The Democrats and the Dilemma: Morality, Interests, and Foreign Policy, 1988

THE DEMOCRATS AND THE DILEMMA: MORALITY, INTERESTS, AND FOREIGN POLICY, 1988 Christopher A. Padilla .he setting is all too familiar. The Democratic party, laboring under the foreign policy of an incumbent Republican president and eager for an electoral victory, sets up special task forces and study commissions to find a new American approach to the world. Hapless legislators, party leaders, and would-be presidential candidates are given a few weeks to redefine forty-year-old tenets of U.S. foreign policy, complete with position papers on a laundry list of specific foreign-policy issues. Eleven years ago, this list contained countries such as Angola and Cambodia and issues such as the cruise missile, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and human rights. Today, it contains Nicaragua, South Africa, the MX missile, and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Yet while the names on the laundry list have changed, there remains an underlying and unresolved conceptual debate within the party, one that goes deeper than today's cause célèbre to affect the roots of the American worldview. Nearly twelve years after the end of the Vietnam War, the Democratic party still lurches from one "new beginning" to another, struggling to regain a lost consensus on foreign policy and to solve the dilemma that has preoccupied Americans since the early 1970s: is there a foreign policy that will keep the United States a strong, proud, and involved world leader and simultaneously prevent future Vietnams? In 1975 liberal internationalism, the guiding principle of Democratic presidents since World War II, lay mortally wounded in the streets of Saigon. This forced the Democrats to begin a long and painful process of réévaluation, through which they sought to retain their ideals and eschew the discredited notion of militarized global containment. As much as the party might have wanted to fix the blame elsewhere, it recognized Christopher A. Padilla is a 1987 M.A. candidate at SAIS. 77 78 SAIS REVIEW that Vietnam was a war conducted by two separate Democratic administrations , initially supported by Democratic lawmakers, planned by Democratic bureaucrats, and, at least until 1968, justified by liberal Democratic ideology. Following World War II, Democrats operated under the generally accepted view that a world molded into the American image was not an unrealistic dream but a strategic and moral imperative. At the close of U.S. military involvement in Indochina the party faced a new and stronger imperative: no more Vietnams. Since then, the effort to reconcile this new noninterventionist goal with the traditional American desires to "stand tall" and to set an example for the world has been at the center of Democratic party foreign-policy debates. Of course, this post-Vietnam foreign-policy dilemma is not unique to the Democrats; it is a problem for U.S. foreign policy in general. Republican politicians, however, have had much less difficulty coping with the problem. They tend to engage in strong, almost crusading, rhetoric while remaining relatively more prudent in action. This deceptive imagery gives the impression of standing tall while avoiding the more dangerous actions called for by conservative Republican ideology. The Democrats, perhaps to their credit, have not tried to handle the dilemma by simply manipulating public passions. But as the Democrats grapple openly with the difficult problem of making America both strong and prudent, the Republicans' superior rhetorical ability to cope with that dilemma seems to have created a public perception of Republican foreignpolicy consensus and strength. If the Democrats want a foreign policy that is anything more than a criticism of Republican initiatives, the party must be able to reach some general agreement on how to handle the United States' post-Vietnam predicament. Achieving a consensus about the foreign-policy dilemma does not necessarily mean finding a solution. Republican flag-waving has not solved the dilemma—it has only postponed it, albeit effectively. Both parties have sought to avoid the frightening possibility that it is tragically but necessarily insoluble: perhaps a globally engaged great power cannot hope to avoid involvement in peripheral conflicts. Democrats have operated under the assumptions that there are lessons in the history of Vietnam and that consequently there must be some way out of the dilemma. Such assumptions...