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On an unrelated note, I'm guessing the Republican reevaluation and demythologization of his legacy is something that is bound to happen at some point.
I've mentioned this before, but I return to it because it remains true.
Circa 2016, when we were starting to realize that Trump was a real candidate, I attended a lunch talk with the Yale constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar. Amar is a brilliant scholar, whatever you think of his political opinions. One of his core arguments that day in 2016 was that Barack Obama was about to become what he labeled at the time a "Turning Point President." His basic thesis was that when you look at American political history, when a President wins 1) Two consecutive terms and then 2) gets his chosen successor elected after him, then that sets the paradigm (a Turning Point) that the country operates under until another Turning Point when a new paradigm is established. So if Clinton had won in 2016, Obama would have been a bona-fide turning point, and we would be operating under the Obama paradigm today. It's a Hegelian triad, Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, kind of system; a turning point president represents a new Synthesis that becomes the next Thesis.
But the upshot of this logic is that we are currently operating under the Reagan paradigm. Developed and attenuated, altered with each passing presidency, but we're still within that paradigm. When Reagan came into office, the last president to achieve this feat was FDR, and between FDR and Reagan we were operating within FDR's New Deal paradigm. The Democrats during that time tried to expand the New Deal, the Great Society and whatnot. Even Republican presidents during that period, Eisenhower and Nixon, were operating within the New Deal. Eisenhower adjusted the New Deal to make it more conservative, and Nixon signed a lot of liberal legislation but otherwise tried to reign in the New Deal and not to overturn it.
Reagan overturned the New Deal paradigm. He struck a fresh synthesis, of social conservatism that would manage change, pushing family values while mostly surrendering on race issues and the sexual revolution. Free market capitalism, free trade, race neutral corporate meritocratic success, these were the core values of the Reagan Revolution. An assertive foreign policy that brushed off post-Vietnam malaise with short and sharp foreign interventions that did the job and left town.
And we've operated under that ever since. Clinton's third way Dems were an adaptation to that paradigm, an effort to soften it and move it left. Dubya operated within that paradigm, dominated by the overseas interventions of his term. Obama said forthrightly that Republicans had been the party of ideas since the 1980s*, and sought to change that, but he still operated within a corporatist, capitalist, free trade, Washington-Consensus paradigm, with a foreign policy built around assertive American exceptionalism and short sharp interventions. Perhaps Obama thought he could establish a new paradigm, but he didn't, and I debated with Amar at the time if he even could claim one regardless of HRC's results.
If you hate the status quo, you have to hate Reagan as he actually existed. You can, of course, revise Reagan to make a myth of something you do support, but you can't love Reagan and hate the world we live in today. It's his world, it's his America.
*"I think it's fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10-15 years in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom," Obama said in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal.
That doesn’t seem right.
Short, sharp interventions have been out of vogue since some time around Iraq. Neoliberal economics survived the dotcom bubble only to become a permanent wedge after 2008. Obama hollowed out the Democrat apparatus; now Trump’s completed his own skin suit. The Tea Party was completely suborned. Identity politics got a second, third and fourth wind. American exceptionalism shares space with a multipolar model.
Whatever we’re in, it’s not the same paradigm as Reagan.
Were there any short, sharp and successful interventions besides Grenada and Panama?
Kuwait in 1991? Arguably Operations Praying Mantis and El Dorado Canyon, too.
Some might consider Kosovo / bombing Yugoslavia to have been successful, too.
The obvious problem with the Kuwaiti, Iranian and Libyan examples, as opposed to the interventions in Panama and Grenada, is that the military operation, no matter how splendid, did not result in the long-term political settlement of the crisis that prompted the invasion in the first place. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario after all where the 1991 Gulf War is not followed by another Gulf War eventually. Also, the Libyan regime stayed in power and kept supporting terrorist groups after 1986 as well (I suppose). In the case of Kosovo I think the long-term negative repercussions are too palpable. The ‘rule-based international order’ might have worked in another scenario but surely was never going to work after Kosovo.
It's very easy. If the US doesn't start the 2nd Gulf War, there isn't a 2nd Gulf War. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours in 2003 and his WMD programme was kayfabe to deter an Iranian invasion. The only terrorism he was sponsoring was Palestinian terrorism against Israel, which the West was and is comfortable tolerating in countries they don't have any other beefs against. Israel and Saudi Arabia both wanted Saddam gone, but by 2003 both saw Iran as the real threat, which means that the most likely outcome of a 2nd Gulf War (a Shia-dominated government inclined not to oppose Iran) is net negative for them.
There are good reasons for thinking that the world would have been better off without Saddam if he could have been removed by someone competent, but nobody had to remove him. There is no credible scenario where Saddam starts a 2nd Gulf War from his side.
Those are all good points, but I was referring to US domestic politics.
Fair enough - I agree with you that as a matter of US domestic politics the decision to do Gulf War 2 was over-determined.
I think the message here is "If you are determined for domestic reasons to achieve all of your war aims, people will object less if you don't negotiate a ceasefire and then come back for a second bite at the cherry"
To which the obvious counter-argument is "Yes, but this is the Middle East."
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