Learnin'

I'm reading what I like to call, in one breath, "David Halberstam's history of American diplomacy in the 90's Bush, Clinton, And The Generals." For someone who grew up in Cambridge in the 80's (where it was fairly common knowledge that Reagan was hooorrible) but was never truly engaged in political events until fairly recently, it's important for me to catch up things with a balanced viewing of American power. This book seems to be that. Next, I'll take a deep breath and find a history of the 80's and the Gip.

One thing Halberstam considers, and people are considering now, is the tension between foreign-poicy realists and idealists. Reagan was the great hero, of course, for certain idealists who espoused capitalism and Christianity and American Exceptionalism. James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and Lawrence Eagleburger are central figures in these pages of history. Now, Baker and Scowcroft are back in the news as part of Dubya's Iraq Rescue Squad™. They are "realists."

Maureen Dowd, in the Times today, wrote about this, too:

"The Idealists who loved Ronald Reagan’s evocation of Thomas Paine — 'We have it in our power to begin the world over again' — are right that Americans yearn for a moral foreign policy. It was sickening in 1989 to see Brent Scowcroft — another realist back in fashion — offering a cozy supper toast to Chinese leaders only six months after Tiananmen Square, and getting [Bush 41] to lecture Ukrainians not to break the iron grip of Moscow...

"Bush junior cast himself as the Reagan heir. But as President Reagan showed in Lebanon, when he pulled out troops after 241 servicemen were blown up, and in Reykjavik negotiating with Mikhail Gorbachev on nuclear arms, he was incredibly flexible — an effective contrast with his inflexible rhetoric. He pursued openings and even radical diplomacy. If the Gipper was wood, the Decider is stone.

"Voters rejected W.’s black-and-white, good-and-evil, incompetent foreign policy last week. The president got the message that some shades of gray were desirable and brought in the family fixer with the bright green ties, who is perfectly positioned to come up with a solution that will fly in Washington and flop in Baghdad.

"As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr taught, morality without realism is naïvité or worse, and realism without morality is cynicism or worse. Morality should open your eyes, not close them."