Author: Eric Roddie
With the Republican primaries approaching, as a conservative I can’t help but think: Wouldn’t we be better off with a Henry Kissinger-type candidate?
I know it sounds random. And I know in select circles as of late, Kissinger has become known as the most evil war criminal ever. But if you can separate the old man from all the Cold War insanity going on at the time, he’s actually pretty applicable to our current foreign policy situation.
While I consider myself pretty conservative on most issues, I’ve definitely come a ways from my “rebellious” stance in high school as the #1 Bush apologist in the Bay Area. While I’m not completely critical of the administration at this point, one of their biggest failings, as I’m sure most Americans can agree on by this point, is foreign policy. What bugs me the most is that while the “democratize everything” ideology of Bush conservatives has good intentions, it’s annoyingly black-and-white when it comes to dealing with the Middle East. It’s true that we can’t negotiate our way out of everything, but to hear Bush diehards tell it, any talk of “diplomacy” in the region means you’re advocating the waffling “let’s all be friends” lefty policy.
As Secretary of State back when I was a youngun—I mean, not born yet—Kissinger knew the deal when it came to this. He may have advocated a questionably friendly policy when it came to particularly violent anti-Communist regimes, but he knew that sometimes it was better to make that trade-off than to get too wrapped up in unsustainable democratic idealism. While we can debate individual cases, I would definitely argue that Kissinger’s realism was a much more, well, realistic ideology than that of the gung-ho neoconservative/pro-Bush democracy set today (to put it the simplest way possible).
So what does this have to do with the primaries? After all, Bush is going to be gone anyway in about a year (unless, of course, his Justice Department finds an insane loophole and argues that the executive branch can rewrite the Constitution or some craziness).
The connection is in Rudy Giuliani’s candidacy. I have to say I’m not too excited about the idea of a Giuliani presidency. From the impression I get, the dude is in agreement with the Bush administration on all the issues it’s wrong about, and opposed to it on everything it’s right about. He takes a good amount of liberal positions when it comes to various social issues, and (my personal disagreements aside) this probably won’t sit well as far as conservative unity goes.
I definitely don’t think this country needs an administration that’s basically Bush Doctrine, Version 2.0. Maybe I’ve just got the wrong impression of the guy, but that’s the idea I get from Giuliani. The ideas that we should lump all Middle East terror groups into the same category to be dealt with in the exact same way and the general aversion to negotiating with unfriendly states really aren’t helpful. It’s true that most of these dudes aren’t amenable to negotiation, but there are ways to undermine support for them that shouldn’t necessarily always involve a “kill ’em all” type policy.
The idea that pushing for democratization in the Middle East is in the U.S.’s best interests is pretty questionable. I have my doubts that the current Iraqi government is all that sympathetic to the U.S., outside the fact that they’d be done without us. Given the general sentiment against the U.S. in the region, why should we expect quick democratic transitions to play into our goals? Perhaps this could happen in the long term, after a general shift in the region’s political attitudes, but definitely not right now.
The Bush ideology is right on one thing—we can’t lose in Iraq, unless we want our relationship with the region to be even more screwed than it already is. However, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if today’s conservatives really have the right idea when it comes to rational foreign policy. I mean, I’d vote for McCain, but apparently he fell off the map a long time ago and I totally missed it. When I look at some of the leading Republican candidates and what’s going on in the Middle East right now, I can’t help but think my vote won’t be an easy party-line deal this time around. Though admittedly, having the dude from Law & Order in charge would be pretty badass.
Eric Roddie is a junior Economics major. He can be reached at eroddie@oxy.edu.
This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.
