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Roundup: Historians' Take

Walter Russell Mead: The Democrats Can Make a Good Claim to Being Strong on Defense

Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writing in the WSJ about the Democratic Party's opportunity to portray itself as strong on national defense if the voters reject Dean's anti-war position (Jan. 21, 2004):

Historically, the Democrats have been America's war party. Bob Dole got into trouble during his 1976 vice presidential campaign when he denounced World War I and World War II, along with Vietnam and Korea, as "Democrat Wars," but most of America's foreign wars began with Democrats in the White House: add the Mexican War, the Cold War and the War of 1812 to the Democrats' count. Republicans, even including the Federalist and Whig predecessors to the GOP, could only claim the Spanish American War and the Gulf War before the War on Terror and George W. Bush.

"Vote for a Republican," people used to say, "and you get a Depression. Vote for a Democrat, and you get a war."

Most of the Democrats' wars were, to use what is becoming a popular phrase today, "wars of choice." The War of 1812 was, strictly speaking, unnecessary; unbeknownst to Congress, Britain had already revoked the Orders in Council before war was declared. In the Mexican War, James Knox Polk sent U.S. forces into disputed territory well before exhausting all diplomatic avenues. More recently, the Vietnamese and Korean conflicts were, if not quite wars of choice, wars whose primary purpose was not to safeguard either the territory or the citizens of the U.S., but its broad strategic interests. U.S. interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo were also wars of choice; the United States faced no direct military threat as a result of Serbian madness and misrule. The Cold War was preventative; the Soviet Union did not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. in 1947. Of all the wars of all the Democrats, only the two world wars were clearly wars of necessity -- and some historians argue that a more even handed policy by President Wilson could have kept the U.S. out of World War I as well.

In the 19th century, idealistic and pacifist war critics were found mostly among Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans. Republican Senators like George Norris and William Borah continued the tradition -- as did the Republican Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin who voted against both World War I and World War II. As progressives gradually moved into the Democratic Party through the New Deal period, the Democratic Party became the natural host for America's partisans of protest. Franklin Roosevelt's former Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace led his Progressive Party out of the Democrats to punish Harry Truman for initiating the Cold War. During the Vietnam War, Democratic senators like William Fulbright and Eugene McCarthy led the opposition.

Had a Democrat been president on Sept. 11, 2001, a combination of political calculation and personal conviction would have almost certainly pushed the administration toward a vigorous prosecution of the war -- just as both the Truman and Carter administrations were caught up in confrontations with the Soviet Union. Many of the Democrats who served the Clinton administration were instinctive hawks. Madeleine Albright is one of the most passionate anti-totalitarians in American life and has always called herself a child of Munich rather than a child of Vietnam. Richard Holbrooke has the talent and the toughness to play the role of a latter day Dean Acheson.

In any case, a strong Democratic president in the White House, backed by the kinds of public majorities that have backed the Bush administration's prosecution of the war, would have been able to tame and control the party's antiwar wing and -- whatever the protest on the Kucinich-Nader fringe -- put the Democrats solidly in the center of public opinion on the war. This is the strategy towards which both President and Senator Clinton seem to be heaving the party, but until the Iowa voters spoke Monday night, it was not clear whether this push would succeed. With Iowa voters signaling that opposition to the war is not their main priority, the moderates seem firmly in the saddle.