In proclaiming it America's mission to spread democracy all over the world, President Bush has gone far beyond the traditional policy of the Republican Party, and even beyond the ambitious goal of Woodrow Wilson, which was (you will recall) to "make the world safe for democracy."
Since Bush has already demonstrated, in Iraq, his willingness to commit American troops to support our mission in appropriate cases, it is relevant to recall that the traditional test of when American forces' lives may be risked abroad is "when a vital American interest is at stake." What Bush has done, and frankly said he has done, is define the worldwide furtherance of democracy as a "vital interest" of the United States.
As the Wilsonian antecedents of his policy suggest, its paternity is traceable to the Democratic rather than the Republican Party. Even at that, no administration of either party actually ever threw America's military weight around abroad in support of a cause that was less than a vital interest of the United States until Bill Clinton came along. He cheerfully sent our troops to places like Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, where not even the sharpest eye could discern a vital American interest--and has since rued that he didn't send them to Rwanda as well.
But George W. Bush has made Clinton look like a piker. The danger that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction made pre-emption of his efforts a genuinely vital interest of the United States. But when we attacked Iraq and found no WMDs, Bush quickly shifted to justifying the war on the basis that democratizing Iraq was the only way to make it, and thereafter the rest of the Middle East, peaceful. He even insisted that this had been one of our war aims all along, and perhaps it was; but if so, it was hardly a vital interest of the United States, justifying the loss of American lives.
Yet I do not doubt Bush's sincerity in proclaiming the universal human longing for freedom, and the high idealism of the mission to spread democracy everywhere. You can see it on television, when he is making a speech and touches on those subjects. He will pause, and smile faintly at the audience, in genuine wonder at the sheer beauty of the concepts.
Well, it is the prerogative of presidents to proclaim such visionary goals, and only time will tell whether this one takes firm hold and either becomes a fundamental tenet of American policy, or loses traction and ends up as mere rhetorical flourishes in a few forgotten speeches. Meanwhile, Republicans had better understand where Bush is leading them, and decide whether they want to go there.
Take Rwanda, for example. This is, for all practical purposes, an ungovernable stretch of east African jungle, populated by a majority of Hutus and a minority of Tutsis who, predictably, hate each other. In the late 1990s the Hutus opted to solve the problem permanently by killing all the Tutsis, and came alarmingly close to succeeding. In the genocidal slaughter, millions of Africans died.
What should America (and specifically the Clinton administration, which was in office at the time) have done about it? More than we did, clearly. We should have mobilized world pressures--economic and diplomatic--to stop the slaughter. We should have rushed medical aid to the injured. But should we have sent in the 101st Airborne Infantry, and sacrificed however many American lives it took, to force the two sides to lay down their arms? Bill Clinton now wishes loudly that he had done so.
But for the life of me, and despite the indisputable horrors that took place, I cannot see that there was a vital American interest in stopping them. What is the vital interest of the United States in whether Rwanda is ruled by the Tutsis or the Hutus? To use the scarifying phrase coined by pollsters for use in Iraq, would the possibly large loss of American lives be "worth it"?
"The world is out of joint," said Hamlet. "O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!"
I can see his point.
William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.