Bush's stances threaten to recast the United States - the home of a generation that fought worldwide fascism, endured the Cold War, and boasted that it would bear any burden in the cause of global freedom - as a nation now more attuned to its own economic interests.
Threaten to? Wasn't that pretty much a core of the Shrubbery's campaign? US first, to hell with the rest of the world? (Except, of course, for those parts of it that let us ship manufacturing jobs overseas to be done in low-wage sweatshops. Those parts we like. Or at least the people who pull Bush II's strings like them.)
Unlike Prof. McManus, I don't imagine there would generally be "outrage" within the country over Shrub's positions; we've always been pretty isolationist. Mostly, we threw ourselves into internationalism the last 50 or so years because we were so surprised by WWII -- the concept that the US could actually be attacked left a lasting mark. Now that the rest of the world is more or less either loosely aligned with us or militarily incapable of any sort of conventional attack, we can withdraw behind our two-ocean shield and sail on in supreme indifference.
Until the next time, that is.
Congress isn't doing anything to temper his positions because they either don't know what to do, or because they don't want to. As it stands, the Democrats have no real reason to try to hold him in too much; the more he sends himself out on the wings, the more ammunition he gives them in upcoming elections. (The fact that his positions are detrimental both domestically and internationally being largely irrelevant to these considerations, of course.) The Republicans know this, to be sure, but are at something of a loss as to how to deal; if they try to publically rein him in, they're afraid they'll be considered disloyal (and we've all seen how well the Shrub handles those he feels are disloyal -- remember how thoroughly he drove Jeffords out?), and he's probably ignoring private attempts. (I would imagine there have been some.)
(And now we're sniping back and forth with Canada. I understand the international debate, but the sniping on defense is just silly. I mean, can we get a grip? What do we plan to do if Canada decides that they just don't want to spend that much on defense? Somehow, I don't see us saying, "Oh, Alaska, you're on your own; we're withdrawing the North American defense perimeter to the northern Continental US border." Canada could pretty much decide to zero out their defense spending -- except that NATO as a whole would take a dim view of that -- and it wouldn't much change anything we do.)
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
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12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!