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Against ‘Withdrawalism’

At the launch of the Freedom Collection’s website in Dallas on Wednesday, President Bush expressed concern, as he has repeatedly in recent...

At the launch of the Freedom Collection’s website in Dallas on Wednesday, President Bush expressed concern, as he has repeatedly in recent months, about growing isolationism in America. I’ve just read two superb pieces, written by former colleagues of mine at The New Republic, that elaborate on this theme. First, there’s Leon Wieseltier’s Washington Diarist from The New Republic’s April 5 edition. The piece begins: “Desperate times call for desperate measures, and so the other day I read Rachel Maddow’s new book. It is called Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, and it is an anthropologically useful document of the new American disaffection with American force.” He has some wonderful lines about Ms. Maddow, whose show puts me in the mind of fingernails scraping a blackboard: “Written in the same perky, self-adoring voice that makes her show so excruciating,…its righteous aim is to make the use of force seem absurd.” It is not absurd, of course. It is, at some points in history, necessary. Ridicule may be fashionable, but, when it comes to making foreign policy, it is dangerous. We need a clear-eyed approach to diplomacy and the use of force. Wieseltier writes, “A military strike [against Iran] may be a bad idea – the results may be insufficient; the costs may be too high; but the contemplation of it is not war fever.” Maddow cites Jefferson selectively, making him seem the pacifist he was not. Wieseltier quotes him this way, from 1806: “Our duty is, therefore, to act upon things as they are, and to make a reasonable provision for whatever they may be.” Second, there’s Martin Peretz, who, as editor in chief of The New Republic from 1974 to 2011 and my own intellectual mentor, assembled a remarkable and eclectic group of writers and thinkers, including Wieseltier (still with The New Republic), Charles Krauthammer, Hendrik Hertzberg and Dorothy Wickenden (now both of the New Yorker), Michael Kinsley, Andrew Sullivan, the late Michael Kelly, Mort Kondracke, Fred Barnes, and our own Amity Shlaes (to name just a few). His piece, on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, is headlined, “Where’s an Open Mic When We Really Need It?” His premise is President Obama’s confidence to Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, caught this week by an open microphone. The New York Times called it “a moment of candor.” Peretz writes, “It seems to me, actually, to be a moment of political contempt.” President Obama is saying “that the American people are not trusted by their own president. Otherwise, the president would tell us the truth about his intentions. And here he is, admitting his distrust of his own people to a leader of a nasty foreign government that seeks to thwart our purposes in the Middle East and elsewhere.” Dr. Peretz’s broader point is that “Mr. Obama is president over what might be called a withdrawalist moment in American foreign policy. Throughout his presidency, Mr. Obama has seemed strangely unmoved by the claims and values of American nationalism as they were expressed in most of the last century – for the rights of other peoples to establish nation-states after World War I, to free Europe and Asia from the bloody rule of monstrous fascist tyrannies in World War II, to defeat the egalitarian phantasm of communism as a civilized way of life.” For example, Peretz notes that from the “improving situation [in Iraq] President Obama hastily fled.” The writer then ends with questions about where the administration wants to take us. In Iran, for instance, “Will he support Israel’s use of force? Will he use America’s force?” And where, Peretz asks, “is an open mic when we need one?” This post was written by James K. Glassman, executive director of the George W. Bush Institute .