Obama’s Big Stick Diplomacy

John Bolton’s jumped in on the Republican operation to gather the pitchforks and start the fearmongering. Yesterday, in an interview on Fox News’s radio station hosted by John Gibson, he railed against Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Of Obama’s policies he warned, “It will simply have more embassy bombings, more bombings of our warships like the Cole, more World Trade Center attacks. That would be the best outcome from that perspective.”

Watch:

Besides the fact that, as Jason Linkins bets “Bolton about eleventy billion dollars that the World Trade Center is not going to get attacked again,” it was during the Bush Administration that September 11th attacks happened. Of course what Bolton was trying to infer is that it was Clinton policies that brought on the attack, but what Bolton and most Republicans refuse to think about is that it was probably Bush’s soft-peddled isolationist foreign policy (remember that? from before the Sept. 11th attacks?), one that stressed isolationism, that probably made the terrorists brave enough to attack in the first place.

It’s also worthwhile to point out that the Bush policies have markedly increased terrorist attacks worldwide. The Center for American Progress points out that Al Qaeda attacks worldwide have increased during the administration from 28 to 200 a year, if you include Afghanistan and Iraq. Not including those two nations, there has still been a 35% increase in attacks.

If you follow the link to the Center for American Progress it also has a good interactive map which gives a graphic visual image indicating the increase in terrorists attacks since Bush came around.

During this election of historical precedents and alternatively, mind-numbing historical comparisons, I fail to see how the Republicans have missed the comparison to one of their party’s most famous foreign policies in Barack Obama: Big Stick Diplomacy. Teddy Roosevelt advocated negotiations with our enemies and competitors while reminding them of our awesome political, economic and militaristic power. So is Obama.

The Republicans have a hard time thinking this way because TR had used this policy against our European competitors who were in most ways our cultural, economic and militaristic equals. For the colonial world, America had the “little brown brothers” policy adopted by Taft and McKinley. It was a policy that advocated helping those members of the world who couldn’t help themselves because of some kind of ingrained inferiority; a form of paternalistic racism.

In many ways this is the policy that the Republican neo-cons still believe in. While the arguments for going to war are different in that they don’t focus on the race of those being “helped,” like McKinley or Taft had, they are not afraid to lump all of Islam together as one pool of ancient peoples who refuse to fess up to 21st century principles of democracy and free-market capitalism. Hence why the Iraq war had to be an occupation, so that Iraq could be brought into the future. Removing Saddam and finding (or not finding) weapons of mass destruction are goals that dissapeared years ago.

The Democrats have recognized that like the European states at the beginning of the 20th century, the third world is are new set of competitors. Whether it be China and India as economic competitors or the Islamic world as competitors in ideology and in our military interventions around the world. When dealing with our competitors, or people who perceive themselves to be in competition with us, we can’t afford not to speak softly to them because the reality is, we’re going to e wrestling with them anyways, if not physically then rhetorically, for other adherents.

As a world power though, we also carry a very very big stick, and we should also not be afraid to brandish it. However, that bludgeon is all that Bush, Bolton and Co. seem to understand, and they’ll beat the whole world into agreeing with even if it means wrecking America as well.

-Marc-