Foreign intrigue: what explains the presidential urge to go global?

AuthorCavanaugh, Tim
PositionRant - Column

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES make many promises they don't intend to keep. The most frequent one is that they will resist the siren song of foreign adventure and focus on pocketbook issues. The image of a president vainly trying to avoid foreign policy thickets but eventually devoting more attention to international matters than to domestic well-being is so familiar that the motto of American diplomacy may be less Teddy Roosevelt's "Speak softly and carry a big stick" than Michael Corleone's "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!"

Every president in recent memory has come into office vowing to commit foreign policy only when absolutely necessary; every one has ended up making statecraft the centerpiece of his administration. Elected on that most domestic of rhetorical questions--"Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"--Ronald Reagan burnished his legend by cold-cocking communism and liberating Grenada's oppressed masses. George H.W. Bush came into office as the Education President but spent his tenure battling former clients Saddam Hussein and Manuel "Pineapple Face" Noriega. Capitalizing on Bush's homeland neglect, Bill Clinton gave us the phrase "It's the economy, stupid," then absurdly seemed to believe he would be remembered for peace breakthroughs in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and the Balkans.

George W. Bush is a kind of summation of this trend. His campaign promised a "humble" foreign policy, and a large minority of voters deemed him fit for office despite -- more likely because of -- his indifference to foreign affairs, famously signaled by an inability names several heads of state. Yet apart from an early tax cut he has done little beside foreign policy. He at least has a compelling reason for his foreign policy focus--though his plans, as of this writing, to prosecute a war on radical Islam by overthrowing the most secular government in the Middle East are questionable at the very least.

The temptation to lose oneself in diplomacy can't be explained by electoral calculations. Foreign policy has been conspicuously absent from voters' decision making for many years. Victory in the Persian Gulf didn't win Bush I a second term, nor did failure in Vietnam cost...

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