By: Michael Hayes

In a previous essay, I called upon the Democrats to critique President Bush’s policy of spreading democracy throughout the Middle East by exposing its underlying interventionist rationale. However, interventionism is not the exclusive property of the Republican Party. To the contrary, President Bush is merely the latest in a long line of interventionist presidents from both parties since the end of World War II. Presidents from Truman onward have succeeded in equating interventionism with internationalism. By successfully equating non-interventionism with isolationism, these leaders convinced the public that there is no alternative to interventionism, making critics of their foreign policies seem backward-looking and naïve.

Labeling critics in this way is a conscious political strategy designed to prevent real debate over policy directions by marginalizing dissent. A non-interventionist foreign policy is not the same thing as an isolationist foreign policy. Democrats all recognize the pressing need for American leadership on a wide range of issues, including nuclear proliferation, global warming, and terrorism. No contemporary American president—Democrat or Republican—would even consider pursuing a genuinely isolationist foreign policy. As the world’s sole remaining superpower, and as its largest and strongest economy, the United States cannot escape the responsibilities of global leadership. The issue here is not whether we should be involved in the world. Rather, it is whether we should try to exercise control over the internal political affairs of other nations.

In an earlier essay, I observed that the pursuit of absolute security by one nation inevitably means absolute insecurity for other nations. This maxim of international relations theory takes on a deeper meaning when, in the age of terrorism, the world’s most powerful nation becomes afraid of almost everybody.

But the United States was already afraid of almost everybody even before the age of terrorism. Our manifest need to control what is going on everywhere in the world, which began with the onset of the Cold War, has always reflected an underlying sense of insecurity.

This need for control also reflects an exaggerated sense of our own importance. That this is not simply a Republican malady is illustrated by the popular television program “West Wing” (my favorite show), which focuses on the inner workings of a Democratic White House. How many times over the years has this program suggested that a coup halfway around the world in some small and weak country absolutely requires the staff to wake up President Bartlett so that he can formulate an American response? By implication, the very stability of the world hinges on President Bartlett dealing quickly and effectively with the replacement of one dictator by another in a third world country that can barely defend itself, much less pose a serious threat to its neighbors.

In the Cold War era, the United States was primarily concerned with the threat posed by an expansionist Soviet Union. In the previous essay, I described how United States policy-makers came to feel boxed into supporting a right-wing government in El Salvador dominated by a wealthy oligarchy and the military. Death squads were used to eliminate political opposition while maintaining plausible deniability. The Reagan administration repeatedly certified to Congress that the government there was making progress against terrorism and human rights violations when the facts on the ground (which they knew) all indicated otherwise.

While El Salvador posed no military threat to us whatsoever, we were always concerned that political instability there reflected Communist efforts to secure a foothold within our hemisphere. The prime suspect in this instance was, of course, the Marxist government of nearby Nicaragua. Analysts who attributed such instability to poverty and inequality still worried that communists might exploit political unrest to gain some advantage. Thus, regime stability in El Salvador came to be perceived as a compelling national security interest.

In other countries, political and economic stability has been viewed as important to provide a favorable climate for corporate investment. The CIA coup in Iran in 1953, which overthrew a secular democracy and installed the Shah in power, was originally prompted by the Iranian government’s efforts to force a British oil company, Anglo-Iranian Oil, to renegotiate the royalties that company paid Iran for oil rights. Similarly, the overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954 owed much to complaints by the United Fruit Company that a land reform program then in progress threatened the company’s interests. In both cases, for a variety of reasons too complicated to go into here, the Eisenhower administration was persuaded that communist elements were at the root of nationalistic policies threatening to corporate interests.

Clearly, our interventionist foreign policy has very deep roots. Exercising control over the internal affairs of other nations—whether supporting dictatorships to secure regime stability, overthrowing governments that persist in pursuing policies we oppose, or installing democracies ostensibly to reduce the threat of terrorism—serves a formidable combination of national security and corporate interests. Without question, reversing six decades of interventionist foreign policy will be extremely difficult. But it is not impossible.

In his excellent text on the nature of politics, Modern Political Analysis, political scientist Robert Dahl suggests that in most successful nations the public is socialized into accepting as fact what is really a legitimizing myth—an idealized account of how the political system really works. There is always a significant gap between this myth and the reality of how the political system operates, but the idealized version is nevertheless accepted by most citizens because it provides a sense of identity (e.g., who we are as a people) as well as a framework for understanding events. Thus President Bush’s interpretation of the attacks of 9/11—“they hate us for our freedoms”—provided an affirming explanation for what had just happened while, at the same time, marshalling support for the sacrifices that would inevitably be associated with the necessary military response.

There is no need to assemble public opinion data to prove that the United States possesses such a legitimizing myth because we all grew up with it and almost all of us share it. We have all been socialized to believe that the United States is the most generous country in the world, rebuilding our former enemies and providing more foreign aid than any other nation; that the United States is always a force for good in the world; that the United States only goes to war in self-defense or to protect other, weaker nations from aggression; that the United States always abides scrupulously by international treaties, while our enemies do not; and so on.

The fact that the public believes all these things so strongly, combined with the natural desire of people not to spend time following politics when they could be doing other things that are more immediately profitable or entertaining, makes it easy for political leaders to do all sorts of things the public would never support while escaping political and legal accountability. People want to trust their government, and they resist any suggestion that our country ever does bad things. This is why Dick Cheney’s indignant response to Amnesty International’s recent revelations of American mistreatment of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq—saying how offended he was that anyone would even suggest that we would do such things—will probably put an end to the matter for many people.

While public acceptance of these legitimizing myths clearly makes it difficult to raise criticisms of American foreign policy, these same strongly-held beliefs can force changes in policy if Democrats successfully expose the specific consequences of interventionism. As Americans, we do not just want to believe our country is a force for good in the world. We want it to actually be a force for good in the world.

Persistence in the face of short-term setbacks is terribly important here. Democratic criticisms of abuses associated with interventionism open us up to predictable—and, in the short run, effective—Republican responses. For example, Vice President Cheney will continue to respond to new revelations with outright denials because he understands that people haven’t been paying much attention to what is really going on and want to believe we are basically good. We can also expect Republicans to repeat Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s famous line from the 1988 Republican convention: “They always blame America first.” No one should go into this thinking it will be easy.

To succeed on this issue, Democrats must say over and over again that a noninterventionist foreign policy is an internationalist foreign policy. We can and must stress the ways in which we would exercise leadership in fostering international cooperation to responsibly address global problems. This, not saber rattling, is real international involvement.

We must also reiterate, at every opportunity, our commitment to a strong national defense. President Bush’s neglect of homeland security, combined with his apparent disinterest in capturing Osama Bin-Laden, provides a great opening for Democrats to discuss how we can defend the country more effectively without threatening to attack other countries preemptively or imposing our form of government on them at great expense.

We need to do a better job of demonstrating how our policies reflect our love of country and our identification with American values. John Kerry tried to do this by emphasizing his military service during the Vietnam War. Despite significant misgivings, he served. This part of Kerry’s campaign should be replicated, not rejected. I am not saying we should only nominate veterans for president, although the “chicken hawk” syndrome characterizing the Bush administration strongly suggests that people who have actually served in wars are much less likely to launch them precipitously. Rather, I am saying we should nominate candidates whose love of country is palpable—Democratic counterparts to John McCain—who want to fix the system, not throw it out. This should not be hard. We got this part of the equation right with Kerry.

In this regard, it is vitally important that we make clear that we embrace the same idealistic vision of America most voters hold and merely want the country to live up to its ideals: to really be the most generous nation in the world, a people that goes to war only to defend ourselves or others from aggression, a respecter of morality and law, and a consistent force for good.

President Bush’s foreign policy, like so many Republican policies, ultimately rests on an appeal to fear—a fear of the outside world, a fear of change, and a desire to avoid real engagement with other nations. While it is rational to fear terrorists, the Republicans also want us to fear cooperative efforts to deal with global warming. They want us to fear the United Nations, and they even want us to fear the International Criminal Court. What does it say about this nation if we have reached a point where we actually have something to fear from an international criminal court?

While it may appear hard-headed and proactive, President Bush’s unilateralism is really isolationist, xenophobic, and domineering. By contrast, a Democratic foreign policy of non-interventionism would be confident, mature, and genuinely internationalist. Non-interventionism is also realistic—realistic about how secure we really are, realistic about what can and cannot be achieved through foreign policy, and realistic about what kind of leadership the world really needs from us.

Non-interventionism can be made a winning issue for Democrats, both as a substantive issue and as a valence issue. We can prevail on this, and it is terribly important—both for the nation and for the world—that we do.

Michael Hayes has been Professor of Political Science at Colgate University since 1984. His most recent book is The Limits of Policy Change, published by Georgetown University Press in 2001.