OxBlog

# Posted 12:59 AM by David Adesnik

GARY HART'S GRAND STRATEGY: In the spring of 2001, I sat down with Gary Hart to have lunch in the Covered Market at Oxford. We'd gotten to know one another because of our mutual friendship with John Lewis Gaddis, who'd inspired both of us to study grand strategy and think about how the United States might develop one.

Much of what Sen. Hart and I talked about prefigured the central message of his new book, The Fourth Power: A Grand Strategy for the United States in the Twenty-First Century. Both of us strongly believed that a grand strategy built around the promotion of democracy and human rights had the potential to transcend the partisan divide by appealing to the ideals of both Democrats and Republicans.

Back in the spring of 2001, Hart was not yet known as the author of prophetic report about the threat of international terrorism. As Ryan Lizza sums it up in his review of Hart's book,

During the 1990's, when the foreign policy establishment was obsessed with Star Wars and other issues left over from the cold war, Hart headed a commission on national security with another former senator, Warren Rudman. Its report, issued early in 2001, warned of catastrophic terrorist attacks in which ''Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.'' Incredibly, the work of the Hart-Rudman commission was widely ignored by the press and the Bush administration.

[UPDATE: RB points out that much of Hart's work was done before Bush took office and the Clinton folks ignored it as well.]

Prof. Gaddis, however, recommended that I read the report because it reflected a conscious effort to map out a grand strategy for the United States of America. In spite of its prescience, the report said little to nothing about American ideals. According to Sen. Hart, this oversight reflected the difficulty of forging a consensus among the report's many authors.

But now that Hart has his own book, he can talk at length about those ideals. Since I don't yet have a copy, I'm going to restrict myself to addressing the points that Sen. Hart raises in an LA Times column that summarizes the arguments in his book. At first, Hart's call for an idealistic foreign policy comes across as an implicit condemnation of John Kerry's calculated avoidance of any promises to promote democracy in Iraq or Afghanistan. But then Hart writes that

Some so-called neoconservatives in the Bush administration have evoked Woodrow Wilson for the purpose of making the United States the missionary of democracy, neglecting the important truth that Wilson's methods were internationalist and peaceful, not unilateralist and militaristic.

Coming from an individual with a doctorate in American history, Hart's thumbnail account of Wilson's foreign policy is profoundly disappointing. If you ask the people of Mexico, Haiti and Nicaragua, they will tell you that Wilson was a cynical and aggressive unilateralist whose self-righteous idealism did nothing to prevent him from invading and occupying their homelands. If you ask the people of Mexico, Haiti and Nicaragua what they think of the current American president, they'd probably say exactly the same thing.

On a similar note, Wilson also sought to promote democracy at gunpoint in Germany and Central Europe. His League of Nations may have been multilateralist by design, but its significance paled in comparison to the Peace of Versailles, which was imposed on Europe by the victorious Anglo-Franco-American cabal.

Correcting Hart's account of Wilson is extremely important because influential Democrats have been distorting Wilson's legacy for almost thirty years. In the course of my research on US-Central American relations under Carter and Reagan, I have come across countless speeches in which Democrats lionize Wilson for his dedication to multilateralism and peace.

Although sincere, this sort of rhetoric reflected the political imperative of providing a historical foundation for the strident anti-interventionism of the post-Vietnam left. Its policies were those of Jimmy Carter even if Democrats attributed them to Woodrow Wilson.

When Reagan came into power and began to pursue a foreign policy that was truly Wilsonian, few Democrats opposed him more vehemently than Gary Hart. Even though numerous Democrats supported Ronald Reagan's efforts to promote democracy at gunpoint in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Hart refused to do so until the anti-Communists in those nations curbed their horrific abuses of human rights.

As this example demonstrates quite well, the American values that Hart idealizes often come into conflict with one another. At least in his LAT column, Hart misses this point entirely. Instead, he seems to presume that there is a single, correct interpretation of what American values are.

The potential for conflict within the American value system has often been overlooked in recent months because John Kerry has studiously avoided any sort of idealistic pretensions. When OxBlog debates with Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias and Laura Rozen about the importance of idealism in American foreign policy, they defend John Kerry on the ground that idealism is overrated, especially the faux idealism of George W. Bush.

Thus, one might ask whether Hart's idealism places him somewhere on the political spectrum that is further from Kerry and closer to Bush. The answer to that question is a definitive 'no'. Like Jimmy Carter, Hart elevates the principle of multilateralism to a status on par with that of democracy and human rights.

Back in the 1980s, John Kerry opposed Reagan's Nicaragua policy on the exact same grounds as Gary Hart. Kerry described that policy as recklessly unilateralist and totally disinterested in human rights. Back then, multilateralism for Kerry was a matter of principle. Yet now Kerry's portrays his multilateralism as a realistic means of enhancing America's strength.

When I met Gary Hart for lunch in the spring of 2001, I was a first-year grad student who had no appreciation of the potential for conflict within the American value system. While I salute his efforts to reinvigorate the idealism of the Democratic left, I fear that his definition of American idealism will bring us no closer to bipartisanship than Kerry's realist rhetoric.