News from the New Party

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Facing up to global challenges

James Forsyth in the Spectator has some interesting comments on the foreign policy stance of the main Democratic contenders for next years U.S. Presidential election:

To many, 20 January 2009, George W. Bush’s last day in office, can’t come soon enough. The President’s pugnacious speech to the American Legion summed up why: not content with vigorously defending two wars, he seemed to start banging the drum for another with his statement that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons threatened to put the Middle East ‘under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust’ and pledge that America ‘will confront this danger before it is too late’...

The fact is that President Bush’s comments about Iran could just as easily have come from one of the Democrats running to replace him in the Oval Office. Indeed, Bush sounded positively moderate in comparison to Hillary Clinton. In a speech in January 2006, she warned that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was ‘moving to create his own new nuclear reality in line with his despicable rewriting of history’. She emphasised that the United States ‘cannot and should not - must not - permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons’. Just to ram home the point, she declared that the US ‘cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran - that they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons’.

Barack Obama’s position is very similar to Hillary Clinton’s, despite their different views on the Iraq war. When Obama was running for the Senate in 2004, he was asked about how he would deal with an Iran on the verge of going nuclear. He noted that, after the damage Iraq had done to America’s standing in the world, it would hardly be ‘optimal’ for the US to strike Iran, but added that ‘having a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons is worse. So I guess my instinct would be to err on not having those weapons in the possession of the ruling clerics of Iran.... And I hope it doesn’t get to that point. But realistically, as I watch how this thing has evolved, I’d be surprised if Iran blinked at this point.’ It seems Obama wouldn’t blink either.

Of course, attitudes to Iran in this context are likely to be radically different to those towards the Iraq War, which is widely regarded even in America as having been disastrous. President Bush may reasonably claim that his "surge" policy is bearing fruit at last, but this is too little, too late for his domestic political redemption. Even if the Iraq campaign had been a rip-roaring success, George Bush is obliged to leave the White House in any event at the end of his current term.

The difference on this issue between British opinion and American opinion is stark (at least as regards that portion of public opinion which is obliged to take the business of government seriously). Americans tend to recognise that a failure of planning is not the same thing as a failure of decision making. In other words, the botched execution of such plans as existed for post-invasion Iraq does not in itself discredit the decision to invade: the American people are more likely to give Bush the benefit of the doubt for doing the right thing; their gripe is that he has done it badly.

British views, on the other hand, tend to be more sullen and conspiratorial. British commentators who grumble about Britain's supposedly slavish adherence to American foreign policy (commentators who, incidentally, must have spent the 1990s asleep - since it was effectively Bush who adopted Blair's policy, rather than the other way around) are also apt to blame the outcome of the Iraq War on the decision to invade. This is illogical: however badly things have turned out, other outcomes were possible. Nevertheless, making the right decisions involves accepting the risk of failure.

Such lines of thinking are disturbing. They can only lead us back to a risk-averse policy of appeasement or isolationism which can only give comfort to the very real enemies of the West. If this is obvious even to the main Democratic presidential candidates, then perhaps there is less to fear from the coming American election than might previously have been apparent.

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