable. None of these things is necessarily beyond repair, and they are medium to long-term problems, but they are real problems.
Thanks for responding, Daniel, and fair enough. I’m concerned about the foolish apocalyptic rhetoric I’m hearing elsewhere about those topics, but you haven’t been saying anything like that. And agreed, they are all real medium- to long-term problems.
Daniel,
Thank you for the answer but why not look at what the six members of the CBC on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs are saying. They are in the majority and as the U.S. becomes a non-white nation their POV will become the dominate point of view.
The only relevance that the Republicans have on any policy issue comes from whatever the Democrats give them. The Democrats have total control over foreign policy and will have for at least the next seven years. Whatever the Republicans are saying is totally irrelevant.
Also, the idea that the Republicans can make a comeback in a decade after the Democrats pass amnesty and pass massive new entitlements is laughable. Instead of trying to affect the irrelevant Republicans why not try to affect the party in power and what they will be doing in the future. At least the Obama Administration was smart enough not to get involved in Darfur or anywhere else in Africa. The Obama Administration is also smart enough to ignore South America since those countries are all working hard to make themselves irrelevant.
Does this ‘runaway federal spending’ include the military budget?
superdestroyer, okay, I’ll bite. What are those 7 CBC members saying? Btw, there are 29 Democrats (48 total) on that committee, and only one CBC member with a subcommittee chair. (1 CBC member in the 8 highest ranking Democrats, but 3 out of the 10 highest) What power do they have?
Do you know what year American will become a minority majority country? And do you know that blacks aren’t the only non-whites?
Daniel sounds like a pragmatist and a bit to imbued with respect for other countries opinions and standings. I suspect that at the core he believes that people have to make their own political decisions: i.e. let the Iranians fight for their own freedom and democratic rule and justice; only this way they will truly achieve something.
This deep respect for the other that I sense in Daniel will make it very hard for his voice to gain any credibility with the GOP, because his attitude seems as going against the grain of American exceptionalism. He will have to wait for more than 8-11 years. If he keeps his head above water and he is able to write a good book analyzing american foreign policies from a coherent perspective and without any veil left hanging, he has good chances to become at 50 the next wolfovitz or frum or whatever.
Blogging and journal writing is necessary for keeping a finger on the current events, but one or two books would really help. As a leftist and pacifist, I wish him good luck and success, ‘cus heaven knows how badly GOP and republicans need to reform (not that democrats are much better, just that they seem at the moment a lesser evil).