Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Scoop Jackson is dead and . . .

. . . David Brooks is an idiot:
[President Obama's] speeches at West Point and Oslo this year are pitch-perfect explications of the liberal internationalist approach. Other Democrats talk tough in a secular way, but Obama’s speeches were thoroughly theological. He talked about the “core struggle of human nature” between love and evil. . . .
Obama has not always gotten this balance right. He misjudged the emotional moment when Iranians were marching in Tehran. But his doctrine is becoming clear. The Oslo speech was the most profound of his presidency, and maybe his life.
Tuesday's column was the most idiotic of David Brooks' week, but the week's not over yet.

Brooks seems to confuse speeches with policy, as if all Obama needs to do is begin a speech, "Fiat lux," and we will all be blinded by the brightness of a thousand suns. Brooks' paean to "the liberal internationalist approach" ignores the sequel to Woodrow Wilson's crusade to "Make the World Safe for Democracy," namely World War II, which ended with half of Europe under the Soviet heel, followed in turn by the bloody stalemate in Korea and the blundering "escalation" of Vietnam.

The fact that Brooks takes Obama at his word is no reason the rest of us should be so foolish. Nevertheless, given the actual consequences of "the liberal internationalist approach," if indeed this is what Obama is about, it shouldn't really be reassuring. Democratic Party foreign policy is not necessarily a straight line from Versailles through Yalta to the scene of helicopters rescuing Americans from the roof of the Saigon embassy, but it's a familar route nonetheless.

The Zeitgeist-sniffing Brooks shifts like the wind, yet is stubborn about exactly one thing, his refusal to acknowledge that liberals generally make a botch of whatever policy they influence. Brooks has probably been too busy admiring the crease of the president's pants-leg to notice anything else.

8 comments:

  1. The desire to appeal to the other side and to appear more intelligent and nuanced then your garden variety conservative has been the man's undoing. It takes someone with a lot of confidence and political conviction to withstand the allure of the New York sophisticates. Someone like William F. Buckley was quite exceptional, which becomes all the more obvious as we experience the world without him.

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  2. Obama talked tough to the Norwegians because it was the only way he could pose as morally superior to them.'

    Here in the States he'll be turning Gitmo terrorists loose as fast as his tame Justice Department can kick them out for the same reason.

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  3. "Brooks' paean to "the liberal internationalist approach" ignores the sequel to Woodrow Wilson's crusade to "Make the World Safe for Democracy," namely World War II, which ended with half of Europe under the Soviet heel, followed in turn by the bloody stalemate in Korea and the blundering "escalation" of Vietnam."

    Bravo for that. I wish more people grasped that sad fact.

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  4. Wilson's crusade was to get us into WWI, not the second world war.

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  5. I know he's not as widely read as Brooks.. but Frank Schaeffer is off his meds again:


    Faith in Obama is not a blind faith. In his first year in office he is starting to stack up real accomplishments against all odds. But there is a long way to go.

    My frustration is that I have no idea how to express my support for the President. Maybe there are others who share my strong feeling that the Obama presidency is our last best shot to get it right on so many issues, from justice to education, from spiritual values, to how and where we wage war.

    http://frank-schaeffer.blogspot.com/2009/12/odds-facing-our-presiden.html

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  6. There is no political writer who criticizes another political writer as accurately and as amusingly as Stacy does with David Brooks.

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  7. I should add: "zeitgeist-sniffing" is a perfect description of Brooks.

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  8. Carol said...
    Wilson's crusade was to get us into WWI, not the second world war.

    What I meant was that U.S. involvement in WWI -- or rather, Wilson's "internationalist" approach to the post-war settlement -- was the fundamental cause WWII.

    Wilson allowed his European allies (primarily France) to impose humilating terms on Germany at Versailles, and compounded the error by encouraging the belief that the League of Nations could prevent a recrudescence of German militarism.

    "Liberal internationalism" -- and we may, I think, apply Brooks' term to Wilson's naive statesmanship -- was thus a major contributing factor to WWI.

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