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The Bush Administration's Radical Bellicosity
By Joyce Appleby

Ms. Appleby, professor emerita of history at UCLA, is a former president of
the American Historical Association and a writer for the History News
Service.

The entanglement of the United States in Middle East politics gets tighter
and tighter with every turn of events. Although the destruction of the World
Trade Center burst upon us as a totally unsuspected development, the
September attack in fact came after 50 years of American involvement in the
affairs of Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iraq, not to mention
Israel.

As President Bush poises our armed forces to take action against Iraq should
that nation fail to comply with UN arms inspectors, one arresting question
remains unanswered: should the United States be aggressively policing the
world like this or do the needs at home deserve our leaders' full attention?
The query itself has an interesting history.

It is an ironic twist from the past that the first congressional discussion
of Muslim culture turned on the same foreign policy issue that is embroiling
the country right now. In a debate about helping the Greeks in their revolt
against the Ottoman Turks in 1821, members of Congress asked if the United
States should pursue its values by promoting them abroad or by cultivating
them at home -- what we might shorthand to "over there-ism" and "over
here-ism."

The Greek effort to throw off the yoke of the Ottoman Empire at first seemed
doomed to failure. But the longer the Greeks held out, the more their
independence movement took on the aura of humanity's indomitable fight for
freedom. By 1824 American citizens had become involved. The American
"Hellenes" began to hold public meetings, send clothes and medicine to the
Greek rebels and petition their representatives to pledge American support
for the heroic struggle of the Greeks.

But caution carried the day in 1824; the House defeated the resolution
promising moral support. Those who resisted the temptation to aid the Greeks
persuaded their colleagues that the greatest contribution Americans could
make to democratic self-government was by cultivating democracy at home.

Virginia's John Randolph summed up the issue in words that are relevant
today when he insisted that the United States could best help mankind "not
by its crusade to establish the empire of our principles, not by
establishing a corps of diplomatic apostles of liberty, but by the moral
influence of its example." The country followed this advice through the
nineteenth century.

We could act on this wisdom today, but it would require shaking free of the
precedents established in the past hundred years when the United States
became the powerful Western hub for European interests. It became that hub
only after a century of isolation from the rest of the world, isolation
ended by the two World Wars. By 1945, the United States was the largest and
most prosperous country in the Free World. Great Britain, France, Italy and
Germany had exhausted themselves in the two devastating wars.

The ensuing Cold War intensified our sense of acting on a world stage when
we became the principal champion of freedom in a global struggle with the
Soviet Union and its Communist allies. Both the Soviet Union and America's
European allies had already established outposts around the world, so few
countries in the Third World escaped the conflicts between the First and
Second Worlds after the hot war merged into cold.

Now, thirteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which symbolically
brought an end to the Cold War, we have a chance to consider the wisdom of
cultivating our principles at home instead of "over there." Americans have
rightly felt vulnerable since September 2001, but the intensified fear of
terrorism could just as easily serve conservative foreign policy goals as
the Bush administration's radical bellicosity. Pulling back from further
warfare would not only soothe both our allies and opponents, it would also
focus Americans' attention on the concrete measures they could take to make
us safer at home.

The sober message of conservatives in 1824 was that the country's "first and
most important duty" was to maintain peace. It's again within the realm of
possibilities that we adopt that as America's first principle. With the
attention and revenue spared through a disentanglement from the Middle East,
the United States could become that exemplar of freedom, justice, restraint
and tolerance that the world's peoples yearn to see.




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This piece was distributed for non-exclusive use by the History News
Service, an informal syndicate of professional historians who seek to
improve the public's understanding of current events by setting these events
in their historical contexts. The article may be republished as long as both
the author and the History News Service are clearly credited.