Rewriting American History: Realism Edition
This article is dedicated to Josh Hammer, specifically because of his 2/21/2025 Newsweek article “Vance in Munich and Foreign Policy Realism for the Modern World.” Specifically, I have to take note of this line from the article, regarding how Trump’s foreign policy is different from other Presidents before him:
I am forced to wonder what Hammer is talking about regarding this alleged era of “universalist liberalism.” Certainly it was not when Bush, Obama, and Trump all buddied around with the ruthlessly authoritarian and theocratic government of Saudi Arabia, to give just one example. The United States has historically backed dictators across the world, providing military assistance to seventy-three percent of them. None of this is getting into how Vance’s speech was primarily criticizing European nations for not being liberal enough in areas like freedom of speech, making it seem more like a demand the countries in question live up to their alleged values over anything else.
The article constantly shows Hammer has little understanding of even modern American history. He notes how it would be unthinkable for such a rebuke of Western European leaders to happen in previous generations — but such events did occur. When France condemned George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, for example, many political leaders in the United States rebuked them — this even leading to the infamously silly moment where “French Fries” and “French Toast” were renamed “Freedom Fries” and “Freedom Toast” in the Congressional Cafeteria.
Hammer’s article is nothing more than a promotion of Trump-era realism, “Nationalism and realism are not merely the flavors of the day — they are the flavors of the century,” he writes. Realism, for those curious, “places the pursuit of the American national interest above everything else.” However, I am forced to wonder when Hammer believes the United States was not engaging in actions that benefited itself above all else. He writes about the post-Cold War era as one of unapologetic idealism, but the actual reality of what happened fails to back this up. Although idealist rhetoric might have been used to justify certain foreign interventions to the American public, realism has still been in control first and foremost.
On 2/20/2025, Niall Furguson posted a quote from the first George Bush on X, specifically him saying “This will not stand. This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait” in response to the nation being annexed by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. This was supposed to be contrasted with Donald Trump’s demand that Ukraine give concessions to Russia, but if one actually looks at what happened under Bush it becomes clear this is only rhetoric. Nathan Robinson discussed this conflict in Current Affairs last year, while himself reviewing a revisionist account by Dr. Richard Haass. Specifically, Robinson notes how Reagan and Bush had previously supported Hussein when he was engaging in an equally aggressive invasion of Iran. The year after Bush made the statement Furguson quoted from, Bush gave a speech where he warned against “suicidal nationalism” in Ukraine, which was largely seen as a rebuke of Ukrainian independence.
Bush went after Hussein largely to promote United States hegemony, not because of some principled objection towards what he was doing. The point was to make it clear that — as Bush put it on 2/1/1991 — “what we say goes,” with Bush even refusing to engage in diplomatic negotiations that could have led to a withdrawal from Kuwait because he knew a full blown war with Iraq would have been winnable. It was an unapologetically self-interested conflict to those within the inner sphere of the Administration, even if the rhetoric used to the American public was occasionally more humanitarian in nature. However, neither the faction of the right-wing which believes Trump should behave more like Bush did nor the sub-section that hopes to frame Trump as a bold innovator in foreign policy feel comfortable admitting that, because both want to spread the narrative that the United States had been betraying its self-interest previously, when no such thing was the case. It’s “old wine, new bottle,” to use a phrase coined by Noam Chomsky to describe the shifting justifications for the same globalization which has always existed after the end of the Cold War.
