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Closing the Neocon Circle
George W. Bush has unveiled a new vision for U.S. foreign policy.
His inspiration: Israel’s Natan Sharansky
By Michael Hirsh
10/25/05 "Newsweek" -- -- Natan Sharansky can bestow no higher
praise than to call George W. Bush an honorary “dissident.” And the
Israeli cabinet minister says he is elated that the U.S. president,
in his second inaugural speech last week, appeared to fully embrace
Sharansky’s vision of foreign policy. “It’s clear to me that he read
my book,” Sharansky, a squat cannonball of a man with a heavy
Russian accent, told NEWSWEEK. “I only wish that my mentor, Andrei
Sakharov, were alive to see this,” Sharansky added, referring to the
Soviet nuclear scientist who risked his life and career to help open
up the Soviet Union.
Bush, in his Jan. 20 address, did prove himself a dissident in one
sense. When the president declared that “the survival of liberty in
our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other
lands,” he was delivering a dissent from traditional U.S. foreign
policy, one that could have been lifted whole from the pages of
Sharansky’s new book, “The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom
to Overcome Tyranny and Terror.” (Public Affairs; New York). Bush,
in fact, has been pressing the book on aides and friends in recent
weeks and urging them to read it. And it is clear that Bush’s
speech—as well as Sharansky’s influence—could have huge consequences
for America in the coming years.
In Bush’s speech, drafted by chief White House speechwriter Michael
Gerson with input from an old Sharansky ally dating to the Reagan
years, National Security Council official Elliott Abrams, Bush in
effect declared an end to a three-decade-old debate in
foreign-policy circles. Fittingly, it is a debate that dates back to
the fights over détente versus confrontation with the Soviet
Union—and, not coincidentally, to Sharansky’s earlier incarnation as
a jailed Soviet dissident. In a single, eloquent line, Bush sought
to declare a truce to the old ideological struggle between U.S.
government “realists”—those who believe protecting vital national
interests has little to do with spreading democracy and freedom—and
the so-called neoconservatives, who crusaded for these values.
“America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one,” he
said.
In practice, of course, this battle of ideas will go on as U.S.
officials wrangle over how to deal with recalcitrant regimes like
Iran and North Korea. Administration officials were quick to play
down the practical impact of Bush’s rhetoric, noting that the
president declared the policy of spreading freedom to be “the
concentrated work of generations.” But it is hard to avoid the
conclusion that U.S. policy toward Iran and North Korea has now been
resolved in favor of regime change--just as Bush once signed onto
Sharansky’s goal of “regime change” in the Palestinian Authority in
June 2002 when, in another speech heavily influenced by the Israeli,
he said he would negotiate not with the autocratic Yasir Arafat but
only with a newly elected Palestinian leadership.
At the very least, Bush’s rhetoric strengthens the hand of
hardliners from the Pentagon and the office of Vice President Dick
Cheney who see no way around the use of force or covert activity
against such tyrannical regimes. As Sharansky’s old friend, onetime
Pentagon advisor Richard Perle, told NEWSWEEK on Jan. 24, the
current policy toward Iran has been one of “paralysis.” And, he
says, the president’s speech “caused elation among dissidents in
Iran. You read those words and the reaction is likely to be similar
to Sharansky’s reaction when [as a dissident] he read Ronald
Reagan’s words calling the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire.’”
Thanks to Bush’s speech, there may now be less willingness to cut a
deal with the recalcitrant Iranian mullahs or the autocratic Kim
Jong Il. A senior U.S. official denies this. He says the Bush team
continues to hope for “behavioral change” like they got from Libya’s
Mohammar Khaddafi--who’s off the regime change list since giving up
his WMD. But in reality they don’t expect much from Tehran or
Pyongyang. The danger is that yet more drift and paralysis in U.S.
policy will ensue as Iran and North Korea get closer to becoming
nuclear powers. Just as the hardline Sharansky has been criticized
from his left for setting an impossibly high threshold for
negotiating with the Palestinians—he opposes Ariel Sharon’s
disengagement plan for Gaza—Bush could turn the totem of “democracy”
into a convenient excuse for persisting in his stony refusal to talk
directly to Iran and North Korea. There is also a danger of
unintended consequences. Will the soaring rhetoric of freedom help
bring regime collapse—an outcome few would mourn—or will it help to
harden the nuclear ambitions of two regimes that Bush has declared
to be moribund (the mullahs and Kim) but which have proved to have
greater staying power than many thought?
Why is Sharansky’s influence so deep? In part because he didn’t pop
out of nowhere. Sharansky has been speaking out in neocon forums for
years, stiffening the spines of his former allies from the Reagan
era. Chief among them is Perle who, in an interview, identified
Sharansky as one of his two “heroes,” together with his old mentor,
Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Their relationship is decades old. Back
in the 1970s, when the Israeli was still a Russian named Anatoly
Sharansky, Perle was the notorious attack dog for Jackson, fighting
for Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union by pushing through the
famous 1974 Jackson-Vanik bill, the opening shot fired against Cold
War détente.
That was the first big battle over human rights in American foreign
policy. Until then, the Cold War had been about realpolitik and
detente, mainly “managing” the Soviet Union. Both men had been
irrevocably changed by the experience of taking on what their mutual
hero, Ronald Reagan, called the “evil empire.” Now each is in the
midst of a new incarnation, fighting against Arab terror, yet they
are animated by the same ideas as in the old days. Sharansky’s
personal suffering under tyranny—and triumph over it—has made him a
zealous campaigner for democracy in the Arab world, to the right
even of his fellow Likudnik hawks in Israel. Perle and a small group
of fellow neoconservatives have made it their mission to drag along
Washington’s remaining “realists.”
In his book, Sharansky makes a powerful case that there is a common
thread tying together the anti-Western hostility of old regimes like
the Soviet Union and that of new enemies like the Islamist
terrorists and their sponsors, including the Iranian mullah state
and the Palestinian Authority under the late Arafat. “While the
mechanics of democracy make democracies inherently peaceful, the
mechanics of tyrannies make nondemocracies inherently belligerent,”
he writes. Whether they are communist or Islamist, he argues, they
must achieve legitimacy by creating external enemies, he argues.
That’s a recipe for eternal conflict, he argues--as the autocratic
Arafat proved by consistently sidestepping a peace deal.
So Sharansky’s influence represents a closing of the circle for the
neocons who began battling for their ideas in the late ’70s and
early ’80s. Sharansky himself says it is all a continuum, including
the cast of characters, among them Abrams, Perle, Defense Department
senior officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and Cheney’s chief
of staff, Scooter Libby. “If you check their background, most of
them were connected either to Senator Jackson or to the Reagan
administration or to both,” says Sharansky. “And that’s why, by the
way, many of them are my friends from those years. And in the last
15 years, we kept talking to one another.”
It is possible that America’s new embrace of Sharanskyism will also
prove to be a recipe for eternal conflict. America will now be
accused of hypocrisy every time it fails to live up to Bush’s
promise “to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and
institutions in every nation and culture.” In China, Russia and
Taiwan, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Washington has shrunk
from pursuing that policy too forthrightly, mainly because it needs
friends. And Bush is unlikely to depart dramatically from this
cautious course. That means, in turn, that his new statement of
American policy is certain to come back to haunt him, just as
Woodrow Wilson’s promise of self-determination haunted American
foreign policy-makers after World War I. Especially when Natan
Sharansky is out there, reminding him of his promise.
With Dan Ephron in Jerusalem
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
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