"Come home, America” said US presidential candidate George McGovern during the Vietnam War, whilst going down to a bad defeat against Richard Nixon. But these are the words Sen. Barack Obama should be uttering today, if he wants to live up to his credo. The Republicans — and some Democrats — will try to tear him apart for this, tarring him with the brush of isolationism. But it is not isolationism. If handled with perception and commitment for the long haul it is engagement with the world and its problems. It is merely a different way of going about the cause of greater political order and more individual freedom.
It can be charactarized as a policy of substituting the carrot for the stick but this is to simplify it. The carrot should be offered but with it a reciprocal sense of self-discipline and a commitment by the opponent to measure progress against the Charter of the United Nations and the resolutions of the Security Council, for when the Security Council agrees it represents a formidable concensus of world opinion.
This kind of engagement has a long American tradition going back to 1916, and even further back, with President Wilson’s aim to create a League of Nations. He failed not because of his idealism, or his commitment to solving disputes without major war, but because his tactics with regard to Senate ratification of the treaty were unnecessarily stubborn. Wilson also decried the European balance of power system (a favorite geopolitical cause of Henry Kissinger): “Now, revive that after the (World) War I is over and, sooner or later, you will have just such another war.”
We can go even further back, although not many commentators do, to the time of Theodore Roosevelt. He successfully mediated the Russo-Japanese war, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize. It was he in fact, not Wilson, who was the first president to propose a league of nations. He called it the “World League for the Peace of Rightousness”, a title which would have him laughed out of court in today’s cynical world.
“Coming Home to America” means getting out of Iraq, probably Afghanistan too, and not getting into Iran. But it also means stressing to antagonists the good that America can do with private investment, aid and the development of a common security whereby both sides’ right to individual political postures is recognized as long as they are nonthreatening to others. In return for peace, America can offer recognition and security.
It also means being more serious about the role of the United Nations and trying to recreate the benign veto-free period of former President George Bush and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. It means readopting a policy, never followed up on, of President Bill Clinton to offer the UN peacekeeping troops that could operate under the command of UN generals.
If this is isolationism the problem is not with the articulator of such a purpose but those who cling to the status quo, usually older male leaders, stirring up a false patriotism at the cost of young lives.
This time round, Obama has a fair chance of winning the election which McGovern never did. The temptation will be to compromise to assure that victory. But he mustn’t even though his opponents will throw at him all sorts of problems that they believe might at some point require the use of America’s mighty force — so mighty in fact that American military spending dwarfs all the rest of the countries of the world added together. They will throw at him Taiwan, China, North Korea, a resurgent Russia, and the oil-producing nations of Nigeria and the ex-Asian Soviet republics, not to mention Israel and Palestine. It seems a long time since Colin Powell, then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, could say “I’m running out of enemies”.
In Harvard’s quarterly, International Security, Professor Harvey Sapolsky published an article on the theme “Come Home, America: the Strategy of Restraint in the Face of Temptation”. It was published in 1997 but it needs to be read again. Much damage to the world could have been avoided if its prescient observations and prescriptions had been followed.”The US” he writes,”can spend much less than it does today and still be much more secure than it was during the Cold War. It is not at all clear what, if anything, Americans are getting for their extra defense dollars.”
