LITTLE REAGANS
Bello, Walden
LITTLE REAGANS Liberal Democrats re-enlist in the Cold War BY WALDEN BELLO Nine long years ago, President Jimmy Carter said it was time Americans shed their "inordinate fear of communism." For a...
...But now, in the aftermath of the electoral debacle of 1984, leading Democrats are retrieving the anticommunist line and placing it back at the top of the party's ' agenda...
...Coming from Brookings, traditionally allied with the Democratic Party, the report has exerted influence among the pols...
...The rightward trend within the Democratic Party coincides with the renewed interest in the Party on the part of the "neoconservatives"—former liberals who have flirted with Ronald Reagan but now, ironically, find him too pragmatic and insufficiently anticommunist...
...It was in a speech before the ADA in June that Solarz unveiled the new foreign-policy posture of the Democratic Party...
...In an interview with The Washington Post, he enumerated the conditions under which he would back anticommunist rebels: II the rebels are indigenous to the country...
...For a fleeting moment, it seemed as if a new era was dawning, at least in the philosophy of the Democratic Party...
...Pat Buchanan, and not George Shultz, will be given license to run our policy in Southeast Asia...
...they are returning to the old days of Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson "This particular requirement establishes profound limitations on any possible intervention," commented Charles Krauthammer, a senior editor of The New Republic...
...The Democrats have lost four of the last five Presidential elections...
...This policy of opportunism was articulated by Samuel Huntington, a former member of the National Security Council and leading neoconservative who has maintained close links to the Democrats...
...To insist on prior domestic support is to reinforce the narrowest nationalist basis for intervention...
...It pitted liberals against liberals, with right-wingers content to sit on the sidelines, waiting impatiently to vote for Solarz's amendment to supply the Cambodian rebels with $5 million in military aid...
...military aid to rebel groups seeking to overthrow the government of Angola...
...Solarz echoes Reagan's strong anticommunism while denouncing his preference for such authoritarian allies as Ferdinand Marcos...
...A similar set of circumstances attended the debate on the repeal of the Clark Amendment, which prohibited aid to the rebels fighting to overthrow the government of Angola...
...The debate on Cambodia sparked the most heated exchanges of the entire foreign-aid deliberations...
...Huntington at least is explicit about the kind of Democratic Party he wants...
...While his past is marked by hardline anti-Arab views which could be expected from the Representative of a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood, Solarz exhibited a strong liberal record on African and Asian issues...
...The Republicans, after trailing the Democrats for decades in terms of voter identification, have now drawn about even...
...The response from neoconservatives was swift...
...Liberal Democrat Howard Wolpe, head of the Africa subcommittee of the House Foreign Relations Committee, was reduced to defending the Clark Amendment by arguing that Jonas Savimbi, head of the South African-backed rebel group UNITA, was actually a Marxist masquerading as a friend of the West...
...Another born-again anticommunist, Claude Pepper, the old New Deal Democrat from Florida, led the battle to repeal the Amendment, even as George Shultz and the State Department opposed giving aid on grounds that it would harm diplomatic efforts to stabilize the area...
...The progressive Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy gives Solarz a 92 per cent rating on foreign policy issues, and Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) awards him an 85 per cent overall mark...
...In the case of the Philippines, for instance, the fact that the New People's Army receives no aid from any communist country does not deter Solarz from advocating the use of American resources—political, economic, and military—to excise what he terms the "NPA cancer...
...By so doing, they hope to blot out the memory of the "wimpish" McGovern-Carter era...
...Thus Representative Les Aspin and Senator Sam Nunn laud the military buildup while they denounce Pentagon waste...
...What worries them most of all is what they see as the emerging "right-wing isolationism" of such key Reagan aides as Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger...
...Contrary to the media image of hesitant liberals caving in to White House pressure, prominent Democratic liberals eagerly took the initiative in forging this militantly anticommunist, interventionist foreign aid bill...
...There must be some reasonable assurance we will have the support of the American people and their elected representatives" before the United States commits combat forces abroad, Weinberger asserted...
...The Democrats are trying to "outWalden Bello is an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and co-director of the Philippine Human Rights Lobby...
...Reagan Reagan" in foreign policy, as liberal Republican Jim Leach of Iowa sarcastically puts it...
...American liberals have a long and honorable tradition of anticommunism," Solarz told his audience...
...Huntington urges the Party "to adopt a balanced foreign policy, combining the emphasis on negotiations and accommodation that characterized the Carter Administration with the Reagan Administration's emphasis on military strength and vigorous defense of American interests abroad...
...The foreign aid bill for fiscal year 1986 marked the first significant triumph for Democratic "realism...
...in fact, it publicly opposed it on grounds that it would "create difficulties in reaching a negotiated settlement" between the Khmer rebels and the Vietnam-backed government of Heng Samrin...
...The neoconservatives point in alarm to a controversial speech Weinberger delivered last November...
...While Solarz was leading moderate Democrats down the anticommunist road, the ranking Republican in the Asia-Pacific subcommittee, Jim Leach, spearheaded the losing effort to bar renewed U.S...
...Recalling that the splitting away of radical Henry Wallace supporters in 1948 brought masses of Catholic voters back to the Party, he recommends that "a similar splitting off into a third party of the more radical Jesse Jackson supporters among blacks and the more extreme liberal groups among whites could provide the impetus for the return of many of those moderate Democrats who have twice voted for Reagan...
...He has also been the bete noire of the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Philippines, criticizing the human-rights violations and pervasive corruption of the Marcos clique...
...Not only did the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives vote to give the Nicaraguan contras $27 million in "humanitarian" assistance, it also: H exempted El Salvador and Honduras from an eleven-year ban on police aid to foreign countries...
...However, he claims the situation in Cambodia meets his conditions, and he has made aid to the Cambodian rebels the cutting edge of his effort to refashion pem-ocratic policy along interventionist lines...
...The American political system, during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, has been transformed to an extent unknown since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt," said a recent Brookings Institution study, "The New Direction in American Politics...
...Stephen Solarz, chairman of the Asia-Pacific subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is a case in point...
...interests abroad, an expanded role for the market, diminished regulation by the state, and a revitalized conservative morality...
...The Reagan Administration did not ask for the military aid...
...Extreme liberals" should be ousted from the Party, Huntington says, and replaced by a new "coa'lition of white Southerners and moderate-income workers from the New Deal stratum, the young professionals, independents, and others in the emerging newly affluent stratum, and whatever elements can be recruited from the New Politics stratum...
...H they are resisting a foreign occupier rather than an established, recognized government...
...Solarz also supports military assistance for anticommunist rebel forces opposing some regimes that are hostile to the United States...
...11 they enjoy broad regional and international support that the government lacks, and H U.S...
...To outflank the Reagan Administration, Democratic hawks are at once embracing and criticizing the President's record...
...Some of the so-called moderate Democrats taking a leadership role in the foreign policy debate have good liberal credentials...
...Steve is no fan of the NPA and would favor increased military aid [to the Philippine military] if we could be sure it would go toward fighting the NPA and not to line the pockets of Marcos's generals," one of his key aides told a delegation of Philippine human-rights lobbyists...
...In 1980, for instance, he became the first high-level Government figure to visit North Korea since the Korean War...
...The United States must be prepared to crush leftist insurgencies that threaten America's allies, Solarz argues...
...military support should "advance a significant American objective as well as enhance the prospects for a negotiated settlement...
...What the Solarz amendment in the final measure does," said Leach, "is to give license to the forces in American society that want to ideologize our foreign policy...
...In the current campaign of anticommunism sweeping Congress, it is the Democrats—not the Republicans—who are leading the troops...
...military intervention in the Indochina peninsula...
...If the Republicans are dominant now, the study suggests, it is because they have skillfully managed to tap the sentiments to which most Americans purportedly subscribe: renewed patriotism, belief in a strong defense, anticommunism, vigorous pursuit of U.S...
...He called for an end to "reticence" in expressing "in a forthright fashion our view of the inherent immorality of the Soviet system...
...Solarz's casuistic reasoning would disqualify support for the Nicaraguan con-tras...
...Alarmed by what they perceive as creeping isolationism in the Republican Administration, many neoconservatives again see the Democratic Party as a vehicle for the anticommunist liberal inter-ventionism that was the Party's trademark from Harry Truman's Administration through Lyndon Johnson's...
...The Democratic "realists" may not be as blunt, but the effect of their new anti-communist crusade may be the same one Huntington desires: the departure, in disgust, of liberals, leftists, and minorities from what used to be the Democratic Party...
...On the more controversial issues, the votes and influence of these self-styled "moderate Democrats" provided the margin of victory...
...11 voted $15 million in "humanitarian aid" for Afghan rebels who now receive millions of dollars from the CIA, and 11 provided $5 million in military or economic assistance for noncommunist rebel organizations fighting the Vietnam-supported government in Cambodia...
...H repealed the Clark Amendment banning U.S...
...In the current campaign of anticommunism sweeping Congress, it is the Democrats—not the Republicans—who are leading the troops...
...by 1988, they will have been out of power for sixteen of the last twenty years...
...He is also co-author of the forthcoming "An American Lake: Nuclear Peril in the Pacific" (Penguin, 1986...
...To buck these trends, the "realists" claim, would be to relegate the Democratic Party to permanent minority status in the White House and possibly in the Senate...
...The Democratic "realists," as they like to call themselves, view the adoption of staunch anticommunism as a necessary condition for winning back the legions of disaffected Democrats and independent voters who jumped on the Reagan bandwagon...
...It argues that a fundamental political "realignment" has taken place, prompted by changing beliefs and values among key sectors of the electorate that once constituted the vast Democratic base...
Vol. 50 • January 1986 • No. 1
