IN THE NEWS
I'm late to the ball when it comes to analyzing Bush's second inaugural speech. However, I think it's not too late to point out a statement he made that (1) didn't get the attention it deserved, and (2) is highly uncharacteristic of any presidential address of which I'm aware:
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
Other presidents have argued that the US national interest includes the spread of democracy and the rule of law to other countries. These men have had stated different reasons why this policy was important, and some (like Woodrow Wilson) emphasized it far more than others. However, I can't find any president who has ever said that we don't want fewer tyrannies and more democracies abroad.
I can't find in my brief research on the topic any statement that liberty at home is contingent on liberty abroad. In fact, in many famous examples, US presidents have stated exactly the opposite. Washington's farewell address includes the following famous passage:
Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it.
Washington then continues:
The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
And he doesn't stop there. After taking pains to outline other reasons why the new American republic shouldn't involve itself more with Europe than what is minimally necessary to preserve American commerce and the integrity of its borders, Washington closes this section of his farewell address with the following:
There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion, which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.
Of course, after World War II, the United States did involve itself quite deeply in European affairs. Once the Cold War made American decision-makers worried about threats from other corners of the globe--Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and so on--the United States became more interested in the internal politics of more nations than it had ever cared about. (The obvious exceptions, of course, were Latin America, the Caribbean, and to a more limited extent, the Philippines and China.) By the time John F. Kennedy made his inaugural address, the United States had left Washington's warnings about foreign entanglements far, far behind.
No president, however, ever differed from Washington on an important point of national consensus: regardless of what happened in the rest of the world, the American political experiment had to stand or fall on its own. American democracy, liberty, and constitutionalism could be an example to the world. However, these fundamental elements of "the American way of life" never depended on how effectively we spread them to other countries. Even the crassest moments in American foreign policy, such as dollar diplomacy, never implied that the election of an alderman in Poughkipsee or Pocatello somehow depended on the fortunes of democracy in Paraguay.
On this point, the closest parallel I can draw between Bush's second inaugural and a similar speech is Kennedy's inaugural address, in which he alluded to the "long twilight struggle" of the Cold War. Then, the concern was "wars of national liberation" that were led or could be subverted by communists friendly to our Soviet enemy. The United States was in danger, Kennedy argued, from unexpected corners of the globe, in guerrilla wars that were only "little" to those who underestimated the threat. Today, Bush and other American leaders, both Republican and Democrat, are making the same argument about terrorism. But no one that I can find, including Kennedy, has ever before said that "[t]he survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." Here's what Kennedy actually said in the "twilight struggle" part of his speech:
In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than in mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.
Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.
Not quite the same statement as Bush's. Kennedy, like every other president before or since, except Bush, has said that American democracy is completely in our own hands.
So, what exactly is supposed to be threatening the survival of America's liberty - that we'll be conquered by Islamic terrorists who'll make us wear burkas and pray to Mecca five times per day? Or that the terrorist attacks against the US will become so severe that Administration will have to destroy our liberty in order to "save" it?
Posted by: Aikibrewer | 01/31/2005 at 13:28
I'm still amazed--and maybe I'm just naive--that as many American citizens and journalists are willing to accept the thesis, without question, that because terrorists attacked us, we have to accept severe restrictions on our civil liberties until some hazily-defined point at which we "win." When the newly-elected president makes a similar statement in his inaugural address, and it passes practically without comment, I get even more alarmed than I was (if that's possible).
Posted by: Kingdaddy | 02/01/2005 at 10:30
And yet, as Richard Clarke (and I believe you) points out, the Clinton Administration managed to catch all but one of the terrorists responsible for the WTC bombing, run them all through the criminal justice system, and put them away for a very long time, without the USA PATRIOT act, without a Department of Homeland Security, and without invading a single other country. But has the Bush Administration explained why they've needed to suspend habeas corpus; the Geneva Conventions; and Article I, Section 8, Clauses 10, 11, 12, and 14 of the U.S. Constitution?
Posted by: Aikibrewer | 02/02/2005 at 14:59