The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [137]
It was against this backdrop—an era of division rather than an era of consensus—that most Americans alive today formed whatever views they may have on foreign policy. These were the years of Nixon and Kissinger, whose foreign policies were tactically brilliant but were overshadowed by domestic policies and a Cambodian bombing campaign that were morally rudderless. They were the years of Jimmy Carter, a Democrat who—with his emphasis on human rights—seemed prepared to once again align moral concerns with a strong defense, until oil shocks, the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan made him seem naive and ineffective.
Looming perhaps largest of all was Ronald Reagan, whose clarity about communism seemed matched by his blindness regarding other sources of misery in the world. I personally came of age during the Reagan presidency—I was studying international affairs at Columbia, and later working as a community organizer in Chicago—and like many Democrats in those days I bemoaned the effect of Reagan’s policies toward the Third World: his administration’s support for the apartheid regime of South Africa, the funding of El Salvador’s death squads, the invasion of tiny, hapless Grenada. The more I studied nuclear arms policy, the more I found Star Wars to be ill conceived; the chasm between Reagan’s soaring rhetoric and the tawdry Iran-Contra deal left me speechless.
But at times, in arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview. I didn’t understand why, for example, progressives should be less concerned about oppression behind the Iron Curtain than they were about brutality in Chile. I couldn’t be persuaded that U.S. multinationals and international terms of trade were single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to steal from their people. I might have arguments with the size of Reagan’s military buildup, but given the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, staying ahead of the Soviets militarily seemed a sensible thing to do. Pride in our country, respect for our armed services, a healthy appreciation for the dangers beyond our borders, an insistence that there was no easy equivalence between East and West—in all this I had no quarrel with Reagan. And when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his due, even if I never gave him my vote.
Many people—including many Democrats—did give Reagan their vote, leading Republicans to argue that his presidency restored America’s foreign policy consensus. Of course, that consensus was never really tested; Reagan’s war against communism was mainly carried out through proxies and deficit spending, not the deployment of U.S. troops. As it was, the end of the Cold War made Reagan’s formula seem ill suited to a new world. George H. W. Bush’s return to a more traditional, “realist” foreign policy would result in a steady management of the Soviet Union’s dissolution and an able handling of the first Gulf War. But with the American public’s attention focused on the domestic economy, his skill in building international coalitions or judiciously projecting American power did nothing to salvage his presidency.
By the time Bill Clinton came into office, conventional wisdom suggested that America’s post–Cold War foreign policy would be more a matter of trade than tanks, protecting American copyrights rather than American lives. Clinton himself understood that globalization involved not only new economic challenges but also new security challenges. In addition to promoting free trade and bolstering the international financial system, his administration would work to end long-festering conflicts in the Balkans and Northern Ireland and advance democratization in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the former Soviet Union. But in the eyes of the public, at least, foreign policy in the nineties lacked any