Something that the Republican Party -- and especially those in charge now -- is very good at is changing the terms of debate. Sometimes it's a simple word usage. Look at how often John Edwards is referred to as not just a "trial lawyer" but a "millionaire trial lawyer" during the general campaign. But sometimes it's setting up certain ideas as truth and forcing the debate around them. I wrote a column during the 2000 campaign that looked at this phenomenon from a large-scale perspective -- the resolved nature of the debate over Bush's readiness for office. Now, Josh Marshall has an excellent post that neatly lays out the way America is looking at Bush as a proponent of democracy:
That sentiment is obviously critical, at least to some degree, of the Bush administration's role as an advocate and force for democratization on the international stage. Implicit in that line, however, is an assumption which now permeates much of the debate about foreign policy in this year's campaign.
That is, that however successfully or wisely the goal has been pursued, the Bush administration is the champion of democratization as a strategic goal on the world stage while John Kerry is the advocate of a more traditional foreign policy Realism, which prioritizes stability and alliances with existing powers over democratization and the export of American values.
Indeed, this was the premise of a critical David Brooks column in the Times from June 19th ("Kerry's Cruel Realism").
Perhaps the clearest sign of the ubiquity of this assumption is that it is not only advanced by the president's advocates but -- from a different and more critical perspective -- by his opponents as well. Many of them fault the president for a heedless or ill-conceived neo-Wilsonianism, which will damage US national security by pursuing illusory or improbable goals.
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I don't pretend that all of these decisions were wrong. In the case of Pakistan I think it has been, by and large, the correct and unavoidable course, though I think the "major non-NATO ally" business was perhaps laying it on a bit thick. And to one degree or another many instances of the Bush administration's cozying up to dictators has been the result of the exigencies of its 'war on terror.'
In essence, if you support the US war on terror, how you run your country is your own business.
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At the risk of repeating myself, this is not to say that the US should, willy nilly, upend friendly non-democracies with an indifference to American strategic interests. But if that's the model the administration is following then there's really, at best, no difference with previous administrations and the whole premise -- so widespread now in our political and foreign policy debates -- that the Bush administration is hawkish on democracy or neo-Wilsonian -- and that this is a departure from previous administrations or a potential Kerry administration -- is just an empty claim embraced by the inattentive and incurious.
We cannot expect the media or the general public to get right with this on their own. This is an issue that the Kerry campaign needs to look at in the longview and understand that we will buy it if they call the Administration's bluff, precisely because most of us now understand the Administration to be, at best, blinded by a very particular ideological amoralism or, at worst, incompetent.
Posted by Aaron S. Veenstra ::: 2004:07:07:11:13