bobbyw24
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by Paul Gottfried
A frequently heard complaint on the Old Right is that American foreign policy has changed for the worst because of the neoconservative ascendancy in public affairs. Supposedly there was a time when sober white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or other staid types were running Foggy Bottom, or wherever US foreign policy was made. These embodiments of prudence, fortified by a belief in original sin, warned our heads of government against ideological fanaticism. Whether these advisors were like the subject of Lee Congdon’s admiring biography of George F. Kennan or the "wise men" described by Walter Isaacs in his equally celebratory study of the bluebloods who became presidential advisors in the 1940s and 1950s, supposedly foreign policy advisors were not always of the stuff of Madeleine Albright, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Michael Ledeen.
At one time, perhaps fifty or eighty years ago, there were patricians imbued with a sense of limited national interest and with a desire to stay out of entangling alliances, unless American survival was at stake. Back in the good old days, secretaries of state and presidential confidants did not rant against the non-democratic world or call for foreign crusades to impose the American way of life.
Such an age of sobriety has not existed for a very long time. The sober realist Kennan was an isolated dinosaur by the end of the Second World War; and it is hard to think of many struggles that the US has engaged in since the First World War that was not sold as a crusade for democracy and universal rights. The late Hans Morgenthau, who was supposedly a foreign policy realist, argued that it was OK for the US to wage foreign wars for universal ideals, as long as our leaders understand that it was all for show. But that dichotomy has never worked. All crusades for democracy, from the time they are launched, have to be defended and prosecuted as struggles with global moral significance. In the two World Wars this ideological zeal resulted in demonizing the enemy. Particularly in the last two years of the Second World War this governmentally incited demonization facilitated the mass bombing of the "undemocratic" civilian population on the other side. The US also insisted on unconditional surrender in both Europe and Asia and it engaged in expensive efforts to either kill or imprison the leaders of its erstwhile enemies and then to reeducate the surviving civilian population, until they became more or less like us. That’s how democratic crusades fought for universal ideals are likely to end, particularly if they involve large standing armies and continue to be fought with considerable bloodshed until the other side has been totally defeated.
This did not happen while Russian Jewish Trotskyists or super-Zionist hawks were running American foreign policy. Rather we are looking at the demonstrable actions of WASP patricians like FDR, who espoused a drastic course of action in destroying anti-democratic enemies that FDR believed Americans had failed to take during an earlier American crusade for democracy.
That of course was the war that the Southern patrician Wilson had pulled his country into in 1917. Other bluebloods between 1914 and 1917 such as Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Elihu Root and Henry Cabot Lodge, were profoundly disgusted that Wilson had taken so long to throw us into the European meat grinder. Many of these patricians balked (as they should have) at American adhesion to the League of Nations. They did not want armies being sent to Europe to aid the French and those successor states in East Central Europe created or expanded to contain Germany and Soviet Russia in perpetually holding down the losers, namely the Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians. But the argument could be made that these patricians should have thought twice before embroiling us in a massive war, one in which we became complicit in mass killing and in the unjust treaty that ended that struggle. Far better if the US had taken the advice of Wilson’s first secretary of state, the decidedly non-patrician prairie populist William Jennings Bryan, someone who had been serious about being neutral and about working to reconcile the European belligerents.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried114.html
A frequently heard complaint on the Old Right is that American foreign policy has changed for the worst because of the neoconservative ascendancy in public affairs. Supposedly there was a time when sober white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or other staid types were running Foggy Bottom, or wherever US foreign policy was made. These embodiments of prudence, fortified by a belief in original sin, warned our heads of government against ideological fanaticism. Whether these advisors were like the subject of Lee Congdon’s admiring biography of George F. Kennan or the "wise men" described by Walter Isaacs in his equally celebratory study of the bluebloods who became presidential advisors in the 1940s and 1950s, supposedly foreign policy advisors were not always of the stuff of Madeleine Albright, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Michael Ledeen.
At one time, perhaps fifty or eighty years ago, there were patricians imbued with a sense of limited national interest and with a desire to stay out of entangling alliances, unless American survival was at stake. Back in the good old days, secretaries of state and presidential confidants did not rant against the non-democratic world or call for foreign crusades to impose the American way of life.
Such an age of sobriety has not existed for a very long time. The sober realist Kennan was an isolated dinosaur by the end of the Second World War; and it is hard to think of many struggles that the US has engaged in since the First World War that was not sold as a crusade for democracy and universal rights. The late Hans Morgenthau, who was supposedly a foreign policy realist, argued that it was OK for the US to wage foreign wars for universal ideals, as long as our leaders understand that it was all for show. But that dichotomy has never worked. All crusades for democracy, from the time they are launched, have to be defended and prosecuted as struggles with global moral significance. In the two World Wars this ideological zeal resulted in demonizing the enemy. Particularly in the last two years of the Second World War this governmentally incited demonization facilitated the mass bombing of the "undemocratic" civilian population on the other side. The US also insisted on unconditional surrender in both Europe and Asia and it engaged in expensive efforts to either kill or imprison the leaders of its erstwhile enemies and then to reeducate the surviving civilian population, until they became more or less like us. That’s how democratic crusades fought for universal ideals are likely to end, particularly if they involve large standing armies and continue to be fought with considerable bloodshed until the other side has been totally defeated.
This did not happen while Russian Jewish Trotskyists or super-Zionist hawks were running American foreign policy. Rather we are looking at the demonstrable actions of WASP patricians like FDR, who espoused a drastic course of action in destroying anti-democratic enemies that FDR believed Americans had failed to take during an earlier American crusade for democracy.
That of course was the war that the Southern patrician Wilson had pulled his country into in 1917. Other bluebloods between 1914 and 1917 such as Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Elihu Root and Henry Cabot Lodge, were profoundly disgusted that Wilson had taken so long to throw us into the European meat grinder. Many of these patricians balked (as they should have) at American adhesion to the League of Nations. They did not want armies being sent to Europe to aid the French and those successor states in East Central Europe created or expanded to contain Germany and Soviet Russia in perpetually holding down the losers, namely the Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians. But the argument could be made that these patricians should have thought twice before embroiling us in a massive war, one in which we became complicit in mass killing and in the unjust treaty that ended that struggle. Far better if the US had taken the advice of Wilson’s first secretary of state, the decidedly non-patrician prairie populist William Jennings Bryan, someone who had been serious about being neutral and about working to reconcile the European belligerents.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried114.html
He shoots himself right in the foot at the very beginning of the article with this implication.
