Source: Carnegie

By Robert Kagan

Originally published in the Washington Post, November 17, 2003

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently did his best to justify the war in Iraq, and he expounded a bit on the role of American power in the world. Here are some excerpts of what he said: "The war against Saddam Hussein was right. . . . He is a vicious dictator and a documented deceiver. He . . . invaded his neighbors, used chemical arms and failed to account for all the chemical and biological weapons he had before the Gulf War. And he . . . tried to build a nuclear bomb. . . . I think we're going to find weapons of mass destruction. I'm convinced that these weapons were there and that they could have found their way into the hands of terrorists and found their way to the United States, and that's what we had to stop. . . . A nation always preserves the right to take preemptive action in defense of our security and our freedom. . . . We have a chance to show the world that we were in fact in Iraq for the right reasons, that we were there for the purpose of liberating the Iraqi people, that this was not about the expansion of American power, that this was not about oil. . . . I think the commander in chief has to be tough. I appreciate the fact that we have a strong military in this country. . . . I think the world has proven, and we have proven, that there is a rationale for our containing the most powerful military on the face of the planet. To win the war on terror, we must be prepared to use the iron fist of our superb military."

Okay, I lied. Rumsfeld didn't say any of that. The above quotation is a composite of statements made over recent months by John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, Joseph Lieberman, John Edwards and Howard Dean. (The lines about Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons are Dean's, as are the "strong military" and "iron fist" lines.)

It has been said that the United States is polarized these days. Maybe so. But on foreign policy questions, where the country is presumably most polarized, the poles are a little hard to define. The fact remains that a majority of the Democratic Party's most plausible candidates supported the war in Iraq and have not, with the exception of Wes Clark, tried to claim otherwise. Howard Dean is the preeminent antiwar candidate, but aside from his dissent on Iraq, does he really offer a fundamentally different vision of American foreign policy? Will the 2004 election, in other words, be a national referendum on the fundamental principles of American foreign policy in the post-Cold War, post-Sept. 11, 2001, world? At this moment, it seems unlikely, even if the matchup is Bush vs. Dean.

Dean has been portrayed, especially by Republicans, as the new George McGovern. But judging by Dean's public statements at least, there is a big difference between the nature of his antiwar critique and the anti-Vietnam critique offered by McGovern and his followers three decades ago.

At the heart of the anti-Vietnam critique was a wholesale rejection of anti-communist containment, the reigning American foreign policy paradigm in those years. Vietnam was not just "the wrong war at the wrong time." It was, McGovernites believed, the logical culmination of two decades of misguided and immoral Cold War strategy. The problem was not just Richard Nixon but the whole foreign policy "establishment," Democrats and Republicans alike, from Dean Acheson through McGeorge Bundy, all of whom who had taken America down the wrong path. And the answer was not just withdrawal from Vietnam but a complete reorientation of American foreign and defense policy. America was on the wrong side of history; its power and influence in the world were a source not of good but of evil. In the McGovernite view, any war was the wrong war. Americans needed to "come home" both to save themselves and all who suffered from their nation's oppressive global influence.

In this respect, at least, Howard Dean is no George McGovern. He opposed the Iraq war, he says, because it was "the wrong war at the wrong time," not because it was emblematic of a fundamentally misguided American foreign policy. Dean has not, in fact, challenged the reigning foreign policy paradigms of the post-9/11 era: the war on terrorism and the nexus between terrorism and rogue states with weapons of mass destruction. "I support the president's war on terrorism," he told Tim Russert this summer. He supported the war in Afghanistan. He even supported Israel's strike against a terrorist camp in Syria because Israel, like the United States, has the "right" to defend itself. (European Deanophiles take note.) Dean does not call for a reduction in American military power but talks about using the "iron fist" of our "superb military." He talks tough about North Korea and at times appears to be criticizing the Bush administration for not addressing that "imminent" threat more seriously. And he especially enjoys lacerating Bush for not taking the fight more effectively to al Qaeda, a bit like John F. Kennedy criticizing Eisenhower in 1960 for not being tough enough on communism.

Of course, all this tough talk could be hot air. Maybe Dean is doing a great job controlling and hiding his inner peacenik. If so, that in itself tells you something about the current state of the foreign policy debate. Even Mr. Speak-My-Mind thinks he has to talk tough. George McGovern didn't.

Another possibility is that Dean's opposition to the Iraq war has been over-interpreted by his supporters on the Democratic left. They think he rejects the overall course of American foreign policy, just as they do. But maybe he doesn't. They think he's one of them, but his views may not be all that different from those of today's Democratic centrist establishment. When Dean criticizes Bush's foreign policy "unilateralism," he sounds like a policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, not a radical. "There are two groups of people who support me because of the war," Dean told Mara Liasson a few months ago. "One are the people who always oppose every war, and in the end I think I probably won't get all of those people." The other group, Dean figures, simply "appreciates the fact" that he "stood up early" and spoke his mind and opposed Bush while other Democrats were cowed. Dean may not be offering a stark alternative to Bush's foreign policy, therefore, so much as he is simply offering Democrats a compelling and combative alternative to Bush himself. The Iraq war provided the occasion to prove his mettle.

If so, that has two implications, one small and one big. The small one concerns the general election: The Bushies are planning to run against a dovish McGovern, but there's a remote possibility they could find themselves running against a hawkish Kennedy. The bigger implication, which the rest of the world should note well, is that the general course of American foreign policy is fairly stable and won't be soon toppled -- not even by Howard Dean.

-- Rober Kagan