by Christopher Roach The great American foreign policy debate began with the two parties’ divide over Vietnam. Until the Vietnam War, Republicans and Democrats more or less held to a consensus on the value of containment. After the war, Republicans favored unilateralism, a strong military, and clear-sighted pursuit of national interests that included the use of force against foreign threats. George W. Bush exemplified this thinking, and his early, bold action in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001, found success in spite of knee-jerk criticism from the Left. On the other side, the Democrats favored multilateralism, negotiations and diplomacy, and a preference for domestic wealth redistribution over military investment. A persistent Democratic criticism of the Iraq campaign was not that it tried to introduce democracy into a broken part of the world, but rather that Bush failed to obtain the blessing of France. Democrats, particularly John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign and Barack Obama in 2008, treated diplomacy like magic, where consensus was an end in itself. Mere talking would align other nations more closely to our preferred path. The main foreign policy debate of the 2004 and 2008 elections was the Iraq war. In 2004, Bush remained firm…
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