One of the more fascinating aspects of the Bush presidency has been the extent to which the President has rejected the Baker/Scowcroft school of “realism” that dominated his father’s cabinet, in favor of a much more Reaganite foreign policy.
The rejection of the old Republican realists has been so jarring that it’s confounded liberals and conservatives alike. These days, it’s not unusual to find liberal internationalists who clearly despise the President taking on the arguments of the realists they despised in years past.
Today, we get just such an example from the Chronicle‘s Cragg Hines, who embraces realism in defense of the infamous Yalta agreement that President Bush recently criticized so forcefully:
The rhetorical highlight of Bush’s journey was an intentionally provocative speech in Riga, Latvia, before he went on to Moscow for the main celebrations. It was a stylishly written, if historically faulty, denunciation of appeasement that was meant to be both a thumb in the eye of Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as a justification for Bush’s own militarism in Iraq.
The headline-grabbing centerpiece of the Riga speech was an assault on that hoary whipping boy Yalta, the tripartite conference in the Crimea in early 1945, at which Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin held their final face-to-face talks of World War II. Yalta has been a favorite gambit of the right wing since none other than Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy.
They blame the agreement for the division of Europe that lasted through the Cold War.
What happened to much of Eastern Europe, at the hands of the Soviet Union, after World War II was, as Bush said at one point in his Riga remarks, “one of the greatest wrongs of history.” But for Bush to blame it unequivocally on Yalta and implicate Roosevelt, especially without giving so much as a hint about what he would have done differently, was unworthy of the president.
Actually, it was an historically accurate denunciation of a tragic realism that effectively doomed too many innocents to life behind an iron curtain. That the Coven-obsessed D.C. columnist for the Houston Chronicle disagrees with the President’s criticism doesn’t make the speech historically inaccurate. Rather, it just clarifies that Hines would have made the same easy, but immoral, deal. Hines admits as much by including this passage:
Munteanu, now with the Washington-based Cold War International History Project, believes that Yalta was morally wrong, “but in terms of realpolitik was right … . I don’t think anyone was prepared for another war.”
Hines makes it clear he wouldn’t have been. Instead, the deal still gave us 50 years of “Cold War” and doomed millions to life behind an iron curtain. The “realpolitik” of FDR and Churchill drove the decision, as Hines concedes with this quote. He may disagree with the criticism, but he’s just conceded the historical accuracy of the President’s criticism.
Hines tries to work in some nonsense about conservatives being inconsistent (I think — it’s hard to tell when he just starts fuming) by bringing in Churchill:
What, it seems logical to ask given his present resolute hubris, would Bush have done, either at Yalta or immediately after? Charge eastward?
That would put Bush at odds with another latter-day Republican idol: Churchill.
Conservatives do have proper appreciation of Churchill for many good reasons, but Yalta is not one of them. Both he and FDR embraced “realism” over moral principle at Yalta, and were wrong to do so.
With the denunciation of Malta — and the realist foreign policy it embraced — President Bush once again showed himself as the son of Reagan, who helped remake the Republican party with his own dogged condemnation of Henry Kissinger’s realism in 1976.
It’s unreasonable to expect everyone to agree with President Bush on this subject, but it’s not unreasonable to expect an allegedly respected D.C. columnist for a major daily to treat the subject with more seriousness than he did in this column. That was really weak.
There’s been more intelligent discussion of this story all over the blogosphere, but as always, the discussion has been particularly good at Brothers Judd, a blog that treats political ideas seriously.
