Richard Norton-Taylor writes about The
Death Of Deterrence in the Guardian:
Bush, who, judging by American opinion polls, desperately needs
Britain to join any military action against Iraq, was persuaded by
Blair, among others, to follow the UN route, if only for
presentational purposes. This approach had the added advantage of
pulling the rug from under the Democrats in Congress and Labour
backbenchers in the Commons.
Again, Mr. Norton-Taylor has shown himself guilty of wishful
thinking. The opinion polls he quotes are particularly suspect --
most americans would like to see Britain on board, and wouldn't mind
less carping from Europe, but "desperate" is a considerable
overstatement. Bush went to the U.N. precisely to pull the rug from
under the Democrats at home -- many Americans would weep not at all if
the U.S. sent the U.N. packing.
Bush and his advisers have made no such qualification in their quest
for a new, aggressive Pax Americana, something they had wanted from
the start but for which they were confident of attracting sufficient
US domestic support only after the September 11 attacks.
Unfortunately, that statement is wrong in nearly every particular:
The U.S. had been rapidly returning to its prewar isolationism,
beginning in Clinton's second term. Although Clinton resisted this
resurgent isolationism when he went into Bosnia, this isolationist
groundswell was dragging his interventionist foreign policy to a halt,
driven by what Walter Russell Meade explains as "Jacksonian
isolationist tendencies" which had re-emerged after the cold war.
Bush, in contrast to Clinton, was overtly isolationist, which as
Mr. Norton-Taylor has no doubt forgotten was a major source of
friction between Bush and the "International Community" pre-9/11.
The 9/11 attacks did, however, was to change the focus of
Jacksonian defensive instincts that were driving the U.S. into
isolationism into the same sort of outward-looking, aggressive stance
that it had during the Cold War, but without a balancing force
comparable to the USSR. Where isolationism ("avoiding foreign
entanglements", in the words of G. Washington) had clearly failed to
protect the American people, the opposite approach, a "Pax Americana",
might work better. But the two doctrines are in fact two sides of the
same coin.
Bush, as a Jacksonian, went through this same transformation that many (most?) American people did.
And that the Europeans did not.
