Victor Davis Hanson: Freedom and Idealism

['The Corner'] in National Review ^ | January 20, 2005 | Victor Davis Hanson

[quidnunc]

-snip-

This is the first time that an American president has committed the United States to side with democratic reformers worldwide. The end of the cold war has allowed us such parameters, but the American people also should be aware of the hard and necessary decisions entailed in such idealism that go way beyond the easy rhetoric of calling for change in Cuba, Syria, or Iran — distancing ourselves from the Saudi Royal Family, pressuring the Mubarak dynasty to hold real elections, hoping that a Pakistan can liberalize without becoming a theocracy, and navigating with Putin in matters of the former Soviet republics, all the while pressuring nuclear China, swaggering with cash and confidence, to allow its citizens real liberty. I wholeheartedly endorse the president's historic stance, but also accept that we live in an Orwellian world, where, for example, the liberal-talking Europeans are reactionary-doing realists who trade with anyone who pays and appease anyone who has arms — confident in their culture's ability always to package that abject realpolitik in the highest utopian rhetoric. But nonetheless the president has formally declared that we at least will be on the right side of history and thus we have to let his critics sort of their own moral calculus.

-snip-

[Tolik]

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Permalink to VDH comment: http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/05_01_16_corner-archive.asp#051782

 

[i_dont_chat]

I can't help proofreading. It's a hard habit to break.

Last sentence:
But nonetheless the president has formally declared that we at least will be on the right side of history and thus we have to let his critics sort of their own moral calculus.



Perhaps it should read:
. . . and thus we have to let his critics sort OUT their own moral calculus.

[Thorin]

Hanson's piece confirms what is obvious from Bush's rhetoric: Bush is not a conservative, but a radical who wishes to push the United States down a path taken by none of his predecessors, and at odds with the vision left us by the Founding Fathers. Give me George Washington's Farewell Address over this any day.

[Mariposaman]

I'm not sure what you mean by "Radical", and exactly what course did the Founding Father's set that Bush has veered away from?

[thejokker]

there are many, many who would disagree with your definition of a conservative/radical. you sound like a DU troll...

[TASMANIANRED]

Put me on.

[ClaireSolt]

The American Revolution has always been the shot heard round the world. Washington's advice to avoid foreign entanglements was not his most important legacy. European realpolitique is cynical and oligarchic. It has brought us to the rudderless corruption of the UN. We are better off aligning our foreign policy with our ideals.

[Poodlebrain]

Do you accept the ideals put forth by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence? Do the truths that were self-evident to those in Philadelphia in 1776 only apply to people who happen by accident to be born in the United States? If you accept the principles laid forth in the Declaration of Independence then it is not necessarily a radical ides to wish to see them proliferated about the world. In fact it would seem to be contradictory to not seek universal application of the ideals.

[bowzer313]

"This is the first time that an American president has committed the United States to side with democratic reformers worldwide."

I don't agree with this at all. The US has been attempting to foster freedom around the world for over a hundred years, politically, economically, and militarily. Bush just states this policy in stark and unmistakeable terms. Perhaps he's providing a focus and coherence to policies that heretofore have been performed in a haphazard and inconsistent fashion.

When I was years younger, I was an isolationist. The negative legacies of WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and even the first Iraq War seemed to validate the futility of foreign entanglements. But after 911, I realized that in a nuclear world populated by crazed Moslems (Bush's PC remark about the Koran notwithstanding) an agressively defensive pre-emptive posture is all we have left that is certain to deter our enemies. Like it or not!

[Thorin]

I was referring to the timeless wisdom offered by George Washington in his Farewell Address, in which he advised us to have friendly commercial relations with all nations but as few political dealings with them as possible. This was the view shared by the other Founders, none of whom envisioned the United States using its power to remake the world in its image. Such a view is radical, Wilsonian, even messianic, not conservative.

Bush's vision is also radical because it implicilty assumes that the rest of the world can and should become like America. The republican institutions we enjoy in America were the culmination of centuries of organic growth in a specific cultural context--that of England and her colonies in North America--and cannot be readily exported.

[bowzer313]

"I was referring to the timeless wisdom offered by George Washington in his Farewell Address, in which he advised us to have friendly commercial relations with all nations but as few political dealings with them as possible."

Agreed. And noble sentiments, indeed. Then, within months of Washington's Farewell Address, the Barbary Pirates, Moslems all, began kidnapping, torturing, and killing American merchant seaman minding their own business plying the carrying trade. And they did this without the US having any troops stationed beyond our borders as being somehow "instigative". We were just "easy pickin's" to these ravenous Moslem wolves. Thus began the "War on Terror" with America, perpetrated by Moslem madmen, over two hundred years ago. We're just picking up a conflict that Moslems have been inflicting on the entire world for 1400 years.

The "War on Terror" is our destiny. Like it or not.

[iopscusa]

Keep digging, it is in there somewhere....we managed to stay out of WW1 till the end and what we got from that was Hitler, WW11 and Stalin + Communist Empire. We let Islam/Terror run free for 20 years and what did we get....9/11. Continue the time line and what do we get?
Maybe a bit of revision is needed!

[Mariposaman]

You mention one address by Washington as the basis of your Isolationist stance. The evidence you present is hardly overwhelming. Further, the idea that America should promote Democracy around the world, though perhaps in an imperfect state,is neither new nor radical. to

[Thorin]

>>>>You mention one address by Washington as the basis of your Isolationist stance.<<<<<

Washington's Farewell Address was honored by all of his successors until Woodrow Wilson plunged us into WW I. That war is Exhibit A for nonintervention, since even Churchill felt that our entry into the war destroyed the chance for a peace agreement that would have prevented the rise of both Nazism and Communism.

Washington's views weren't unique, they were normative. As John Quincy Adams said, "America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy."

[CGVet58]

don't quite understand the comparison. After all, Washington also strongly advised against foreign entanglements. Kinda hard to do this in today's world where (A) we are the superpower of the besieged West, and (B) our oceans can no longer protect us as they did in our first two centuries of life.

History will ultimately confirm or deny the next, but (I strongly believe...) Bush is a visionary who in one fell swoop, has put lie to the conventional wisdom that we could do business with dictators (even relatively benevolent ones) as long as they were on our side. The world has gotten too small; globalization in the business and cultural sense has actually been preceded by globalized media by some 30 years. The message is always about the United States, and - because we are the most open nation and the leader of a Western Civilization that is under constant assault by the leftist intelligentsia - our faults, shortcomings, "hickness" are what that message seems to always trumpet.

We could continue doing business as usual, and the troublespots of the world will continue brutalizing their peoples, making them so stupid that they actually do believe their same slavemasters who turn to them and point their bloody fingers at us when laying the blame for their wretchedness. This will continue to breed ruthless scum who think nothing of learning how to fly airplanes into buildings or worse.

No sir, I do not agree with you at all. Obviously, I do agree with the President that planting the seeds of Freedom in these viperpits is one of the best ways to protect our country.

I can also tell you one thing the President can't, and that's the other side - the "or else" part of the above statement: These vipers may not realize it, but America's gesture to support freedom is the last chance they're gonna get, 'cause if it fails and in that failure they manage to get strong enough to threaten us with serious damage, then it's lights out for them.

CGVet58

[PzLdr]

Forgetting the War of 1812? We spent three years trying to "free" Canada. The Spanish-American War?. How about allying with all those Europeans during the Boxer Rebellion? Or, around Washington's time, our semi-alliance with the British against the French during the Quasi-War? All before Woodrow Wilson.Then there's the Monroe Doctrine,which relied, in no small part, on the Royal Navy for enforcement,and US-British naval patrols to stop slave running. We also threatened French troops in Mexico after the Civil War, and armed the Juarista fighting them.

[Thorin]

The only one of those events to arguably violate Washington's advice was the decision to keep Spain's colonies after the Spanish-American War. Washington advised us to steer clear of the Old War and entangling alliances, but he certainly favored westward expansion.

[mtntop3]

With Hitler on the march through Europe during the 1930's and Imperial Japan's expansion into Manchuria and the Pacific at that time, the reaction of many in the U. S. was to do - nothing.

It was, you see, "none of our business."

It was actually forbidden to even directly help England.

That all changed on December 7, 1941 and Pearl Harbor - at which time there was a real question of whether the United States and the Allies would survive as unconquered and free nations.

That war - World War II - resulted in an estimated 60 million persons killed, of which a goodly number were American men and women.

Those thousands of crosses in American cemeteries throughout Europe and in Hawaii signify those killed in defending liberty - exactly the liberty that President Bush referred to today. If this nation and others had not been slow to defend liberty elsewhere in the 1930's, those crosses may have not been there.

The defense and preservation of liberty must ultimately always be an offensive rather than defensive operation - for the latter is reactive and perpetually lagging.