by hilzoy
While thinking about Sebastian’s thread, it occurred to me that my thinking about foreign policy crystallized around some very specific episodes, and that it would be interesting to know what everyone else’s were. (It might also help us know where everyone else is coming from. On reflection, I found I could barely imagine what it would be like to have the reference points of someone, say, 15 years younger than me.) Here are mine. (Just foreign policy; adding domestic policy would take too long.)
When I was growing up, both the war in Vietnam and the Cold War were the backdrop to everything. My parents were, basically, liberal internationalists. They had met in Paris, in 1954 and therefore they had followed the French Indochina war, and therefore they knew a fair amount about Vietnam way before the US got seriously involved, and thought our getting involved was a bad idea from the outset. And this meant that they did not go through any sort of wrenching change of heart in 1965 or ’66, and thus were at no risk of lurching from too far on one side to too far on the other. They just thought that we did not have significant national interests there, and that there was no real case for going to war to support one bad regime against another. I tended to agree. (And I read a lot about it later, not wanting to be stuck with a kid’s understanding of it, and have never seen any reason to change my mind.)
The major lesson I took from the Vietnam war, as a kid, was this: it seemed to me that we had gotten into it without having fully thought it through. What if advisors weren’t enough? Were we prepared to send troops? What if the troops we sent weren’t enough? Etc. By the time I started being really aware of the war, around ’67 or ’68, it seemed to me to be a kind of situation I (as a kid) completely recognized from my own experience: the kind where you say something dumb without thinking, and then are made to follow up on it in some way, and then can’t figure out how to backtrack, and end up having completely painted yourself into a corner with no way out. The obvious way to deal with these situations, thought 8 year old me, was not to get into them in the first place, and if you do, just apologize immediately and extricate yourself. (I did not, then or now, consistently act on this knowledge, more’s the pity.) Likewise here: I thought you should never get into a war without being very clear about how you can get out again without damage to your credibility. Never, never, never. And never for some vague reasons like: this is communism, we should oppose communism, therefore we should intervene. Never, ever get into a war without knowing exactly what you’re doing.
About the Cold War: it was just omnipresent, though in its later, 60s form. It’s relevant, though, that my mother is Swedish (she moved to the US after marrying my Dad), and so half my relatives were (a) not from the US (which meant that I always knew what it was like to see the US from the outside), and (b) living disproof of the idea that all leftists were communists. (It’s hard to disbelieve in the existence of people who are, in fact, your grandparents: proud and committed socialists (and democrats) who took it to be obvious that the US was a fundamentally admirable country and the USSR was not.)
It was also part of the backdrop of my childhood that the US government sometimes did the right thing and sometimes did not. The major political events of my parents and their friends were World War II and McCarthyism, which made either reflexive dislike of or reflexive cheering for the US and all its works just impossible. Our basic assumption, when I was growing up, was that the US was founded on admirable principles to which it sometimes lived up and sometimes did not, and that it was our job as citizens to help it to do the right thing more often.
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