A Democratic National Security Strategy
Democrats are deluding themselves if they think they can neutralize the Republican advantage in national security by nominating combat veterans without agreeing on a defense strategy. A neocon chickenhawk with a strategy, no matter how bad, beats a war hero without a strategy any day. Worried voters are looking for a plan on horseback, not a man on horseback.
The Democratic strategy should be the same as a sensible Republican strategy, because we need a bipartisan consensus on national defense. A sound national security strategy should have three elements, in order of importance: border control, deterrence, and preventing the rise of hostile hegemonic powers. Unfortunately, the radical left tends to oppose all three, while all too many mainstream liberals are half-hearted in their support of these goals, particularly the first.
The first duty of the U.S. government is to defend the American homeland against invasion or infiltration by stateless or state-sponsored terrorists or saboteurs. This means the government must shut down all illegal immigration, even though most illegal immigrants are economic migrants who threaten wages and working-class housing affordability but not national security. Scientists have yet to devise a force field that can keep out Saudi or Pakistani jihadists, while admitting mild-mannered Honduran construction workers or Mexican maids.
Echoing the cynical cheap-labor right, the politically-correct open-borders left whines that controlling America's land borders is "impossible" (it's not). They also whine that for our country to control its borders would be "anti-Latino" (the leftists seem not to care if it's anti-Canadian). On the contrary, law-abiding citizens of Latin American countries are free to enter the U.S. legally as legal immigrants or legal visitors. Since when are foreigners from Latin America, by virtue of their ethnicity, absolved from obeying U.S. federal immigration and naturalization laws that they find inconvenient? Can other foreigners of other ethnicities pick and choose which U.S. laws they obey? Should citizens of Asian countries be exempt from obeying drivers' license laws in the U.S., because they find them inconvenient? Should Europeans be free to disobey U.S. visa laws if they choose?
Many on the radical left seem to believe in a borderless world, bless their hearts. These sweet, innocent souls are doomed to lifelong frustration. Since the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago, humanity has been divided among territorial states of various kinds--city-states, empires, nation-states. Unless its power has completely collapsed, no state has ever allowed vast numbers of people to wander freely in and out of its territory. Even in the U.S., where commonsense border security is opposed by cheap-labor Republicans and politically-correct Democrats, more illegal immigrants are caught than succeed in breaking our nation's laws.
Once the borders are secure, in the age of missile proliferation the next priority for American strategists is to deter hostile powers from carrying out long-distance bombardment. If missile defense were practical, the U.S. and every other country should adopt it. But because missile defense is unworkable so far, and may never work, the U.S. must maintain an adequate second-strike deterrent force, sending the signal that any strike on us will result in a strike against them. The U.S. can and should negotiate partial disarmament with other countries, but a modest deterrent will remain necessary, and it will also be necessary to upgrade or change our missiles as technology and threats change.
After border control and deterrence, the third priority of a national security strategy should be anti-hegemonic policy. The U.S. should not aspire to global hegemony itself; the neoconservative attempt to establish American hegemony has only alienated our allies and exposed the limits to our power. But even a U.S. that renounces unilateral American world domination must be able to project military power around the world to defeat attempts by hostile great powers to enhance their military and economic power by using force or intimidation to dominate key industrial regions, like Europe and Asia, or sources of materials critical for military-industrial power, like Persian Gulf oil. Not all regions are important from the standpoint of global power politics and U.S. national security.
Isolationists of the left and right complain about the costs of America's anti-hegemonic wars against Germany and the Soviet bloc, which were expensive indeed in American blood and treasure. But American isolation or appeasement would have meant a far larger U.S. military and a far more militarized American society in a far more dangerous world.
Entering World War I in 1917 to prevent a German victory was far cheaper than building a besieged Fortress America in a world dominated in 1920 or 1930 by German militarists who had succeeded in constructing a European empire. It was far cheaper to prevent Hitler from winning than it would have been to wait for him to consolidate his Eurasian empire and finish the trans-Atlantic bombers, space planes and missiles his scientists were devising for the inevitable conflict he envisioned with the U.S. It was far cheaper to besiege the Soviet empire, check it in proxy wars and use the arms race to spend it into bankruptcy, surrender and disintegration than it would have been to allow the Soviets to use unopposed military power to extort nonaggression pacts and military-industrial and economic supplies from war-weakened Japanese and West Europeans who lacked an ally in America.
The radical left is fond of pointing out that the Soviet Union at its height was never as powerful as the U.S. But this was true of Hitler and the Kaiser, too. The whole point of U.S. strategy in the three world wars (the Cold War having been a world war in slow motion) was to prevent German or Soviet power from matching or surpassing that of the U.S. and its allies. It's better to strangle a young ogre at the very beginning of its rampage than to build a castle and wait for it to grow up and come bludgeon the walls.
We must hope that an anti-hegemonic strategy will not be necessary again. No European country is a potential hegemonic threat, including Russia, which could be a regional menace at best, and the EU is incapable of acting as a unified superpower. But Asia is now the center of global industrial power, and soon of global military power, and Japan, China and India have all fought wars in the past and regard each other with suspicion. Even if the U.S. is not directly threatened, we may need to take part in intra-Asian power struggles in the future in order to prevent a hostile power's hegemony in Asia, which has succeeded Europe as the key region of the world.
The rise of India and China as great military-industrial powers will make Middle Eastern and Central Asian oil even more important in power politics. Even if the U.S. ended its own dependence on Middle Eastern oil, it would make sense for the U.S. to join other countries in preventing a regional or local hegemon from conquering or intimidating the major oil-producing states. (The mistake of the U.S. since the Gulf War has been to substitute a policy of U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, a hegemony the misguided Iraq War was supposed to enhance, for our earlier and far wiser balance of power policy).
North America is an island remote from the key geopolitical regions. In order to project the military power necessary to take part in anti-hegemonic coalitions in Asia, the Middle East or Europe, the U.S. military must command the seas, air and space. Germany, under the Kaiser or Hitler, would have won if enemy submarines had been able to prevent the flow of US arms and soldiers across the Atlantic (and, in the case of Hitler's ally Japan, across the Pacific).
The anti-hegemonic strategy also requires the U.S. to have allies and bases in critical regions. Sometimes this gets the U.S. embroiled in local situations that have nothing to do with the anti-hegemonic strategy itself. For example, in 1915 President Woodrow Wilson siezed Haiti and Santo Domingo, and a year later pressured Denmark into selling the U.S. the Danish West Indies, in order to deny Imperial Germany ports that it might have used in the unrestricted submarine warfare that it launched in 1917 and which was the cause of America's direct entry into the war. Many aspects of America's Caribbean occupations during World War I were inhumane and unfortunate. But should the U.S. have allowed German submarines based in the Caribbean to sink U.S. supply and troop ships going to Europe, thereby guaranteeing that the 20th century would have been the militaristic German Century?
I have focused on great-power threats because terrorism is a limited danger by comparison. Terrorists might be able to destroy a city; only a hostile superpower could destroy a country. Thwarting the jihadists is difficult in practice, but as a matter of strategy it is pretty simple: keep them from infiltrating target countries like the U.S. and keep them from coming to power in any Muslim countries. If, unlike Lenin's communists or Mussolini's and Hitler's fascists, jihadists never come to power and control a government, and if their conspiracies are repeatedly thwarted, then they are likely to fade away over time, like the early-twentieth century anarchists (though this may take a long time).
What exactly is it about border control, deterrence and anti-hegemonic policy that the radical left doesn't understand? Many radicals on the left appear to favor opening U.S. borders to anyone with any motive who wants to stroll into the country and take up residence; unilateral disarmament that would reassure hostile powers that they could bomb us without fear of retaliation; and giving a hostile great power a free hand to organize a superpower bloc in regions of the world with more manufacturing or key raw materials than can be found in North America, and then to encircle the U.S. in this hemisphere at its leisure. The historians and journalists of the radical left routinely vilify presidents who carried out America's successful twentieth-century anti-hegemonic policy--most of whom were Democrats, like Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johson--as "war criminals" and "imperialists."
Mainstream Democrats are correct to criticize the Republican party for being too open to the radical right. But Republicans are correct to criticize the Democrats for being too open to the radical left, which should have been expelled from the Democratic party and nonpartisan liberal reform movements long ago.
The neoconservative strategy of unilateral world domination adopted by George W. Bush has backfired on the U.S. But the Democratic party as a whole (as distinct from some good individual candidates) has yet to make it clear that it is willing to be tough--not by killing as many innocent Arabs as collateral damage in preventive wars as the Republicans can, but by taking tough (and, in the case of border control, long overdue) security measures that will enrage their sometime allies on the radical left.
If Democrats, after 9/11, are unwilling to end illegal immigration and control America's land borders as well as airports and seaports, then they are a threat to national security and deserve to lose.
If Democrats, in a world of rapidly spreading missile technology, are unwilling to deter missile attacks on the U.S. by investing in the creation and continuing modernization of adequate, survivable second-strike deterrent forces, then they are a threat to national security and deserve to lose.
If Democrats are unwilling to support a policy of military alliances to prevent the emergence of a hostile hegemon in Asia, the Middle East or Europe, or if they support such a policy rhetorically but are unwilling to spend the money needed to make it effective, then they are a threat to national security and deserve to lose.
I'm sorry if I sound harsh, but both the moderate Republican realists and the isolationist paleoconservatives have been defeated by the neoconservatives in the Republican party and therefore the only force which can restrain the neoconservatives at this point in history is a competitive Democratic Party. A "no enemies to the left" policy by Democrats which unites the radical left with the liberal left against the right will only benefit the right by permitting it to treat the ideology of leftist radicals as the strategy of Democratic liberals. The Democratic Party ought to shut the door completely on the radical left and invite moderate Republicans to join a coalition of the commonsense center against the neoconservatives. Sometimes war on two fronts is the best strategy.
Echoing the cynical cheap-labor right, the politically-correct open-borders left whines that controlling America's land borders is "impossible" (it's not). They also whine that for our country to control its borders would be "anti-Latino" (the leftists seem not to care if it's anti-Canadian). On the contrary, law-abiding citizens of Latin American countries are free to enter the U.S. legally as legal immigrants or legal visitors. Since when are foreigners from Latin America, by virtue of their ethnicity, absolved from obeying U.S. federal immigration and naturalization laws that they find inconvenient? Can other foreigners of other ethnicities pick and choose which U.S. laws they obey? Should citizens of Asian countries be exempt from obeying drivers' license laws in the U.S., because they find them inconvenient? Should Europeans be free to disobey U.S. visa laws if they choose?
Many on the radical left seem to believe in a borderless world, bless their hearts. These sweet, innocent souls are doomed to lifelong frustration. Since the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago, humanity has been divided among territorial states of various kinds--city-states, empires, nation-states. Unless its power has completely collapsed, no state has ever allowed vast numbers of people to wander freely in and out of its territory. Even in the U.S., where commonsense border security is opposed by cheap-labor Republicans and politically-correct Democrats, more illegal immigrants are caught than succeed in breaking our nation's laws.
Once the borders are secure, in the age of missile proliferation the next priority for American strategists is to deter hostile powers from carrying out long-distance bombardment. If missile defense were practical, the U.S. and every other country should adopt it. But because missile defense is unworkable so far, and may never work, the U.S. must maintain an adequate second-strike deterrent force, sending the signal that any strike on us will result in a strike against them. The U.S. can and should negotiate partial disarmament with other countries, but a modest deterrent will remain necessary, and it will also be necessary to upgrade or change our missiles as technology and threats change.
After border control and deterrence, the third priority of a national security strategy should be anti-hegemonic policy. The U.S. should not aspire to global hegemony itself; the neoconservative attempt to establish American hegemony has only alienated our allies and exposed the limits to our power. But even a U.S. that renounces unilateral American world domination must be able to project military power around the world to defeat attempts by hostile great powers to enhance their military and economic power by using force or intimidation to dominate key industrial regions, like Europe and Asia, or sources of materials critical for military-industrial power, like Persian Gulf oil. Not all regions are important from the standpoint of global power politics and U.S. national security.
Isolationists of the left and right complain about the costs of America's anti-hegemonic wars against Germany and the Soviet bloc, which were expensive indeed in American blood and treasure. But American isolation or appeasement would have meant a far larger U.S. military and a far more militarized American society in a far more dangerous world.
Entering World War I in 1917 to prevent a German victory was far cheaper than building a besieged Fortress America in a world dominated in 1920 or 1930 by German militarists who had succeeded in constructing a European empire. It was far cheaper to prevent Hitler from winning than it would have been to wait for him to consolidate his Eurasian empire and finish the trans-Atlantic bombers, space planes and missiles his scientists were devising for the inevitable conflict he envisioned with the U.S. It was far cheaper to besiege the Soviet empire, check it in proxy wars and use the arms race to spend it into bankruptcy, surrender and disintegration than it would have been to allow the Soviets to use unopposed military power to extort nonaggression pacts and military-industrial and economic supplies from war-weakened Japanese and West Europeans who lacked an ally in America.
The radical left is fond of pointing out that the Soviet Union at its height was never as powerful as the U.S. But this was true of Hitler and the Kaiser, too. The whole point of U.S. strategy in the three world wars (the Cold War having been a world war in slow motion) was to prevent German or Soviet power from matching or surpassing that of the U.S. and its allies. It's better to strangle a young ogre at the very beginning of its rampage than to build a castle and wait for it to grow up and come bludgeon the walls.
We must hope that an anti-hegemonic strategy will not be necessary again. No European country is a potential hegemonic threat, including Russia, which could be a regional menace at best, and the EU is incapable of acting as a unified superpower. But Asia is now the center of global industrial power, and soon of global military power, and Japan, China and India have all fought wars in the past and regard each other with suspicion. Even if the U.S. is not directly threatened, we may need to take part in intra-Asian power struggles in the future in order to prevent a hostile power's hegemony in Asia, which has succeeded Europe as the key region of the world.
The rise of India and China as great military-industrial powers will make Middle Eastern and Central Asian oil even more important in power politics. Even if the U.S. ended its own dependence on Middle Eastern oil, it would make sense for the U.S. to join other countries in preventing a regional or local hegemon from conquering or intimidating the major oil-producing states. (The mistake of the U.S. since the Gulf War has been to substitute a policy of U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, a hegemony the misguided Iraq War was supposed to enhance, for our earlier and far wiser balance of power policy).
North America is an island remote from the key geopolitical regions. In order to project the military power necessary to take part in anti-hegemonic coalitions in Asia, the Middle East or Europe, the U.S. military must command the seas, air and space. Germany, under the Kaiser or Hitler, would have won if enemy submarines had been able to prevent the flow of US arms and soldiers across the Atlantic (and, in the case of Hitler's ally Japan, across the Pacific).
The anti-hegemonic strategy also requires the U.S. to have allies and bases in critical regions. Sometimes this gets the U.S. embroiled in local situations that have nothing to do with the anti-hegemonic strategy itself. For example, in 1915 President Woodrow Wilson siezed Haiti and Santo Domingo, and a year later pressured Denmark into selling the U.S. the Danish West Indies, in order to deny Imperial Germany ports that it might have used in the unrestricted submarine warfare that it launched in 1917 and which was the cause of America's direct entry into the war. Many aspects of America's Caribbean occupations during World War I were inhumane and unfortunate. But should the U.S. have allowed German submarines based in the Caribbean to sink U.S. supply and troop ships going to Europe, thereby guaranteeing that the 20th century would have been the militaristic German Century?
I have focused on great-power threats because terrorism is a limited danger by comparison. Terrorists might be able to destroy a city; only a hostile superpower could destroy a country. Thwarting the jihadists is difficult in practice, but as a matter of strategy it is pretty simple: keep them from infiltrating target countries like the U.S. and keep them from coming to power in any Muslim countries. If, unlike Lenin's communists or Mussolini's and Hitler's fascists, jihadists never come to power and control a government, and if their conspiracies are repeatedly thwarted, then they are likely to fade away over time, like the early-twentieth century anarchists (though this may take a long time).
What exactly is it about border control, deterrence and anti-hegemonic policy that the radical left doesn't understand? Many radicals on the left appear to favor opening U.S. borders to anyone with any motive who wants to stroll into the country and take up residence; unilateral disarmament that would reassure hostile powers that they could bomb us without fear of retaliation; and giving a hostile great power a free hand to organize a superpower bloc in regions of the world with more manufacturing or key raw materials than can be found in North America, and then to encircle the U.S. in this hemisphere at its leisure. The historians and journalists of the radical left routinely vilify presidents who carried out America's successful twentieth-century anti-hegemonic policy--most of whom were Democrats, like Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johson--as "war criminals" and "imperialists."
Mainstream Democrats are correct to criticize the Republican party for being too open to the radical right. But Republicans are correct to criticize the Democrats for being too open to the radical left, which should have been expelled from the Democratic party and nonpartisan liberal reform movements long ago.
The neoconservative strategy of unilateral world domination adopted by George W. Bush has backfired on the U.S. But the Democratic party as a whole (as distinct from some good individual candidates) has yet to make it clear that it is willing to be tough--not by killing as many innocent Arabs as collateral damage in preventive wars as the Republicans can, but by taking tough (and, in the case of border control, long overdue) security measures that will enrage their sometime allies on the radical left.
If Democrats, after 9/11, are unwilling to end illegal immigration and control America's land borders as well as airports and seaports, then they are a threat to national security and deserve to lose.
If Democrats, in a world of rapidly spreading missile technology, are unwilling to deter missile attacks on the U.S. by investing in the creation and continuing modernization of adequate, survivable second-strike deterrent forces, then they are a threat to national security and deserve to lose.
If Democrats are unwilling to support a policy of military alliances to prevent the emergence of a hostile hegemon in Asia, the Middle East or Europe, or if they support such a policy rhetorically but are unwilling to spend the money needed to make it effective, then they are a threat to national security and deserve to lose.
I'm sorry if I sound harsh, but both the moderate Republican realists and the isolationist paleoconservatives have been defeated by the neoconservatives in the Republican party and therefore the only force which can restrain the neoconservatives at this point in history is a competitive Democratic Party. A "no enemies to the left" policy by Democrats which unites the radical left with the liberal left against the right will only benefit the right by permitting it to treat the ideology of leftist radicals as the strategy of Democratic liberals. The Democratic Party ought to shut the door completely on the radical left and invite moderate Republicans to join a coalition of the commonsense center against the neoconservatives. Sometimes war on two fronts is the best strategy.
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Comments (65)
While I agree with many of your points, I think there is a major failing: your focus on States. I think the world can say the days of invasion of other states, genocide or rise of a hegemonic power, as you say, are over. But that's only part of it. Thinking in terms of States is Cold War thinking, when this is a war of nations vs. stateless criminals.
Nowhere in this analysis do you recognize that this is a different enemy we're facing here, that requires different tactics to combat it. We need better intelligence, better cooperation between nations and a new emphasis on fact gathering. When it comes down to it, governments are united against terrorism, because terrorism is about creating chaos and anarchy so that governments will fall. Our policies should reflect this reality.
August 5, 2005 12:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Before I even try to respond to this can anybody please give me the definition of "the radical left". Is that like the 1% of the people on the fringe? If it is I don't pay much attention to the lunatic fringes of the political spectrum. How is "radical left" defined?
August 5, 2005 12:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
I could be wrong, but I don't think you'll find many Americans, even on the radical left, who would deny the United States a reasonable conventional and nuclear second-strike capability, or even the right to prevent the emergence of a hostile hegemonic power (though the latter would seem to me to involve skillful diplomacy more than military action.)
But I'm curious as to what sort of foreign intervention strategy Mr. Lind would advocate. Specifically, is he in favor of using US military power for human rights purposes in extreme situations? In 1994 Rwanda or present day Darfur, to name two examples?
I know Lind opposed the Iraq invasion, but then again, so did Pat Buchanan. I certainly hope he's not advocating some sort of Pat Buchananite America firstism when it comes to foreign policy.
Even worse, I hope he's not suggesting the Democrats try their hand at Kissingerian realpolitik and return to the sort of thuggery that characterized a lot of American Cold War foreign policy, because there's a long distance between defending Western Europe from the Warsaw Pact and supporting Suharto, Somoza, and every other thug who cloaked himself in anti-communism. Because while I'm all for trying to prevent the emergence of, say, China as a hostile hegemonic power, I fear Mr. Lind is suggesting that Democrats suck it up and accept doing things like trying to overthrow the Venezualan government for signing oil deals with the PRC. I sincerely hope he's not advocating going down this road.
August 5, 2005 12:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Who the hell is this radical left Lind keeps straw-manning. I consider myself a leftest being a big fan of that "militantly leftist" blog DailyKos (hehe) and I don't recognize any of the policies Lind apparently thinks I or the left have. What the hell you talking about Lind? Perhaps there are some radical lefty's fed by an intellectual here or there but they have virtually no say in the Left that dominates the blogosphere today.
In fact, I'm all for smartly cracking down on border security. I think that is a fine political strategy as long as it is done in a way that resepects the immigrants who have lives here now.
As for deterrence, we have it. I don't know if you noticed but our military spending is almost equal to every other nation on this planet combined. We own half the guns on the block. I don't think deterrence is the problem and I'm fine if we use some of that cash to develop better weapon systems as is anyone. If Lind is hinting at low yield nuclear weapons, then he is dumb and I'll explain why soon.
Anti-hegemony. Yep, on board. But as Lind admits, not really a problem right now. I suppose we could whip up some fear by talking about the dangers of China, but I'll let the righties have that one. The problem with whipping up fear in exchange for votes is that we end up doing stupid things like invading countries that pose no threat and thus weakening our military and making us look like arrogant idiots on the world stage.
And I'm sorry but Lind's Republican-lite ideas will simply not work. The Republicans, once they figure out the neo-conservative foreign policy experiments were absurd, will simply revert back to their old Bush, the father ways. That will be better for the country and it will completely invalidate your strategy.
The Democrats need to define their own unique idea of foreign policy that won't be undermined by the same basic idea on the right. That doesn't mean the Right and Left won't overlap, they should and will once the Right abandons their current path. But our emphasis needs to be our own. It needs to emphasize human rights and cooperation. It needs to emphasize the importance of our image. Most of all it needs to make people understand that the key to our success over the past 200 years has been because of our ideals and the fact that the people of the world want to emulate us. In our more inter-connected times, this will take on even more importance. The chineses citizen and every other world citizen needs to see us as their ally, as their friend, as their money tree, as their key to a better education, as a world peace keeper, as a genocide stopper, etc. Unfortunately I can be accused of simply wanting to sing Kumbaya while holding hands with the world, so that is why we need to crush the leaders of genocide and end civil wars. In other words, we need to use our military might to fill power vacuums that are leading to innocent death (making it much easier to find allies to help). And we need to actually hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden. In other words our military adventures include filling power vacuums and taking out those who actually attack us. Simple, yet beautiful.
I'll end with a quote from a Bush aide from Ron Suskind's much heralded article in the Times:
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
The aide is right in a creepy sort of way. Lind wants to engage in a judicious study of the electorates reality at this moment, when the point is to create the electorates reality for the future. In other words, we can have our cake and eat it too. If we want foreign policy to function in a certain way and have it be popular, we can do it. That's what Bush did. He made invading a country that was no threat to us a popular thing and now we are studying him. We can counter with Lind's ideas of 80s Republican foreign policy while giving up our moral domestic policies; or we can create our own popular foreign policy reality by turning our ideals into ideas and language that all Democrats and Independants can relate to and support, while keeping our moral domestic crusades for a better society. The former gets you a seat or two in a Republican cabinet while the latter gets you the Presidency and most of congress. I say that Democrats create the reality for once. It may take longer but the payoff is worth it.
August 5, 2005 1:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
You wrote ... "Democrats are deluding themselves if they think they can neutralize the Republican advantage in national security by nominating combat veterans without agreeing on a defense strategy."
The converse is also true. Democrats are deluding themselves if they think they can propose even a common-sense good defense strategy without nominating a battle-tested commander to execute it.
Some in our party like to point out that George W. Bush got elected in 2000 without being a military hero, but they forget that he drapped himself with his dad's war-hero status, and his party had credibility on national defense because of the perception generated by Reagan that Republicans were"winners of the Cold War." In 2004, Bush had commander-in-chief status on his own as a "wartime president" in the public mind.
So, Democrats had best take note if they want to win in 2008. They need a credible defense plan and a warrior.
August 5, 2005 2:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
1. You say: A neocon chickenhawk with a strategy, no matter how bad, beats a war hero without a strategy any day. Worried voters are looking for a plan on horseback, not a man on horseback.
You presuppose chickenhawks have a real strategy. The only stategy I see is unilateral war irrespective of the cost and the liklihood of a success to roll back a threat that never existed, which was known before the war began. If that's a strategy, then no strategy is better. You also presuppose that liberals don't have a strategy. I disagree. Liberals prefer a multilateral approach, which works and has since WWII. Two examples: NATO and the first Gulf War.
2. You say: The first duty of the U.S. government is to defend the American homeland against invasion or infiltration by stateless or state-sponsored terrorists or saboteurs. This means the government must shut down all illegal immigration, even though most illegal immigrants are economic migrants who threaten wages and working-class housing affordability but not national security.
Wouldn't disagree with your premise that we should do a better job controlling immigration/visas/etc. But to shut down illegal immigration doesn't prevent terrorism. What if a terrorist comes here legally? If I recall, most of the 9/11 terrorists were in America legally. The only real remedy for preventing terrorist coming from abroad is to completely bar entry for all. I don't think many Americans, liberals and conservatives, would advocate that position.
3. You then talk about deterrence and negotiated disarmament.
All due respect, I am unaware of any liberal advocating a position that does not include deterrence or negotiated disarmament. Mr. Gore and Mr. Kerry were both particularly specific about this. It's Mr. Bush who doesn't beleive in negotiation, at least during the election campaigns. (He's changed his tune with respect to North Korea of late, and, evidently, may have negotiationed with terrorist elements in Iraq.)
By the way, negotiated disarmamaent was what was being done in Iraq before the invasion. We had a disarmament regime in place and, evidently, it had worked.
If I recall, Clinton had negotiated disarmament issues with North Korea. And while not great, they were a hell of a lot better than what has occurred since. Before Bush was elected, Korea had no nuclear bombs. Now, it has been reported that Korea has six and counting. It was Mr. Bush's invasion of Iraq and his failure to negotiate that has caused, in large part, North Korea to manufacture these weapons.
With respect to deterrence, there aren't any countries that have considered attacking us. The threat is radical, non-state sponsored organizations, who couldn't care less about deterrence. So, while deterrence is important it won't stop terrorism, which is the threat.
Now I would admit deterrence is important to any National Security strategy, but the question is how much is enough. At present, we have the capability of a responding to an attack that could blow the world up many times over. How much more detterence do we need? We spend more in defense than the next 18 countries combined, and, if I'm not mistaken, by the middle of the next decade we will spend more than the rest of the world combined.
I think we have sufficient deterrence capabilities, but, at present, we lack negoiation capabilities.
3. You say: After border control and deterrence, the third priority of a national security strategy should be anti-hegemonic policy. The U.S. should not aspire to global hegemony itself; the neoconservative attempt to establish American hegemony has only alienated our allies and exposed the limits to our power
My concern, as a liberal, isn't the hegemonic policy of other countries, rather it is the apparent hegemonic policy of my own. While certainly China has exhibited some aspects of hegemony, even they haven't sent 100,000 troops to invade a country 8,000 miles away.
Last time I checked, Liberals have never backed away from the hegemony of others. Germany pre WWII? It was Roosevelt, a liberal, who prepared for war. The Cold War? It was Truman who instituted to doctrine of containment. Now? Well, terrorism is the threat and hegemony of other countries isn't the problem. The problem in most Liberals minds is that becoming a hegemonic power isn't necessary in order to fight terrorism.
Most liberals, as I suspect most Americans, see terrorism as the big problem, but think the best approach is multilateral involving real cooperation of other countries. Ultimately, that is the only way will ever win that war.
The balance of your "essay" - and I use that term loosely - bad raps the "radical left" for subverting the Democratic party an National Security. You offer no examples to support your point, but that's what you did.
Frankly, I don't really understand the reason for this essay, unless you have bought into the cannard that liberals are pussies on National Security issues. It's become an effective argument for the right wing, but its inaccurate. Liberals have always been better at National Security than have Conservatives - take a look at Iraq and current terrorism statistics is you don't believe me. I don't see many "radical liberals" advocating that strategy.
August 5, 2005 2:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Whaaaa! Nobody gave a flying pig's shit about foreign policy during the 2000 election as far as I remember. Who invented the internet and who had the key to the lockbox was more important. I think Bush's espoused plan was to hand the keys to Cheney if anthing bad happened overseas. Thinking back to it, how the hell did Bush win? That was one fucked up election. He's so damn lucky. And we're so damn unlucky.
But I do think that you have a point about a warrior communicating the new democratic foreign policy. I do like that Wesley Clark. I also like that John Edwards but he probably wouldn't want to play 2nd fiddle again. Actually, I think I might prefer some unknown governor type person to emerge. People seem to like that. Hey Dan Wingfoot, whatya doing in 2008? We could smudge your resume a bit.
August 5, 2005 2:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Lind has a rather weird proposal.
1. Border control -- this is not a major issue! OK, shift one-week of Iraqi war budget to one year of mproved border patrol. As you are at it, fix potholes on the roads to the border.
2. Second strike capability. We have it! And no new "first strike" capability emerged So it is an important objective, but no new initiative is required.
3. Preventing world hegemony by others. Duh. There is an issue there , but it is not military but economic. No military dangers on the horizon from th direction of China and India. If that will change, it will be gradual and we will have ample time to re-access the issue.
To summarize, Lind discusses 3 non-priority issues and issues a diatribe agaist all who -- reasonably -- do not shere his feeling of urgency.
One could make another list. Nothing really sexy, but solid stuff:
1. Eliminating miltary program that do not work or that are not needed, with missile defence and space weapons on top of the list.
2. Changing our global strategy to capitalize on our strength -- the unchallenged capability of punitive retaliations -- and avoid thing that we will probably be never good at -- like waging regional dirty wars.
3. Restoring and strenghtening the system of international law, so actively undermined by the Admnistration. If we want to avoid, say, China, becoming an alternative hegemon, we should have put in place constrain on what a wanna-be-hegemon may do.
4. Having a consistent policy of supporting democracy, e.g. by refraiing from supporting armed coup by genocidal thugs (as Administration have done in Haiti).
5. Propose various reasonable stands on international arena that have nothing to do with narrowly understood security (e.g. a genuinely helpful AIDS policy, family planning, alternative energy develoment etc.)
6. Foster cooperation to oppose terrorism using LEGAL MEANS. Oppose torture. Being hated for good reasons is not increasing our security.
August 5, 2005 2:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
You wrote ... "Hey Dan Wingfoot, whatya doing in 2008? We could smudge your resume a bit."
It might work. With all of the smudges from a lifetime of smudging, a few new ones wouldn't be noticed! :)
August 5, 2005 2:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'd be a lot more open to Mr. Lind's arguments if he would dispense with the gratuitous insults he dishes out on fellow members of his party who don't share his views. If his aim is to preach to the choir, that's the way to do it. If his aim is to persuade people who don't already agree with him, that ain't it.
August 5, 2005 2:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Since you have some useful things to say, Mr. Lind, you should try confining yourself to those arguments, rather than making a laundry list of all the people you'd like to drum out of the party.
Taking aim at the "radical left," apparently consisting of anyone who disagrees with you on any topic, is not constructive or rational, nor is it good politics.
August 5, 2005 2:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Lind’s rant on the porous nature of our borders relies less on argumentation than on reference to fictional groups -- the “cheap-labor right,” “politically correct open-borders left,” the “radical left, ” all of them clamoring for the end of territorial states -- that exist like some movie in his mind.
How to respond to Mr. Lind’s directionless rant?
Perhaps it would be good to get some clarification from Mr. Lind. Could he outline what specific policy proposals he’d like to implement to lower illegal immigration? What does he propose?
He may wish to consider the following:
*Most illegal immigrants who enter the US, be they from Latin America or elsewhere, enter the country using legal tourist visas. This is even true of illegal immigration from Mexico. The only way you could ever completely abolish illegal immigration would be to never permit any type of migration, temporary or otherwise.
*Unless its power has completely collapsed, no state has ever allowed vast numbers of people to wander freely in and out of its territory.
That is grossly overstated and historically inaccurate. In the case of the US, although immigration in the 19th century was certainly not completely open, it was far more liberalized than it is today. To give just one example, the US-Mexican border was, until the early 20th century, pretty much open -- people could come and go as they pleased with very little state interference.
*Does Mr. Lind find it problematic that the increasingly fluid movement of capital across the US-Mexican border is not accompanied by an increasing liberalization of the movement of labor? Note, I am not arguing for an open or nonexistent border, much less the end of territorial states.
(But I will digress briefly to point out that a) an “open border” is not incompatible with a territorial state; b) the best data we have indicates that if you opened the US-Mexican border the actual number of immigrants from Mexico to the US would not increase by much, if at all; and that c) attempts to impose greater border controls along the US-Mexican border have never decreased trends in immigration -- they simply increase the transaction costs associated with immigration.)
I am simply trying to make the rather commonsensical observation that, at least in the case of Mexico and Latin America, the best way to reduce illegal immigration is to legalize immigrants, that is, to allow the market to function. Whereas Mr. Lind sees illegal Mexican immigrants as some type of devious law-breakers, I see them as seriously oppressed people who are cynically allowed to enter the country while simultaneously denied the legal benefits that they should derive from honest work and participation in the market.
August 5, 2005 2:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
This seems more rational than Mr. Lind's "essay".
August 5, 2005 3:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Shorter Lind:
"Hey, all you wimpy radical liiberal lefty guys and gals;
Behold, my Mighty Neoliberial Hawkish Staff of Reason!
Be amazed as I write my name with pee in the snow!"
Yeah, that just about sums up this little essay. If you want to talk national security strategy with people you might want to start by not insulting and screaming at them.
August 5, 2005 3:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
I do have to chuckle at Mr. Lind. We'll see how he enjoys the 40th anniversary of 1968. Granted, it will be a more dignified affair. I hope the "grandmothers for peace" willl get credentials in 08 but I expect Lind and his ilk are more likely to reserve them a cage. No matter. I expect the same results. The left will have a good time. The Democratic Party will lose.
In my own none to humble opinion, the greatest long term threat to national security are our global stateless corporate pals who will gladly sell anything and everything to the Chinese and then there is the little problem that a PhD I know is working on, learning Chinese so he can talk to his grad students.
While the hawks throw trillions into the desert sand, all those priorities we are not funding are going to turn us into the 21st century version of the Soviet Union, an exhausted, hollow, paranoid military shell.
August 5, 2005 3:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Lind,
I disagree with you about a number of things, but I find that even where I agree with you, your posts are so full of bitterness, spite ... and even hate ... that agreeing is very unpleasant. Let me focus on an area in which there is a mix of agreement and disagreement:
It has been my impression that the laissez fair attitude toward illegal immigration that you decry is mainly driven by the centrist wing of the Democratic party - not the "radical left", however that might be conceived.
I personally favor a stronger line against illegal immigration. And my attitude is drawn from what I consider two traditionally left- wing motivations.
Number one is democracy - I believe in popular sovereignty, and hold that Americans have the right to see the immigration laws that they have democratically enacted upheld. The United States has traditionally had very liberal legal immigration policies, which I wholeheartedly endorse and esteem. But there are sensible limits, limits that have been written into laws. If the public chooses to enact different laws, then so be it. But until such time, it is an affront to the rights of a self-governing people that we have a national leadership that has consistently chosen to ignore or downplay those laws, for the sake of business interests scrambling for cheap labor.
The other source of my attitude in favor of tougher immigration enforcement is the traditional left-wing regard for protecting the wages of American labor. It is often argued that illegal immigrants do jobs that US citizens just won't do. But perhaps the reason they won't do them is because the pay and benefits associated with these jobs are so dreadful. And perhaps the reason the pay and benefits are so dreadful are so dreadful is because employers have been allowed to draw on a wide-open labor pool consisting in part of unprotected, illegal immigrants who will work for peanuts, and who fall between the cracks of legal labor protections. If employers had to compete for labor in the citizen labor market, they would be forced to pay more.
My sense is that there is actually much more understanding of the outlook I have described on the left than in the center. Leftists understand protecting jobs and wages. But try getting somewhere in a discussion of immigration with a centrist neoliberal enthusiast! It's when you take traditional liberal attitudes of tolerance and universality, and combine them with the neoliberal economic outlook, and upscale disdain for American workers, characteristic of centrist Democrats, that you come up with the very pro-illegal immigration attitude you inveigh against.
Remember Zoe Baird and her housekeeper? Baird was a mainstream, middle of the road Dem, not a radical leftist.
August 5, 2005 3:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
But Republicans are correct to criticize the Democrats for being too open to the radical left, which should have been expelled from the Democratic party and nonpartisan liberal reform movements long ago.
How is it that you imagine that feat might be accomplished Commissar Lind? So far as I know, Americans are free to register for the party of their own choosing, and vote for the candidate that best catches their fancy. How is it that you propose to "expel" these enemies of the state? Planning on denouncing them at the next Demokratik Party Congress?
If we lived in a more vibrant multiparty democracy, a parliamentary system perhaps, I'm sure these dangerous radicals would be happy to bolt and form their own parties. But unfortunately we are all locked into this same damned two-party state, and the left has nowhere to go. So you're stuck with them. You'd better get used to it, or else it is your own"sweet, innocent soul" that will be "doomed to lifelong frustration."
August 5, 2005 3:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Since it's almost impossible to read Mr. Lind's rant, backed mostly by mere assertion and ad hominem attacks, I'll pick only one quote for examination:
Since one of those cities that terrorists "might be able to destroy" is where I reside, the danger assumes something more than "limited" characteristics. So rest assured, I am at least as serious about national security and fighting terrorists as anyone currently lounging in Crawford, Texas.
I'm also someone that Mr. Lind might say (with a snarl) is a "radical leftist" or, perhaps, one of those "deluded" Democrats.
As far as destroying our country, I'd say the Bush administration, with its supporters' help, is doing a fine job of that now. I daresay the emerging great powers of China and India would agree. They don't have to do much besides sit back and watch our meltdown--economically and militarily. We have done more to destroy our own power and influence in the world than any terrorist or foreign government could envision.
And Mr. Lind talks about borders! Please explain to the British how "borders" figured in the London attack that was born and nurtured in Leeds.
Please explain, Mr. Lind, how loose borders were a factor in Timothy McVeigh's bombing in Oklahoma City. Surely that was terrorism too, or doesn't it count because it wasn't Islamic terrorism?
Mr. Lind shows a fatal fascination with primarily martial means of providing security. Certainly we cannot do without a strong military and a vigorous police presence. There will certainly be occasions for military interventions and police actions.
The use of military force, however, represents a failure of the first line of defense against security threats: A strong economy, an engaged citizenry, a subtle and skilled diplomatic corps. We need a CIA that trains master spies--not to torture hapless prisoners in secret prisons, but to infiltrate and gather information about the groups and governments that truly threaten us. We need an administration that doesn't corrupt that information to support a favored ideological agenda.
Right now, the biggest threats to American security are peak oil and resource scarcity in general, and the growing power of China and others to compete with us for those scarce commodities. Related to those threats are global warming, the cruel inequities between the elites and the impoverished, and the lure of apocolyptic fundamentalism of all stripes.
So by all means, take prudent, common-sense measures to guard our borders, secure industrial and infrastructure targets and get tough on ports and cargo container shipping. But don't think that's a strategy for security.
Real strategic thinking would involve deep pockets for a realistic plan to wean us from fossil fuels, strategic investments in the technologies that will provide prosperity and jobs for the next century, especially biotech. There would be a recognition that offshoring so much manufacturing is penny-wise and pound-foolish: We are in danger of forgetting how to make things we need and must rely on those who may not always be our friends.
Finally, we should start making friends again, not just enemies.
August 5, 2005 4:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm sorry, did Peter Beinart hijack Lind's byline? I used to have a lot of respect for Michael Lind, but the last couple of entries are a joke.
Who are the "radical left" that is sabatoging American interests and the Democrats' electoral chances? This left who apparently doesn't believing in "deterrence" and "preventing the rise of hegemonic powers"? ANSWER? A few fringe campus leftist groups? The World Socialist Daily?
Explain who these people are, why they are influential, and how they are shaping American perceptions of the Democratic party. Without a convincing explanation of those questions, much of this "hawkishness" deficit thesis is pure cockamamie.
As far as I can tell, the vast, *vast* majority of Americans have no idea who MoveOn.org are, much less tell you that organization's position on Afghanistan, to use a specific "radical left" punching bag for neolibs. Undoubtedly, Americans associate the anti-war movement with the left. But that's a perception no "plan" will eradicate. The only way you can erase that association is if you amend the constitution to bar public anti-war protests. In any case, espousing a plan means nothing. Did you forget the litany of actions Kerry promised once he takes office? His plan? Securing containers from seaports and the like? No? Most Americans probably feel the same.
Lind, in fact, is exactly wrong: every poll shows that the Americans who decide the elections -- the swing voters and infrequent voters -- have very little knowledge of the candidates' positions on the issues. They vote on other, intuitive factors. That's why a guy like Hackett can get 48% of the vote: a tanned, assertive, confident war vet elicits a much better "gut" feeling than a bilious hack like Schmidt. On a presidential level, the Democrats don't need a ten-point Republican-lite plan. They simply need a viable, coherent position, meaning either some way to increase troop presence in Iraq or an exit strategy. But they need, above all, to nominate a candidate with that elicits the sense that s/he'll protect America. It is the guy on horseback that voters look to. Isn't the reason Bush won due to the irrational feeling that voters had that he'll protect the country, despite all evidence showing he's horrible at the job?
August 5, 2005 4:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Now I know how a troll feels!
Lind's comments stopped me in my tracks. He posits that, presumably, the United States needs a national security strategy. Why? Says who? Why would this work better than 5 regional security strategies? Who decides where the "strategic" security differs from or over-rides "tactical" operations? This discussion is a Swiss cheese of presumption & a sieve of a priori assumptions.
Then the discussion instantly supplies three
new assumptions.
1) Border control: an interesting concept that has nothing to do with security or strategic concepts. Border control is a day-to-day tactical police function that is almost humorously regional. The U.S. pays little attention to the Canadian border, but that's where the millenium bomber attempted to enter. The U.S. spends a great deal of energy on the Mexican border and the coyotes play cat & mouse with our uniformed dobermans (what a fine mixed metaphor!) as the illegals traipse back & forth. HooHa. And our airport security has become an expensive, bureaucratic, ridiculous, silly (no fingernail clippers, but ball pens are just fine) boondoggle that seems to have a great deal of difficulty repelling even the most simple gambits & tricks of penetration by our inspectors & evaluators. Waste.
2) Deterrence: an assumption on my part, but most folks will get my drift--mutual assured destruction is hardly appropriate to North Korea or Iran. Each of those nations is painfully aware that the U.S. can obliterate them from the planet with an incredibly small effort. Poof. It seems unlikely that India, China, or Pakistan have any doubts about the balance of power. So, who or what do we deter? Fat Man or Little Boy equivalents in a sea container? Anthrax spores in a small jet aircraft? Serin gas on an LPG tanker? C'mon Mr. Lind, this stuff is the smallest tactical thinking that requires POLICE work--which is what most of the functioning liberals recommended when Little Boots Bush XVIII took up his strategic level implements and smashed Afghanistan & whelmed Iraq, almost. But Usama bin Ladin breathes free, enhhh???? Police tactics, sir, will ensure safe & sane immigration & tourism, ocean freight traffic at U.S. seaports, and varying degrees of inspection + verification will complete this tactical picture. BushCo hasn't got a fucking clue.
3) Hegemony! We are the hegemon. It's that simple. The problem is that the busheviks don't know how to use (or wield) the power that the U.S. actually possesses because the neocons are stupid; and I mean that, as in 94 IQ stupid, unread, semi-literate boobs. Just this past week, in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Boy George (I mean Georgie Boy, errrrrrr Bush XXXXIII, O whatever) set the chariot in motion to provide Manmohan Singh & the subcontinent of India our latest nuclear technology. So, Dr. Wen Ho Lee no longer works at Los Alamos and the Chimp in Chief is giving away the "crown jewels" of American nuclear secrets to a nation that has been at war with its neighbors, Pakistan & China, over land, borders, religion, & regional domination. A hegemon terminates that crap. But, instead, we see the busheviks promoting the crap. So where is the pax americana? What value is in unused power?
Anyway, Sir, if the U.S. needs a national security strategy at all, the three points assumed by this article to be relevant don't much touch on the heart of the matter.
Here's a strategy: if a nation attempts to develop nuclear capabilites, the hegemon's virtually unstoppable air power will be applied to obliterate the facilities and the scientists on-site. You like that? It's strategic. In fact, Bush 41 applied it to Iraq and Clinton kept it in effect (with help from France & the United Kingdom). It could work . . . . ?
August 5, 2005 4:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
So, let's see, Mr. Lind, in two days you've told us that we can't be socially liberal and that military and security issues, even though they're a highly unrproductive use of our economic resources, have to be our only real priorities.
Justice for our own citizens is nowhere on your list. Continuing the tradition of legal immigration that helped build our country is nowhere on your list. Jobs, healthcare, education, civil rights... do those make your list?
Some of us refuse to react to 9-11 by reverting to the social attitudes of the 1950s.
August 5, 2005 4:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
A flawed strategy with bi-partisan support is still a flawed strategy.
August 5, 2005 4:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
The trouble with all the national security bombast is that it is not 1945. The US is no longer the unchallenged economic power carrying both the power and the responsibility to defend the Western World from chaos all by itself while it casually leads the world in standard of living, education, health, science, you name it. We have many different types of competitors now. We are no longer first in virtually everything. While it may win elections in the short run to tell the yahoos that Johnny doesn't need math, he needs a gun, the rest of the world can see us as we are without the patriotic Wizard of Oz curtain. We are fooling only ourselves.
August 5, 2005 4:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
If Democrats trumped "Border Security" in 2006, they would stomp all over the Republicans, even if certain numbers of Latino voters defected to the pro-guest worker Republicans.
Open borders make for bad security and a bad working environment for American workers. I don't see how the government can allow in 400,000 more workers every year when millions of Americans are unemployed.
August 5, 2005 4:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
I noticed Mr. Lind took some shots on the net for his last post over here at the Cafe, which may explain his sweeping generalizations in this one. Hope he doesn't go Novakulu on us.
August 5, 2005 4:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Latinos are the fastest-growing minority group in the country. In some states, they make whites a plurality, not a majority. The GOP is courting them for this very reason. They know they've blown it with all but the most conservative blacks, but they are looking to the future with Latinos. Latinos are also moving upward rapidly in income and social hierarchy. Democrats write them off at their peril.
August 5, 2005 4:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good one.
August 5, 2005 5:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Democrats are deluding themselves if they think they can neutralize the Republican advantage in national security by nominating combat veterans without agreeing on a defense strategy.
OK. Fine. And you're deluding yourself if you think you can trash the progressive base and get anywhere politically. Watch what happens to Hillary or whoever else tries to pull the same crap come next election. And don't think you can hide behind the word "radical", as in "oh, no, I didn't mean people like you." You're using "radical left" for the same McCarthyist reason that the right does it--intimidation. And shame on you for doing it.
But Republicans are correct to criticize the Democrats for being too open to the radical left, which should have been expelled from the Democratic party and nonpartisan liberal reform movements long ago.
Republicans are correct about precisely nothing. They, as an almost monolithic group, now represent one of the most corrupt, deceitful, venal, and incompetent ruling elites our country has ever seen--and so being at a time of such historical peril is nothing short of treasonous. So spare us your phoney even-handed appreciation of the Republican "good points".
You know what, Lind? I used to enjoy reading your stuff. But now, with your stint on TPM Cafe, you're revealing yourself to be politically tone deaf, and worse, arrogant.
I got news for you, buster: the new progressive movement, developing every day by leaps and bounds on sites just like this one, is going to drum you out of the party long before you drum any of us out of it.
The pity is that you have important things to say. I happen to agree, for example, that the left needs to develop a coherent way to lead a nation--which means, in the end, having a policy on when and how to use state military and police powers. Too bad you're more interested in demonizing those who should be your allies than in advancing the truth in a way that will defeat the current authoritarian/theocratic/corporatist threat to our Republic.
August 5, 2005 5:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
It is interesting to watch Michael Lind conveniently conflate politically winning strategies and sound strategies, both of which apparently always coincide with his views. No one who has any clue whatsoever about the current political climate would imagine that this is a winning security platform. The primary national security threat the majority of the public identifies is terrorism. And with good reason. Terrorists may not be able to destroy countries, but they can topple goverments. They have a far greater power to adversely affect our policies then foreign governments precisely because they are not subject to deterrence as foreign goverments are. And, of course, there's the fact that the terrorists are the ones attacking us regularly at the moment, which seems somehow to have escaped your calculations.
On to the point-by-point:
Sealing the borders: possibly a politically winning move, but not as part of security platform. As noted elsewhere, it makes almost zero impact on our security. The terrorists can more easily enter the country legally, which is what the 9/11 group did. Even supposing a terrorist group were trying to enter the country illegally by land, sealing the borders has to be the least efficient possible means of stopping them. Spend the money on coordinating intelligence and law enforcement with Mexico and Canada instead. If the terrorists are trying to enter illegally, it's because we already have them on a list. Simple cooperation with our neighbors will give use hugely more bang for buck. No, the borders are an immigration issue, and immigration is social and economic.
Second-strike deterrence: you know, there's a handy rule in debate that says you cannot propose the status quo. Your advise might have been relevant 50 years ago. Today, we HAVE loads of second-strike capability, enough to instantly pulverize any nation that hits us many times over. This piece of advise is like saying we need a military. It's not winning politics, and it certainly doesn't belong as a centerpiece in a new Democratic security platform.
Hostile hegemonies: I'm pleased to see you fully on board with W.'s approach (and also evidently Clash of Civilizations, a bad basis for policy if ever there was one). But perhaps we might consider that the hegemony need not be hostile. Especially if we achieve energy independence, removing the one irresolvable point of conflict. Actually, there won't BE any hegemony along the lines you suggest for obvious geopolitical reasons. China and India hate each other, the Muslim states hate both, and the secular democracies are firmly in our pockets. With whom exactly will they collaborate to create the boogeyman you envision?
Here's an idea for a winning a platform:
1)Revitalizing our human intelligence networks. The reasons why this is necessary to combat terrorism hardly need be stated. But it's also essential to shape our foreign policy in the murky realpolitic of the Middle East and Africa.
2)Reforming our military. Cut projects like the new Air Force fighter. We simply don't need it now, and probably won't for decades. Put that money into a larger Army and Marine Corps. The wars of the present and future are all going to be long, messy, and infantry-based. Having better-trained people on the ground, and more of them, will make the difference.
3) The greatest threat to the US is the failed state. Failed states undermine the international order (which benefits us a hell of a lot). Failed states churn out terrorists. Failed states provide weapons to whomever wants them. And failed states cause human misery as nothing else in the world can. We must increase our foreign aid budget (a lot) and our commitment to democratic forces. It is not sufficient for a country to be an ally in the War on Terror or whatever it is today. Relying on brutal police states actively contributes to the problem. Our support for secular dictatorships in the ME is a major terrorist recruiting point.
4)We should <I>always</I> be ready to stop a genocide. Majorities of both parties support this posture. We should make it official, since Bush won't. Intervention of this kind demonstrates to the world our sincerity and humanity. If anything can help change our image abroad, this surely can.
5)Practice equitable diplomacy with Israel. Equitable diplomacy means that we not allow Sharon to flout, ignore and humiliate us as he pleases. I won't pretend that this is a popular position in the US, where Israel enjoys a truly bizarre image immunity, but it is the by far the best thing we can do for the region. The Likud is deliberately attempting to keep the Palestinian people a stateless mass with no legal means to resist their occupation. Their policies are the fuel that enables Hamas to exist. And their colonialism will ultimately turn them into an apartheid state or worse. Taking a clear, simple stance (establishing colonies in the West Bank is wrong, and we will not continue to give you heaps of foreign aid if you do not stop) has the not-so-ancillary benefit of removing the other major terrorist recruiting topic in the Muslim world.
August 5, 2005 5:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here are some questions to Mr. Lind (or anyone else for that matter), and as a full disclosure I don't have the answers:
1. the moderate Republican realists and the isolationist paleoconservatives have been defeated by the neoconservatives in the Republican party
Q: What makes you think that the moderate Rep. realists and/or the isolatiosit paleoconservatives could not regain the power in the Party in 08?
2. the only force which can restrain the neoconservatives at this point in history is a competitive Democratic Party.
Q: Could a third party restrain the neocons?
3. the radical left
Q: Please bring examples of the radical left or left vs. Democratic liberals.
4. The Democratic Party ought to shut the door completely on the radical left
Q: what are the political implications of such a move in
(a) the Democratic primaries
(b) the general election?
5. invite moderate Republicans to join a coalition of the commonsense center against the neoconservatives.
Q: Why would the moderate Republicans join the Democratic liberals? Are their social, economic, political issues that unite both, other than the security/foreign policy?
6. Please name at least 3, if possible, individuals Democratic liberals who can complete this mission?
7. Somehow, I see a bloody fight for power in the Democratic Party, which is well captures in this satire -
SEN BAYH PROPOSES A COMMISSION TO FIND OUT WHO CASTRATED DEMOCRATS
August 5, 2005 5:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's hard to take seriously a posting that invokes an undefined "radical left" in practically every paragraph, with a single on-the-one-hand mention of the radical right. The Democratic party in danger of domination by the "radical left"? I should live to see the day.
August 5, 2005 5:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Know that you inherit and are carrying on the tradition of classic social analysis; so try to understand man not as an isolated fragment.... Try to understand men and women as historical and social actors, and the ways in which the variety of men and women are intricately selected and intricately formed by the variety of human societies. Before you are through with any piece of work, no matter how indirectly on occasion, orient it to the central and continuing task of understanding the structure and the drift, the shaping and the meanings, of your own period, the terrible and magnificent world of human society…
Our citizenry is jaundiced by the paucity of a two party political system. However, such as it is, if one can not find the moral or ethical clarity to decide on which side of the line of demarcation between these two parties one stands, as the rampant and virulent corruption of both parties obfuscates the differences, then, at least, express your outrage, your diametrically (from something) opposed views, and your proposed solutions from a reasonably and responsibly researched view, expressed with intellectual clarity, and based in logic and with some semblance of realism.
August 5, 2005 6:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Lind,
I was irritated at the "radical left" mention, but I am willing to let that go. When you attack "mainstream liberals" nine words later, I decided that you're not really serious about making your point. Your goal seems to be to impugn the patriotism of anyone who leans left and simultaneously inflate yours. I'm glad you're proud of yourself, but I'll stick to discussing things with reasonable people who want to talk about how to make the country safer and stronger.
Come to think of it, plastering your argument with ad hominem attacks seems to be a "half-hearted" way of supporting the goals you deem important. Thou protesth too much.
If you actually do care about discussing security, come back after you've cut the gratuitous "holier than thou" language from your writing. It's obnoxious.
August 5, 2005 6:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Like most of the centrists who spend their time railing against the 'radical left', Lind hides behind the goal of electability to avoid discussing actual goals and beliefs. This is not just my opinion it is in fact the repeated verdict of the electorate. Centrists continually railed against the unelectability of Paul Wellstone; the Republicans ran two elections against him trying to pigeonhole him into the liberal, hippie compartment. Wellstone won twice and would have won again if the crash had not occurred. How? By strongly defining himself as passionately and sincerely committed to the economic advancement of the middle class and workers, against unnecessary military action, and for human rights. His views were strong and well-known; not hidden behind opportunistic views to win the "vital" center. If Lind has centrist Democratic/moderate Republican views that he believes in strongly, he should advocate them. If they make sense, and are argued passionately they may make a winning approach (although if I disagree strongly enough, he will not get my vote). Just stop with your formulas to win the center with just the right poll-tested platform. They don't work; and every "winning" idea loses some votes somewhere.
August 5, 2005 7:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think Lind's point was that security duties pretty much end at the border. I'm not so sure I agree, but you go on to develop this long explanation for national security that the neocons would be very comfortable with. They would find it very easy to rope you into any invasion or war they can think up.
Which I guess goes to prove the point that everybody's making, that Lind is wrong to say the Democratic problem is some radical peacenik like me. We have met the neocons, and they is you.
August 5, 2005 7:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am sorry to revisit this post. But I am struck by two points here. First, just how aggressive and preemptive the policy urged by Lind is. In this regard I think there is little difference between Lind and the neocon policies followed by Bush. And in fact Lind does say that the policies of the reasonable factions in both parties ought to be the same. He does not on the other hand spell out where he differs with Bush on Iraq and any reasonably thoughtful person can see he is closer to Bush than to the progressive left that now resides in the Democratic party. Lind's policy is not where I want to be; it is bad for the country and bad for the world. Most Dems do not agree with Lind or with Bush; most Dems think the war in Iraq an unmitigated disaster, not justified by the lies used to sell it; most Dems do not believe in preemptive strikes and do not believe in wars of regime change. Lind does. I do not believe any candidate advocating these policies will win primaries...unless the schedule puts red states first. And even then it would in my view guarantee another electoral loss (keep in mind that Kerry was following Biden on the war. This is essentially the Lind view. I do not think this helped Kerry).
I was also struck by Lind's call for a purge. From the other side of Lind's divide, I think this is honest but it will surely weaken the Dems of their most committed and passionate cadre. But it surely reflects in an honest way the attitude of the DLC and why they make the left their main target.
August 5, 2005 8:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wellstone won twice and would have won again if the crash had not occurred. How? By strongly defining himself as passionately and sincerely committed to the economic advancement of the middle class and workers, against unnecessary military action, and for human rights. His views were strong and well-known; not hidden behind opportunistic views to win the "vital" center.
V. Laszlo nails it here. The centrists, the operatives, the cynical pros, the convention-bound think tankers, on the other hand, continue to draw the wrong lessons from Democratic defeats.
Democrats as a result have come to be perceived by many Americans as the party of unsubstantial, weightless opportunism. The centrist response to every challenge is to try to fill his flimsy sails with the latest political breeze and drift with the rest of the weekend boaters - no real conviction, no heft, no real leadership. And once they get there in their pathetic little "me too" skiffs, the rest of the country has already sailed somewhere else.
It's all so anxious and feckless. "The country thinks this now, so we must run over here! No it thinks that, so we must run over there! No, maybe we should just stay where we are and the crowd will pass by again!" These are the people whose heads are full of countless clever and ironic words, and more words, and more words - but their hearts and souls seem to be formless pieces of wax. So, now the latest misguided attempt to fool more than half the people more than half the time is this new half-assed, warmed over Buchananism, oh-so-perfectly calibrated and honed to strip a few slices of spoiled and discarded meat from the Republican larder.
We also see a lot lately of the embarrassing tendency to imagine that if one peppers one's speech with words like "muscular" and "tough", "bold" people will think you're actually strong. It doesn't work that way. The way of the strong is to say: "This is right, and I accept the challenge of convincing others that it is so." The nervous posturing of the faux hawks, so obviously trying to talk themselves into something, is transparent. And for all the talk about new Democratic foreign policy strategies we often get something far less than a strategy. We get jejune lists of talking points and bullet points instead.
The fear of the me too-ers is so palpable: it's a terrified obsession with what other people will think of them. The problem is most Americans can smell cowards and weaklings a mile off. They prefer the real deal, a person of conviction they can honestly and strongly disagree with, to an obseqious flatterer.
August 5, 2005 8:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
You say you don't let trolls in. How did this Lind fellow sneak past?
I got to the part about sealing the borders and gave up. Sure, stop all illegal immigration and watch agricultural production and construction projects throughout the nation come to a halt. The suburban mothers with no place to go for their nannies would be a large enough block by themselves to vote you out of office, Mr. Lind.
If there is such a thing as a strident centrist nut, Lind is that. Considering that in the last ten years, more Americans have died of eating peanuts than from terrorist actions, do we really need such draconian measures? Rather than pandering to American's fears of bogeymen, I'd much rather figure out a way to get elected by telling the truth.
August 5, 2005 9:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
August 5, 2005 9:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dan,
On the enforcement of immigration laws: no one is going to enforce them because there is no powerful interests with a vested interest in enforcing them. Why do you think, for example, that when Pete Wilson decided to attack illegal immigration he waged his campaign against the immigrants and not on the businesses that employ them? Illegal immigration is not only allowed but is actively encouraged. This is useful to everyone. It keeps a particular group of people legally subordinate so they can most easily be oppressed and exploited. And it creates a permanent issue that reactionary politicians can raise to win elections. The issue for me is not whether we should enforce or ignore immigration laws but whether we should change them. As I said before, the best way to reduce illegal immigration is to open more positions for legal immigrants -- let supply and demand meet.
On wages: the idea that immigration, legal or illegal, depresses wages is old, reactionary, and totally wrong, unsupported by any serious, reliable research. It’s somewhat similar to old claims that improved technology was bad for the economy since it lowered employment by replacing men with machines.
On Zoe Baird and centrists and immigration: I think this point is a bit confused. In effect, you seem to be arguing that the very act of hiring an illegal immigrant is a political statement. In your view people on the “left” don’t like illegal immigrants, while “centrists” do, which is why someone like Baird would hire one. But the act of hiring an immigrant, legal or not, is not a political statement -- it says nothing about if you are on the “left,” “center,” or “right.” Indeed, most of the huge employers (for example, the Californian agricultural industry) that rely on illegal immigration would certainly not be considered “leftists.”
I consider myself on the “left” because I believe that government has a role to play in redistributive policies through mechanisms such as universal health care, progressive taxation, quality education, etc. I’m not much in favor of heavy-handed interventions in the functioning of the economy, and am this quite comfortable with increasingly free trade. The issue for me is not if we should be pro- or ant-globalization but to question how the benefits of globalization are distributed. The defining of certain immigrants as “illegal” is a way for the powerful to reap the benefits of globalization without spreading the benefits.
Two final points.
*A lot of discussion over illegal immigration gets tied up with people’s general attitudes towards immigration. However, most folks would probably argue that they are totally in favor of immigration, but they simply oppose illegal immigration. It’s an understandable position, but one that is ultimately extraordinarily naive. The only difference between an illegal immigrant and a legal immigrant is that the latter is allowed to enter the country legally. Why were massive waves of Irish, Italian, and German immigrants allowed to enter the country legally for most of its history while nowadays very few Mexicans are granted legal entry despite the overwhelming demand for their labor and the tacit approval of their illegal entry by the authorities?
*I’d like to go back to where this discussion got started. Mr. Lind adopted his get-tough attitude on illegal immigration as part of his greater concern with the war on terror. If you could stop illegal immigration, he seems to think, then no terrorist can ever get inside our borders. To accept this line of argument you’d have to ignore a) that the 9/11 hijackers were in this country legally; b) that the US-Canadian border is largely unprotected and very much open; c) that most illegal immigrants enter the country legally with tourist visas and then stay past their expiration date, so that the only real way you could ever stop illegal immigration would be to never permit any foreigner to enter the country under any circumstances. I return to a point I made earlier, if you believe in globalization and the increasing free flow of capital across borders then there is no way to take a hard line against the free flow of labor unless you are only interested in finding a way of compelling the greater exploitation of that labor by denying it recourse to the legal mechanisms usually available to labor in its struggles. Of course, many people are against the free flow of capital. The greatest irony of Mr. Lind’s post against his imaginary “leftists” is that the most positive replies to his quasi-fascist rant have come from precisely the ant-trade elements that in later posts he is sure to attack as wild anti-capitalist leftists.
August 5, 2005 9:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hi Dan, I wrote a rather lengthy reply to your post but accidently posted it below in reply to a completely different post by PigsandBattleships. My apologies for the mixup.
August 5, 2005 9:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
The above post was meant to be a reply to Dan K's comments above. I accidently replied here. My apologies for the mxup.
August 5, 2005 9:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Honest political debate of this sort requires real people be named and cited, rather than vague "radical leftist views" being attributed to nobody in particular. If Lind were required by some truth in political diatribes act to identify who he is talking about and what they said, his entire argument would collapse. Strong arguments need more thought and resarch than making towers of Beltway political gossip lazily piled up and stuck together with bullshit.
August 6, 2005 5:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
The reason we are in this military mess today is because we elected a president whos military resume is worse than worthless. We have a president who is without the mental capacity to oversee military matters. The man's father (who has a similar name) has a real good military resume, and I just think that confused too many voters. No one seems to be able to help our president because he is like a teen ager who thinks he already knows everything. He has surrounded himself with people who will only tell him what he wants to hear. When we chose his replacement, it doesn't need to necessarily be someone packed with plans. It needs to be someone with the ability to plan.
August 6, 2005 7:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
After Lind's two posts, I'm having trouble believing he belongs in any forum for moderates of any stripe, much less a forum in which moderates and progressives join in a discussion with one another. I had to reply at length to his previous post for its masquerading as moderation while creating the usual right-wing bogey in place of liberalism. Here his rhetoric stoops beyond that, to throwing around words like "left" and "liberal" with the right-wing flair for using them as today's substitute for the Red menace, while again caricaturing the opposition. Have we somehow asked Karl Rove to advise us on the future of America?
The rhetoric alone suggests that lies will follow, and of course they do. Other posts have pointed them out, and I can only add other examples. Illegal immigration? I seem to remember not that long ago a proposal to legalize many immigrants in California by, yep, the Republican party, to help with its bid to wrest Hispanic Americans from the Democrats. Border security? I can name only one candidate whose platform expressed concern for diversion of funds to a phony war on terror and away from monitoring our ports, and it was not Bush. Military action abroad? Of course, Republicans strongly opposed action over the last decade in Europe and Africa, while ignoring problems as well in North Korea.
But I'd like to add another point that posts have not stressed, simply because Lind's dishonest framing of the debate makes it harder to air them. First, by focusing on illegal immigration, Lind makes it impossible to deal with real terror threats. We missed the threat before 9/11 because we dropped the ball on info we already had on the perps, as well as because of an ideological focus on nation states, the same focus that created the disastrous war in Iraq. And recently in England, we had a problem with legal, westernized immigrants gone bonkers. Demonizing those slimy terrorists lurking across our borders makes one forget the monster that our wartime fury has unleashed.
And second, by mentioning deterrence, Lind makes us forget that deterrence worked, as bipartisan American and internationalist policy, to disarm Iraq, whereas Bush adopted instead a policy of unilateral invasion. Maybe Lind could have advised Hitler and Tojo on how to mask its aggression under rhetoric of deterrence and patriotism, but I refuse to have him shape a democratic polity by similar lights.
August 6, 2005 7:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Where did you learn all this hate for the left? Did a hippie beat you up for your lunch money?
I'm sorry if I "sound harsh," but you really need to stop with these strawman arguments if you want to be taken seriously around here. Maybe start by explaining just how and when the Democratic Party was "too open" to the radical left? Last I checked, I didn't see any "Bush Is A Nazi" posters at the Democratic National Convention.
Or maybe you think Howard Dean is part of the radical left? That would certainly explain everything here.
Over 40 comments and not one agreeing with you -- at some point, you should ask yourself: "Is it me?"
August 6, 2005 7:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think it is not just Dean. The Democrats who appear weak on national security to Lind, to neocons, to the right wing noise machine are: Kennedy, Conyers, Byrd, Graham, Wesley Clark, Hacknett, Durbin, Kucinich, Sanders,.. I was amused at everyone trying to get a definition of "radical left" from Mr. Lind. Just ask who would not support a pre-emptive war based on a regime being headed by an "ogre" who might turn into a threat. Is there a regime out there that can NOT be