West Wing wanabees: wake up and smell the coffee

West Wing wanabees: wake up and smell the coffee

Bush's second term shows that Britain's political class is living in the past

David Clark


On the surface of it, President Bush's inauguration on Thursday changes nothing. The Republicans will remain in power for another four years and the world will continue to wait hopefully for America to return to the multilateral fold. In fact, it changes everything. It is the end of illusion for those who still believe we are dealing with the America of Roosevelt and Kennedy and time for Britain to adjust its policy accordingly.

....

In many ways this long retreat from New Deal liberalism has returned America to the default setting of its founding values, characterised by hostility to government and a reverence for laissez-faire. It is important, therefore, to understand that when President Bush today talks about freedom (a term he prefers to democracy), he is talking primarily about free markets. We can see this clearly in the occupation policies America has imposed on Iraq where the economy was liberalised first and elections were added almost as an afterthought. Whatever else it involves, freedom does not include the right to choose "unfreedom" in the form of an economic policy
that departs from American norms.

....

There is nothing new in American exceptionalism. The novel element has been added by the fact that it is now allied to an extraordinary preponderance of global power with all the assumptions of superiority that flow from it.

This finds expression in the neoconservative assertion that the American model is both the product of an exceptional culture and universally exportable. The contradiction between these propositions can be resolved only in a project that is nakedly imperial and involves an element of coercion. This applies as much to social Europe as to Ba'athist Iraq.

More at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1391834,00.html

Who knew?

Would it be correct to say that current US foreign policy (which I heard described as "the world is our battleground") is just an extension of the Truman Doctrine? Or have I got that hopelessly wrong?