They conjure up a world of absolute good and absolute evil beyond the extremely isolated urban bubble in which they live. By James W. Carden.
Today, we are witnessing the endgame of an eight-decade internal Democratic Party debate.
The hysterical and vitriolic attacks on Donald Trump's nominee for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Deborah Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., only confirm what many voters have realized in the eight years since Donald Trump was elected president:
the Democratic Party has become a prisoner of a kind of Cold War mania.
In the few years since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, it has become a war party, and many of its members, including Warren and Schultz in particular, speak as if they are the proud heirs of Joe McCarthy.
Democrats do not tolerate dissent in foreign affairs.
Part of the reason for this is that the party has fallen victim to a kind of absolutist groupthink about America's role in the world.
Democrats are not satisfied with, and frankly uninterested in, traditional government roles such as border protection and diplomacy, but
they have conjured up a world of absolute good and absolute evil beyond the extremely isolated urban bubble in which they live and work.
As such, they want to wage a cold culture war in which American power is exercised for the social causes they favor.
Another reason for the transformation of the Democratic Party into a war party is the debate within the party and the current lack of competition.
In the 80 years following the end of World War II, there was a healthy, sometimes sharp competition within the Democratic Party regarding America and its role in the world: on one side were the so-called Rooseveltians, on the other side were the Achesonians.
The rivalry between the two helped shape American politics during the Cold War.
However, with the advent of the post-Cold War world, competition died down - and turned into victory.
But history took a big turn on April 12, 1945.
With the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman entered the White House. In just five years, Truman and his second secretary of state, Dean Acheson, with the help of original Cold War veterans James Forrestal, Frank Wisner, and Paul Nitze, made a radical break with Roosevelt's postwar vision of great power reciprocity embodied in the UN Charter. The launch of the modern national security state in 1947, followed by the passage of National Security Council Memorandum 68, militarized George Kennan's vision of containment and set the course for much of America's behavior over the next 40 years.
Following the Korea debacle and Truman's decision not to run for a second full term, the Rooseveltians made a comeback of sorts (at least within the party) with Governor Adlai Stevenson's two White House bids. However, in the 1960 election, Stevenson was eliminated and John F. Kennedy, who promoted a vision of an America that bore all burdens and paid all prices , made it. The 1960 election was, after all, between two of his husks, Kennedy and Nixon; but with Kennedy's victory and the appointment of Acheson's protégés like Dean Rusk and other hardliners, the Achesonians were back in the game—or so they thought.
To some extent, John F. Kennedy embodied both the Rooseveltian and Achesonian traditions.
Until the near-catastrophe of October 1962, his government governed in the Achesonian style. But after successive crises—Berlin in 1961 and Cuba in 1962—Kennedy realized that a new approach was needed. He announced this approach at American University's graduation ceremony on June 10, 1963. This marked the end of Kennedy's Achesonian era.
And perhaps this refusal, as recent studies by James W. Douglass and David Talbot show, explains what happened in Dallas the following November.
There are parallels between what happened after the death of President Roosevelt and what happened after the assassination of Kennedy. It is clear that Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson of Texas, expanded the disastrous Vietnam War with the support of the Augustinian institutions set up by Kennedy. Finally, the pattern that emerged in the early 1950s prevailed again in the late 1960s:
after the excesses in Asia, the Achesonians again challenged the Roosevelts for the Democratic presidential nomination.
In 1968, however, this endeavor ended not only in electoral defeat, but also in tragedy.
From 1968 to 1992, the Republican Party was in power for all but four years. This period saw the defeat of George McGovern (a Rooseveltian) in 1972, and later infighting between President Jimmy Carter's hardline, Achesonian national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and his more cautious Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance. During her years in the wilderness, the Achesonians, most notably a Georgetown socialite and scholar named Madeleine Korbel Albright, began laying the groundwork for the Achesonians' return to power.
Albright, who was once a member of Brzezinski's NSC, along with a former deputy secretary of state named Richard Holbrooke, later played a key role in the formulation and practice of American foreign policy under Bill Clinton.
Under Clinton-Albright, foreign policy mainstays Holbrooke and Time magazine's former Russia correspondent Strobe Talbott helped shape the next generation of Achesonians. Talbott became an important protégé and mentor to future Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, as well as Trump's national security advisers HR McMaster, John Bolton, and Russia policy adviser Fiona Hill. Holbrooke was an important mentor to USAID administrator and selective humanitarian Samantha Power. Among Albright's contributions in this area were former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and current Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs James O'Brien.
During Clinton's tenure, the Achesonians consistently triumphed over the Rooseveltians, with NATO expansion, Balkan intervention, and the 78-day bombing of Serbia among their most enduring—and questionable—accomplishments.
The efforts against NATO expansion during these years, led by Kennan and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were the last stand of the Rooseveltians.
During the Senate debate on NATO expansion, the erudite Moynihan — a Tufts doctorate, former U.S. ambassador to India and former adviser to Averell Harriman — was bullied by none other than Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware.
By the turn of the century, the game was almost over for the Rooseveltians.
Congresswoman Barbara Lee was the only opponent of the Bush administration's plan to invade Afghanistan. George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq won 29 Democratic votes in the Senate—including three subsequent Democratic presidential nominees (2004, 2016, 2020). During this period, Rooseveltians mounted token, ineffective resistance to Bush's chosen wars with the presidential candidacies of Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich.
The pattern of the early 1950s and late 1960s was repeated again:
after a period of presidential excesses, this time under the Republican Bush, the Rooseveltians offered a correction in the person of Barack Obama.
But their influence faded within days of Obama's historic election. Hillary Clinton was appointed Secretary of State, Robert Gates remained at the Pentagon, and Leon Panetta was given the reins to head the CIA. In both personnel and policy, the Achesonians triumphed during the Obama years, setting the stage for a new Cold War.
In an October 2016 review of Obama's foreign policy in The Nation, I noted:
“It was widely assumed that Obama would pick up the pieces of the Bush years and exorcise hegemonic phantasies from the body politic. Instead, during his two terms in office, the convergence of neoconservative and Wilsonian interventionist creeds solidified into orthodoxy. Nothing proves this better than the fact that the neocons who were the instigators and defenders of George W. Bush's foreign policy have become staunch supporters of Hillary Clinton. Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and Eliot Cohen, among others, have voiced their preference for [Hillary] Clinton over Republican nominee Donald Trump.”
The bitterness and hysteria engendered by Trump's surprise victory over Clinton in the ranks of the Democratic Party drove it toward an almost total acceptance of Cold War, Achesonian-style politics.
Our story ends where it began: the dangerous Cold War between nuclear-armed powers.
The difference this time is that the new Cold War involves the United States, Russia and China, and, at the time of writing, the proxy war between NATO and Russia in Eastern Europe.
Under President Biden, the Achesian vision has triumphed: Last weekend, the Ukrainians received long-range missiles — missiles that require American soldiers to operate. And the Rooseveltians are nowhere on the national stage. Sadly, even Barbara Lee and some progressives in Congress have joined the ranks of the new Cold War.
Dissidents like Tulsi Gabbard are now branded “Russian agents” by Tailgunner Joe-quoting Democrats. There are no longer elements within the Democratic Party that can curb the dangerous delusions of the American foreign policy establishment.
Translated by Szilvia Polgári
Featured image: Victoria Nuland / MTI / EPA / Tecjana Zenkovics
