The Cogs of War

Michael McMenamin from the February 2000 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

So far as Buchanan is concerned, Reagan, with his restrained and prudent use of military force, was the last good president; he criticizes George Bush for the Gulf War. In doing so, he ignores what was the unifying military theme of both the Reagan and Bush administrations and what came to be known as the Powell Doctrine, after the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: that the American military would not be used without civilian leadership articulating a clear, achievable goal supported by a consensus of the American people, and accompanied by the willingness to use overwhelming force to accomplish the objective as quickly as possible. Designed to avoid further Vietnams, the criteria contained in that doctrine are rarely achievable--as they should be. Yet they reflected then and reflect today the noninterventionist (and non-Wilsonian) tendencies of the American public with respect to the use of the military. And if followed consistently, they would go a long way toward achieving the foreign policy advocated by most free-trade noninterventionists. Needless to say, the Clinton administration has utterly abandoned the Powell Doctrine in favor of frequent military intervention to no clear purpose but only when there is minimal risk to American (though not innocent civilian) lives.

We must study history. And then study it some more. We must recognize the mistakes of the past if we are to avoid them in the future. Clinton and other neo-Wilsonian internationalists have failed to do that. While wrong about World War II, Buchanan and other revisionists are right about World War I--as was Churchill. The U.S. shouldn't have intervened. Our vital interests weren't at stake. Wilson didn't intend to serve as midwife to the births of the Soviet empire and Nazi Germany, but so it happened. The Republicans compounded the mistake in the 1920s by failing to use the enormous leverage of Allied war debts to remove the draconian reparations imposed on Weimar Germany.

The world has paid a heavy price for Wilson's errors. It took the rest of the century to correct them. Let's not make the same mistakes again.