A world without tyranny? Why not?

Philip Roth’s latest novel, The Plot Against America, presents an imagined history in which Charles Lindbergh -- aviation hero, isolationist, and anti-Semite -- defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the presidency in 1940, and promptly signs a non-aggression pact with Hitler’s Germany. It is not hard to picture the knowing smirks on the faces of the paranoid left as they read it, convinced it is an allegory for the “fascist” regime that now governs America. After all, wasn’t Lindbergh a Republican, too? Certainly the novel’s political heroes are mostly Democrats, or at least liberals. But it cannot escape notice that the meat of the novel, what makes FDR admirable and Lindbergh despicable, is the former’s willingness to confront fascism, if necessary to go to war against it, versus the latter’s desire to accommodate it. Whereas today it is the height of enlightened opinion to denounce George W. Bush as a warmonger, while “progressive” magazines publish lists of the Jews who are said to be exerting undue influence over American foreign policy. It is hard to say which drives which: the personal hatred many people feel for Mr. Bush, or the desire to opt out of the long conflict into which American has been plunged -- not by Mr. Bush’s actions, but by the declaration of war that was Sept. 11. Had anyone else given the speech Mr. Bush gave at his second inauguration, or at least had a Democrat, it is possible it would have been greeted with the same rapture that followed John F. Kennedy’s inaugural, to which it bears some surface resemblance. But there’s the rub. No Democrat, or no Democrat capable of winning his party’s nomination, would have given that speech today. As for Mr. Bush, reviews of the speech tended to divide into one of several camps. For some, including some Republicans, Mr. Bush’s commitment of American foreign policy to the spread of democracy around the world was unsettlingly naïve, an obviously unattainable goal. For others, notably in foreign capitals, it was disturbing only in its arrogance, the gunslinging cowboy once again playing sherriff to the whole world. Still other sophisticates insisted the speech was so ambitious he couldn’t possibly mean it, but was merely spouting high-sounding rhetoric designed to put a sunnier face on his administration. So: can’t be done, shouldn’t be done, won’t be done. The one possibility no one seemed willing to entertain is that Mr. Bush means what he says, but without the foolish consistency that some of his critics were eager to impress upon his words. The speech was plainly intended as a statement of broad purpose and strategic vision. While it will be used as the yardstick, and rightly so, by which to judge the conduct of American foreign policy, it was neither intended to be achieved overnight, nor always by force of arms, nor with uniform application to every country, regardless of circumstances. Mr. Bush was explicit on each of these points. But the overarching objective: a world without tyranny? Why not? It was once unimaginable that the world could be free of communism, or slavery, or piracy on the high seas, yet by and large each has been eradicated, outside of a few isolated pockets. Nor can Mr. Bush fairly be accused of being all talk and no action; indeed, his first term was largely guided by the same policy, if not with the same elaboration. The Globe and Mail wrote a curious editorial after the speech sniffing that Mr. Bush had little to show for his efforts to date: this, after free and fair elections had been held, for the first time ever, in Afghanistan and Palestine, and mere days before Iraq is scheduled to join them. To be sure, the record has not always been consistent. Just as the Allies made parley with the Soviet Union to defeat the Nazis, so the Cold War sometimes necessitated joining forces with some pretty rough customers. Mr. Bush has made his own compromises. Not all of these alliances were well-advised, strategically or morally. But foreign policy is often a kind of triage: you make the least bad choice you can, given in the circumstances you find yourselves in. Times change, however, as Mr. Bush has grasped. The threat posed by macro-terrorism, of the al Qaeda variety, cannot be addressed by propping up corrupt dictatorships, whatever the moral demerits of such a course. You can be as solicitous of the Saudis as you like, and still 15 of the 19 who terrorized America came from that kingdom. Hence Mr. Bush’s new synthesis of the “realist” and “moralist” traditions in American foreign policy, in which doing the right thing is also, from a security perspective, the smart thing. Many have commented on how this approach to foreign policy contrasts with that of an earlier generation of conservatives, including Mr. Bush’s father. But surely the more profound break is with the Democrats. The liberal foreign policy tradition, no less than the realists’, has been marked by a readiness to deal with dictatorships, from the Soviet Union to Yassir Arafat to Iraq and Iran, on the theory that there were no differences between states that could not be bridged by negotiation. It is Mr. Bush’s insight that such endeavours depend crucially on the nature of the states involved. Dictatorships are simply unreliable as negotiating partners: after all, if they do not respect the law at home, why should we expect them to behave any differently abroad?