Democrats today are far from FDR’s “good neighbor” foreign policy

Jack O’Rourke
| Guest columnist

The Democratic Party was once the party of the working class and peace. The two are closely linked because wars largely bleed the working class.

But today’s Democrats are a far cry from the days of Franklin Roosevelt’s “good neighbor” foreign policy. The pinnacle of civilized leadership came with Roosevelt’s defiant stance against Nazi barbarity. “Nothing can persuade the peoples of the earth that any governmental power has the right or need to inflict the consequences of war on itself or any other people except for the obvious cause of home defense. »

General Dwight Eisenhower’s hopeful message for D-Day proclaimed: “People of Western Europe: A landing was made this morning on the coast of France by troops of the Allied Expeditionary Force. This landing is part of a concerted United Nations plan for the liberation of Europe in collaboration with our great Russian allies.

One of Roosevelt’s top priorities in the postwar world was to welcome “our great Russian allies” into a peaceful new world order. Roosevelt’s death and the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought a dramatic end to this pursuit.

Republican President Ronald Reagan courageously followed Roosevelt’s example by ending the Cold War with his Russian communist counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, “to make the world safer.” Democratic President Bill Clinton foolishly expanded NATO, an anti-Soviet military alliance, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For what? The Cold War was over. Peace reigned. At best, NATO was no longer a priority.

Then 9/11 happened. The George W. Bush administration was overrun by the war-obsessed neoconservative ideology of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, which poses a threat on the order of that which the Soviet Union once posed.”

For what? The Soviet Union no longer existed. Russia had become a young capitalist democracy eager to work with the West. China was a friendly trading partner. After 9/11, Bush-era neocons had nearly eight years to covertly empower the equally obsessive anti-Russian nationalists in Ukraine, implementing the neoconservatives’ “first goal.”

Barack Obama’s successful political campaign of hope and change lit such an irresistible fire among the faithful that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before he had done anything to deserve it. But peace never came under Obama. He redoubled his efforts in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Syria and Libya were never threats to the United States, but we bombed them anyway.

Instead of stopping whatever the neoconservatives were doing in Ukraine, Obama appointed Joe Biden to lead Ukraine, and as vice president and president he never stopped throwing mud. oil on the fire. On September 11, our national debt stood at $3 trillion. Today it is a disastrous $35 trillion, entirely linked to the war. Our leaders have committed us to spending $57 billion a year over the next 30 years, plus overruns, to “modernize” our nuclear arsenal.

In a 1947 Armistice Day speech that still resonates today, Eisenhower’s second-in-command during the European campaign, General Omar Bradley, spoke from the heart. “We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without consciousness. Our world is a world of nuclear giants and ethical children. We know more about war than peace, more about killing than about life.

We were once humanity’s last hope.

Jack O’Rourke lives in Narragansett.