The Marginalization of Democratic Foreign Policy

There are two parties in the U.S. One is serious about national security, and one isn’t. This fact, more or less true since 1968, is deeply disturbing at a time when Democrats are likely to grab some share of national power in a few weeks.

History didn’t end, did it, with the fall of the Soviet Union. Militant Islam, which has been a factor in international politics at least since the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked an El Al flight to Algiers on July 23, 1968, has grown decade by decade into a true force to be reckoned with.

At some point, probably in 1948 when Stalin allowed the West to save its Berlin outpost with an airlift, the Cold War became a stand-off based upon mutual respect. We haven’t reached that point with militant Islam. The militants are not only willing to die to spread their cause, they—much like the Nazis and the Japanese on the eve of World War II—believe that their willingness to die gives them an inherent advantage in any conflict with the soft West, which so clearly abhors war and sees dying for any cause as uncivilized.

When the U.S. lost Vietnam, Democrats were pleased they had turned America away from war. Republicans were alarmed to think that losing made fighting Communism elsewhere that much harder. Republican dissent from the conventional wisdom on Vietnam grew into Reagan’s willingness to confront the “Evil Empire.” By the end of Reagan’s term in 1989, the Democrats’ national security policy was no longer mainstream.

Even though the Gulf War elevated the standing of the U.S. military and removed much of our Vietnam defeat’s stain, the collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in the Clinton era of good feeling, when any American combat death anywhere seemed one too many. Now we see the Clinton years for what they were, a time of missing clues from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, from the 1995 Philippines’ discovery of the Manila air plot, from Khobar, from the destruction of American embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, and from the attack on the U.S.S. Cole that militant Islam was on the rise. And this week, we are reminded how Clinton’s group (Warren Christopher, pictured) from 1994 on mishandled North Korea’s threat to go nuclear.

The Democrats love to quote their second-to-the-last tough president, “Never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate.” To me, Democratic foreign policy is “Talk, talk, talk, then talk some more.” It leaves Democrats completely unready to take on the real evil we face.