Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

America’s policy of containment also involved an enormous military buildup, matching and then exceeding the Soviet and Chinese arsenals. Over time, the “iron triangle” of the Pentagon, defense contractors, and congressmen with large defense expenditures in their districts amassed great power in shaping U.S. foreign policy. And although the threat of nuclear war would preclude direct military confrontation with our superpower rivals, U.S policy makers increasingly viewed problems elsewhere in the world through a military lens rather than a diplomatic one.

Most important, the postwar system over time suffered from too much politics and not enough deliberation and domestic consensus building. One of America’s strengths immediately following the war was a degree of domestic consensus surrounding foreign policy. There might have been fierce differences between Republicans and Democrats, but politics usually ended at the water’s edge; professionals, whether in the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, or the CIA, were expected to make decisions based on facts and sound judgment, not ideology or electioneering. Moreover, that consensus extended to the public at large; programs like the Marshall Plan, which involved a massive investment of U.S. funds, could not have gone forward without the American people’s basic trust in their government, as well as a reciprocal faith on the part of government officials that the American people could be trusted with the facts that went into decisions that spent their tax dollars or sent their sons to war.

As the Cold War wore on, the key elements in this consensus began to erode. Politicians discovered that they could get votes by being tougher on communism than their opponents. Democrats were assailed for “losing China.” McCarthyism destroyed careers and crushed dissent. Kennedy would blame Republicans for a “missile gap” that didn’t exist on his way to beating Nixon, who himself had made a career of Red-baiting his opponents. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson would all find their judgment clouded by fear that they would be tagged as “soft on communism.” The Cold War techniques of secrecy, snooping, and misinformation, used against foreign governments and foreign populations, became tools of domestic politics, a means to harass critics, build support for questionable policies, or cover up blunders. The very ideals that we had promised to export overseas were being betrayed at home.

All these trends came to a head in Vietnam. The disastrous consequences of that conflict — for our credibility and prestige abroad, for our armed forces (which would take a generation to recover), and most of all for those who fought — have been amply documented. But perhaps the biggest casualty of that war was the bond of trust between the American people and their government — and between Americans themselves. As a consequence of a more aggressive press corps and the images of body bags flooding into living rooms, Americans began to realize that the best and the brightest in Washington didn’t always know what they were doing — and didn’t always tell the truth. Increasingly, many on the left voiced opposition not only to the Vietnam War but also to the broader aims of American foreign policy. In their view, President Johnson, General Westmoreland, the CIA, the “military-industrial complex,” and international institutions like the World Bank were all manifestations of American arrogance, jingoism, racism, capitalism, and imperialism. Those on the right responded in kind, laying responsibility not only for the loss of Vietnam but also for the decline of America’s standing in the world squarely on the “blame America first” crowd — the protesters, the hippies, Jane Fonda, the Ivy League intellectuals and liberal media who denigrated patriotism, embraced a relativistic worldview, and undermined American resolve to confront godless communism.

Admittedly, these were caricatures, promoted by activists and political consultants. Many Americans remained somewhere in the middle, still supportive of America’s efforts to defeat communism but skeptical of U.S. policies that might involve large numbers of American casualties. Throughout the seventies and eighties, one could find Democratic hawks and Republican doves; in Congress, there were men like Mark Hatfield of Oregon and Sam Nunn of Georgia who sought to perpetuate the tradition of a bipartisan foreign policy. But the caricatures were what shaped public impressions during election time, as Republicans increasingly portrayed Democrats as weak on defense, and those suspicious of military and covert action abroad increasingly made the Democratic Party their political home.

It was against this backdrop — an era of division rather than an era of consensus — that most Americans alive today formed whatever views they may have on foreign policy. These were the years of Nixon and Kissinger, whose foreign policies were tactically brilliant but were overshadowed by domestic policies and a Cambodian bombing campaign that were morally rudderless. They were the years of Jimmy Carter, a Democrat who — with his emphasis on human rights — seemed prepared to once again align moral concerns with a strong defense, until oil shocks, the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan made him seem naive and ineffective.

Looming perhaps largest of all was Ronald Reagan, whose clarity about communism seemed matched by his blindness regarding other sources of misery in the world. I personally came of age during the Reagan presidency — I was studying international affairs at Columbia, and later working as a community organizer in Chicago — and like many Democrats in those days I bemoaned the effect of Reagan’s policies toward the Third World: his administration’s support for the apartheid regime of South Africa, the funding of El Salvador’s death squads, the invasion of tiny, hapless Grenada. The more I studied nuclear arms policy, the more I found Star Wars to be ill conceived; the chasm between Reagan’s soaring rhetoric and the tawdry Iran-Contra deal left me speechless.

But at times, in arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview. I didn’t understand why, for example, progressives should be less concerned about oppression behind the Iron Curtain than they were about brutality in Chile. I couldn’t be persuaded that U.S. multinationals and international terms of trade were single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to steal from their people. I might have arguments with the size of Reagan’s military buildup, but given the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, staying ahead of the Soviets militarily seemed a sensible thing to do. Pride in our country, respect for our armed services, a healthy appreciation for the dangers beyond our borders, an insistence that there was no easy equivalence between East and West — in all this I had no quarrel with Reagan. And when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his due, even if I never gave him my vote.

Many people — including many Democrats — did give Reagan their vote, leading Republicans to argue that his presidency restored America’s foreign policy consensus. Of course, that consensus was never really tested; Reagan’s war against communism was mainly carried out through proxies and deficit spending, not the deployment of U.S. troops. As it was, the end of the Cold War made Reagan’s formula seem ill suited to a new world. George H. W. Bush’s return to a more traditional, “realist” foreign policy would result in a steady management of the Soviet Union’s dissolution and an able handling of the first Gulf War. But with the American public’s attention focused on the domestic economy, his skill in building international coalitions or judiciously projecting American power did nothing to salvage his presidency.