What I Regret Most About Heightened Partisanship

Thomas Friedman reviews a book today that deserves considered thought by all parts of the political spectrum.  What I regret most about our heightened state of partisanship is that there is no common sense of problems or goals, with the result that there is little dialogue about the traditional GOP/Democratic intellectual examination of the role of the government vs the role of the markets.

The book is about what should be the goal of American Foreign Policy.  An area where there used to be bi-partisan examination of policy with agreement on what the problems and goals were, if not the exact policy that would get us there.  Now all politics seems to be a blood sport about winning and having it "my way" with no respect for what the views of the other side are.  Perhaps that is inevitable  on certain issues which derive from fundamentally held personal views on those issues, but other issues such as the government must provide basic services and national security and both must be paid for deserve dialog with respect for each other's point of view.

I will digress for a minute.  NY Mayor Di Blasio has diverted money from a water tunnel project that is essential for the vitality of NYC.  The current water tunnels have not been inspected or had maintenance performed on them since they were built and flooded 80 or 90 years ago.  The new tunnel, which will allow that maintenance is almost finished, but still 5 or 6 years away from completion.  So what does the mayor do, he diverts the funding for this work to other parts of the budget so he can limit the increase in water and sewer bills.  You cannot use infrastructure as a tool of social policy, that only produces bankruptcy as we see in Puerto Rico.  It only produces a failed system as we see with the Washington D.C. Metro.  Infrastructure must be funded because an economy does not exist without infrastructure.

But the topic of the day is foreign policy.  Friedman reviews a book, Mission Failure by Michael Mandelbaum.  The focus on the book is the transition of U.S. foreign policy from efforts to contain countries conduct of affairs outside their borders to influencing the conduct of affairs inside their borders.  And the need for the citizens within those borders to be able to effectively conduct those affairs in a manner that U.S. policy seeks.

"Beginning with the 1991 decision of the first Bush administration to intervene in northern Iraq and create a no-fly zone to protect the Iraqi Kurds from their country’s genocidal leader, Saddam Hussein, “the principal international initiatives of the United States” for the next two decades “concerned the internal politics and economics rather than the external behavior of other countries,” writes Mandelbaum, with whom I co-wrote a book in 2011, “That Used to Be Us”.

“The main focus of American foreign policy shifted from war to governance, from what other governments did beyond their borders to what they did and how they were organized within them,” writes Mandelbaum, referring to U.S. operations in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan and toward Chinese human rights policy, Russian democratization policy, NATO expansion and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process."

“The United States after the Cold War … became the equivalent of a very wealthy person, the multibillionaire among nations,” he argues. “It left the realm of necessity that it had inhabited during the Cold War and entered the world of choice. It chose to spend some of its vast reserves of power on the geopolitical equivalent of luxury items; the remaking of other countries.”

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"Don’t get him wrong, Mandelbaum says. The U.S. beat back some very bad actors in Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, and later in Libya. “The military missions that the United States undertook succeeded. It was the political missions that followed, the efforts to transform the politics of the places where American arms prevailed, that failed.”

Link to Friedman column

You would think that the Presidential campaign would at least be recognizing that Foreign Policy is an issue worth discussing.  Instead, it is caught up in the partisan war of words with no respect or recognition that we need other countries to cooperate.  Trump wants to use economic force to get the things he wants.  Cruz wants to bomb innocent people who are necessary to a solution.  I have no idea what Mitch Mitchell wants other than to continue to collect his Majority Leader paycheck.  Sanders thinks we can ignore the world.  And the voters are not being educated in the manner necessary to gain political support for a bi-partisan foreign policy.  I have no regret greater than this.