OPINION:
It’s interesting when a longtime Democrat and long-ago speechwriter for John and Robert Kennedy declares he will vote for Donald Trump. That’s what Adam Walinsky did in Politico Magazine the other day. It’s even more interesting when hostile Democrats rush to defend Hillary Clinton from Mr. Walinsky’s attack, as Peter Beinart did in an article in The Atlantic calling Mr. Walinsky’s piece an “absurd and dishonest essay.’’
Taken together, the two pieces offer a revealing window on today’s foreign policy debate. Mr. Walinsky condemns what he sees as the country’s rush to militarism as an instinctive response to global problems. He views the Democrats as “the Party of War: a home for arms merchants, mercenaries, academic war planners, lobbyists for every foreign intervention, [and] promoters of color revolutions.’’ He scores Mrs. Clinton for pushing America “into successive invasions, successive efforts at ’regime change,’ ’’ for her bellicose attacks on Russian President Vladimir Putin (“another Hitler’’), for her readiness to “invade Syria,’’ and for surrounding herself with “architects of war and disaster unrepentant of all past errors, ready to resume it all with fresh trillions and fresh blood.’’
Mr. Walinsky argues that this militaristic ethos is a far cry from the sensibilities of his heroes, the Kennedys, who “devoted their greatest commitments and energies to the prevention of war and the preservation of peace.’’
Further, though he sees Mr. Trump as “an imperfect candidate’’ and a likely imperfect president, he credits him with understanding the senselessness of seeking confrontation with Russia and China, “at the same time that we are trying to suppress the very jihadi movements that they also are attacking.’’ He likes Mr. Trump’s suggestion that he would end the hostility toward Mr. Putin and possibly collaborate with him in the fight against Islamist terrorism, which he considers America’s real threat.
And he praises Mr. Trump’s “political courage’’ in defying the “hysteria of the Washington war hawks who daily describe him as virtually anti-American for daring to voice ideas and opinions at variance with their one-note devotion to war.’’
All this was too much for Mr. Beinart, who notes that the Kennedys certainly harbored militaristic instincts of their own, manifest in John Kennedy’s “missile gap’’ pronouncements as a presidential candidate, his later military buildup, his sponsorship of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, his decision to send military advisers to Vietnam, and his desire to send Marines into the Dominican Republic. Mr. Beinart says Mr. Walinsky’s depiction of the Kennedy brothers as consistent and impassioned doves is “absurd.’’
Further, Mr. Beinart argues that Mrs. Clinton isn’t the war hawk described by Mr. Walinsky. After all, she helped President Obama reduce U.S. troop strength in Iraq and Afghanistan to 18,000 military personnel from 180,000 when he took office.
This dichotomy gets to the heart of the country’s foreign policy debate. While Mr. Walinsky sees a major shift in America toward a much greater interventionist and militarist zeal since the end of the Cold War, Mr. Beinart sees continuity between those days of bipolar confrontation and today. Hence, in his view, “Clinton is more like the Kennedy brothers than she’s different.’’
On this score, Mr. Walinsky is right; Mr. Beinart is wrong. The country is far more adventuresome in foreign affairs today than it was in the Kennedys’ day. The difference is in the reality of the threat. The Soviet Union threatened Western Europe with a massive ground force throughout the Cold War, and America, as the leading nation of the West, had a huge stake in protecting Western Europe. Further, the Soviets adopted a policy of undermining Western interests anywhere in the world where it could be done. This required countermeasures. Finally, America had a vital interest in preventing communist incursions into the Western Hemisphere, a vital geopolitical sphere of influence.
Even given this powerful incentive to protect vital interests, America moved cautiously most of the time, avoiding foreign policy adventurism that didn’t have a look of likely success (Vietnam being an unfortunate exception).
One small example illustrates the point. Mr. Beinart scores Mr. Walinsky for claiming that Mrs. Clinton wants to “invade’’ Syria. That’s a “lie,’’ he retorts, though he notes in passing that she would “perhaps’’ institute a no-fly zone in Syria. In fact, she clearly advocated such a move, which would be, in effect, a declaration of war against Syria and could very easily lead to war with Russia, which is the fray there on Syria’s side.
Further, such a policy would require the destruction of Syria’s sophisticated anti-aircraft system, which military experts say would require some 70,000 military personnel in the region and would constitute a massive display of U.S. military destruction in another country, no doubt exacerbating the tragic scourge on civilian life already underway.
Get the point? What American interest compels such a risky policy, almost guaranteed to pull America further into the morass of Middle East chaos that began with George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which Mrs. Clinton voted for? Can anyone imagine the Kennedys opting for such reckless actions, absent the imperatives of the Cold War’s global standoff and without any clear threat to American interests or the well-being of its citizens?
This isn’t to endorse Mr. Walinsky’s decision to support Mr. Trump. There are many reasons to resist such a vote. But Mr. Walinsky is right in saying that Mr. Trump did, in fact, stand up to Washington’s foreign policy zeitgeist at a time when that zeitgeist seemed to have the city in its grip. Mr. Walinsky is looking at the big picture, while Mr. Beinart is focused on small arguments.
• Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington journalist and publishing executive, is the author of books on American history and foreign policy.
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