by Cheryl Rofer
U.S. vs. Them, by J. Peter Scoblic, Viking Penguin, 2008.
Peter Scoblic has a grand unified theory of conservatism and national security: the division into good and evil comes before everything else for conservatives. He uses this theory to make sense of a long history of defective conservative prescriptions for national security.
Today’s conservatism was born in the years after World War II, when the world was more Manichaean than it is today: the United States faced the Soviet Union. Conservatives, reeling from their economic failure in the Great Depression and political failure in pushing an isolationist foreign policy in response to Hitler’s rise, needed a New Look. William Buckley and others supplied it: a combination of moralism based on absolute good and absolute evil, along with a preference for war over diplomacy.
Scoblic makes his case persuasively for the the last half of the twentieth century. I’m not so sure that the case works as well for the George W. Bush administration. Perhaps, however, we are too close to the Bush administration, not yet able to shear away the detail to show the clear lines of conservative thought. Nor can we yet read the minutes of the meetings, the proposals for action, the written arguments for and against those proposals.
The conservative record is impressive: MacArthur’s insistence on taking the Korean War to China; the insistence that Eisenhower roll back the Soviet Union by nuclear strikes; opposition to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; opposition to and denigration of the United Nations; distrust of the CIA; a love of missile defense; a hatred of treaties. All fruitless and wrongheaded, some actively dangerous.
Four Republican presidents, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush veered away from the conservative line. During those administrations, rank and file conservatives were upset by the falling-away from their true principles and conservatives within those administrations did their best to undermine heretical policies. However, much of the progress in controlling nuclear arms came about during those administrations.
All this was during the Cold War, a time when conservative thought could revel in the apparent Manichaeism of the US versus the SU. Once the Soviet Union dissolved, things got much more difficult for conservatives. For Scoblic, too.
George H. W. Bush did not manage the fall of the Soviet Union as a full-blooded Manichaean conservative would have; he was one of the last Eastern, liberal internationalist Republicans. Scoblic gives him short shrift, along with Bill Clinton, just a few pages in a chapter called “Hibernation,” referring to the partial fall from power of the conservatives, who by that time included the neos.
Although the Republicans did not hold the presidency through the nineties, that decade deserves more attention through his lens than Scoblic gives it. The Republicans controlled Congress for much of Bill Clinton’s time in office, and Jesse Helms promoted those Manichaean aims as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But the more important trends were within the presidency and the influence that conservative thought had on Clinton.
It is not clear whether Clinton actively favored a conservative foreign policy or whether he came to it through inattention. But the decade of the nineties set up a number of international situations that, handled differently, would have provided less fertile soil for George W. Bush’s doctrinaire conservatism.
Passage of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, more vigorous pursuit of controlling Russia’s nuclear materials, and defunding of missile defense programs all would have built a very different world by the turn of the century. Congress was responsible, but presidential arm-twisting could have made a difference. All of Russia’s nuclear materials could have been firmly under lock and key by the century’s end. What was lacking was funding, abetted by foot-dragging by bureaucrats still fighting the Cold War.
Neglecting the nineties is consistent with a history of conservatives, but a history of conservatism should have illuminated just how deeply those ideas permeated US political thinking and how that thinking has been skewed to the right.
Many of the conservative themes identified by Scoblic are clear in the second Bush administration. Hatred of treaties: check; withdrawal from the ABM treaty and being forced into the most minimal of obligations in the Treaty of Moscow. Opposition to and denigration of the United Nations: check; John Bolton. Preference for war over diplomacy: check; Iraq and the weapons inspectors. Division of the world into good and evil: check; “the axis of evil,” regime change, the willingness to allow nuclear technology to India despite treaty obligations.
Although George W. Bush has said many times that he classifies nations as good or evil, this part of Scoblic’s grand unified theory doesn’t always seem to fit. Was the consistent lack of funding for nuclear material control, despite Bush’s protestations that nonproliferation was his first priority, a lowered priority because fighting evil came first? That is the way Scoblic works it out. But it could also have been the lack of followthrough that Bush has shown again and again, even on programs he says he favors, from rebuilding New Orleans to No Child Left Behind.
The disparities among invading Iraq, negotiating with North Korea, and trying to isolate Iran? The most likely explanation seems to be differences in advisors, rather than a larger conservative ideology.
The last chapter is titled “Future,” which should provide insight into how to end the craziness that conservative Manichaeism has forced on our foreign policy. But Scoblic dives into psychology. Where does this mindset come from? Thinking of one’s own death has been shown to enhance the probability that people will buy on to these ideas. Um, yes. And what do we do with that? Scoblic doesn’t say.
Certainly the Bush administration has made the most of fear, and a new administration that provides a different emotional tone will make a difference. But there is more to psychology than that, and we need all the tools we can find to turn around the brainwashing of the American public by the no-treaties, no-tax crowd.
For one example, Emily Pronin reviews how we see ourselves and others in the 30 May Science magazine. It’s an outstanding article (subscription only; related article), summarizing recent results we all need to be aware of.
What would Scoblic’s last chapter look like if he had taken this article as its psychological basis? The asymmetry between our awareness of our own sensations, emotions and cognitions and our necessarily limited observations of others’ behaviors might have led him to suggestions for moving forward.
Pronin lists several outcomes of this asymmetry:
1. People tend to have inflated views of themselves, their futures and their traits.All of these are all too obviously operative in American foreign policy. American exceptionalism is the asymmetry writ large and a basis for the Manichaeism that conservatives have displayed again and again. Pronin recommends an awareness of these psychological mechanisms, along with increased willingness to apply the same standard of judgment to others as to oneself, to help counteract the most negative results of the asymmetry.2. People overestimate how much they can learn from others through brief encounters, while believing that they remain concealed.
3. People often misconstrue the thoughts and motives of others.
4. People often fail miserably in their efforts to communicate because they know what they want to communicate, while others focus on what they actually say.
5. People are influenced by those around them (and the mass media), but they generally deny that and see themselves as alone in a crowd of sheep.
6. I’m objective, you’re biased.
My conclusions? We need to call bullshit on policy and propaganda that conflict with fact and otherwise don’t make sense. We need to summon up the historical incidents that show that conservative Manichaeanism doesn’t work and can make things worse. And we need to do it vigorously and persistently, just as the conservatives have done with their ideas. Here are two examples of precisely that. We need more.