Powell and Obama, Not as Different as All That
From Jeff Goldstein’s piece on Colin Powell and Barack Obama that is worth your consideration:
Colin Powell is — and always has been — a “realist,” and as such was of course at one time despised by the left precisely for his Nixonian realism. Interestingly, though, he was, at a later point, despised by the left for just the opposite: being a lackey of the “neocons,” an Uncle Tom, as Harry Belafonte called him, for his having ostensibly backed the Bush plan to take a new tack to cripple asymmetrical terrorism by spreading the seeds of Enlightenment values and freedom to countries long under the thumb of dictators and tyrants.
From what I can see, Powell has remained consistent as a GHW Bush / Nixon-era Kissinger / Scowcroft realist. Progressives, disguised as liberals, have moved into that camp, from a foreign policy perspective, marking them as closer to Nixon than to JFK.
The neocons, on the other hand — or many of those who today are labeled “right wingers” — would have found themselves defined out of liberalism, even though they continue to adhere to its principles in a way that progressives do not and (harkening back to the New Left’s attacks on the bourgeois liberals) never have.
Ronald Reagan famously noted that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, but rather the Democratic Party left him.
Today, it seems, progressives would be more at ease calling themselves Nixonian Republicans than Reagan Democrats, just as they’ve turned “neocon” into a dirty word while salvaging the moribund dregs of paleoconservatism, repackaging them, and presenting them in a shiny new package of progressivism, America Firstism, and compassionate nanny-statism.
Colin Powell, insofar as he would back a “realpolitik” foreign policy, would naturally fall in line with someone like Obama, at least on his philosophy for dealing with international affairs.
My distaste for Colin Powell, which I have never hidden here, stems from his embrace of realpolitik, which I believe is the most egregious policy of oppression and death the United States has ever devised. It is the proximate cause of the hatred for America throughout the Middle East. It is, without question in my mind, the greatest failing of the Republican Party and one for which it is rightly condemned.
What I do not understand, for the life of me, is how it still remains as a viable policy proposal. It lives very well among the foreign policy gurus in Barack Obama’s campaign and those such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who should have been cashiered out of high public office for his manifold failures while in the Carter administration.
Powell’s adherence to realpolitik makes him a natural ally to Barack Obama who has shown that he is more than willing to prop up tyrants like Mad Mahmoud and Vladimir Putin for the sake of so-called stability. What puzles me is how the Obama-loving left can accept his endorsement as a grand thing given Powell’s neck-deep involvement in our current engagement in Iraq.
Other Posts of Interest:
- Condoleeza Rice Sounds Like A Carter-Era Throwback
- John Bolton on Naivete and History
- Obama Has 300 Foreign Policy Advisers? (UPDATE: Photoshop Contest!)
Category: No More Tyrants, Our Foreign Policy, The Obamessiah
