How the Democrats Became the War Party

The hysterical and vitriolic attacks made by Massachusetts’s Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Florida’s Democratic Representative Deborah Wasserman Schultz against Donald Trump’s nominee to be director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, only serves to confirm what many voters have come to realize in the eight years since Donald Trump was first elected President: That the Democratic Party has become captive to a kind of Cold War mania. It has, in the span of years following Hillary Clinton’s defeat at the polls in 2016, become a War Party, and many of its members, very much including Warren and Schultz, speak as though they are the proud heirs of Joe McCarthy. 

On foreign affairs, the Democrats brook no dissent. Part of the reason for this is that the party has fallen prey to a kind of absolutist group-think with regard to America’s role in the world. Not content with, or even, frankly, interested in, traditional roles of the state, such as border security and diplomacy, the Democrats have conjured up a world of absolute good and absolute evil outside the supremely insular urban bubbles in which they live and work. As such, they seek to wage a cold culture war, whereby American power is exercised on behalf of their pet social causes.

Another reason behind the Democratic Party’s devolution into a War Party has to do with the current lack of debate, of competition within the party. During the 80 years following the end of the Second World War, there existed a healthy, sometimes fierce competition within the Democratic Party with regard to America and its role in the World: On one side there were what I would call the Rooseveltians; on the other side, the Achesonians.

The competition between the two helped shape American policy throughout the Cold War. It was only with the arrival of the post–Cold War world that the competition dried up—and turned into a rout. 

History changed on April 12, 1945. 

The death of Franklin D. Roosevelt brought Harry Truman to the White House. In the space of only five years, Truman and his second secretary of state, Dean Acheson, with the help of the original coterie of cold warriors such as James Forrestal, Frank Wisner, and Paul Nitze engineered a radical break with Roosevelt’s postwar vision of Great Power reciprocity as embodied in the UN Charter. The launch of the modern national security state in 1947, followed by the adoption of National Security Council Memorandum 68, militarized George Kennan’s vision of containment and set the course for much of America’s conduct during the succeeding 40 years.

Following the debacle in Korea and Truman’s decision not to run for a second full term, the Rooseveltians made a comeback of sorts (within the party at least) by way of Governor Adlai Stevenson’s two bids for the White House. But by the 1960 election Stevenson was out and John F. Kennedy, touting a vision of an America that would “bear any burden and pay any price” was in. The 1960 election was ultimately a contest between two hawks, Kennedy and Nixon; but with Kennedy’s victory and the appointments of Acheson proteges such as Dean Rusk and other hardliners, the Achesonians were back in business—or so they thought.

To an extent, John F. Kennedy embodied both the Rooseveltian and Achesonian traditions. Until the near-catastrophe of October 1962, his administration governed in the Achesonian style. But after successive crises, in Berlin in 1961 and Cuba in 1962, Kennedy realized that a new approach was needed. This approach was announced at the American University commencement on June 10, 1963. This marked the end of Kennedy’s Achesonian period. And this rejection perhaps, as recent scholarship by James W. Douglass and David Talbot indicates, accounts for what unfolded in Dallas the following November.

There are parallels between what occurred after FDR died and what occurred after Kennedy was assassinated. What is clear is that Kennedy’s successor, the Texan Lyndon Johnson, expanded the disastrous war in Vietnam with the support of the Achesonian establishment Kennedy himself put in place. Ultimately, the pattern that was established in the early 1950s prevailed again the late 1960s: After unwise overreach in Asia, the Achesonians were once again challenged by the Rooseveltians for the Democratic presidential nomination. 

Yet in 1968, that quest ended not just in electoral loss, but in tragedy. 

From 1968 to 1992 the Republican Party held power for all but four years. This period saw the defeat of George McGovern (a Rooseveltian) in 1972, and, later, the internecine battles between President Jimmy Carter’s hardline Achesonian national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and his more cautious Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. It was during the wilderness years that the Achesonians, chief among them a Georgetown socialite and scholar named Madeleine Korbel Albright, began laying the groundwork for the Achesonians return to power. Albright, who was once a member of Brzezinski’s NSC, along with a former Assistant Secretary of State named Richard Holbrooke, went on to play a pivotal role in the formation and practice of American foreign policy under Bill Clinton.

The principal foreign policy power brokers under Clinton-Albright, Holbrooke and the former Time magazine Russia correspondent Strobe Talbott, helped mold the next generation of Achesonians. Talbott became an important patron and mentor to the future under-secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, and to the Russia policy adviser to Trump’s national security advisers H. R. McMaster, John Bolton, and Fiona Hill. Holbrooke was an important mentor to USAID administrator and selective humanitarian Samantha Power. Albright’s contributions in this area include former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and the current Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs James O’Brien.

During Clinton’s term the Achesonians consistently prevailed over the Rooseveltians—NATO expansion, intervention in the Balkans, and the 78-day bombing of Serbia were among their most lasting, and questionable, achievements.

The effort to oppose NATO expansion in these years, led by the likes of Kennan and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, marked what amounted to the Rooseveltians’ last stand. During the debate on the Senate floor over NATO expansion the learned Moynihan—the holder of a PhD from Tufts, a former U.S. ambassador to India, and a one-time aide to Averell Harriman—was hectored by none other than Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware.

By the turn of the century, the game was nearly up for the Rooseveltians. Congresswoman Barbara Lee was the sole dissenter from the Bush administration’s plan to invade Afghanistan. George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq won 29 Democratic votes in the Senate—among them three future Democratic nominees for president (2004, 2016, 2020). During this period the Rooseveltians put up token, ineffectual opposition to Bush’s wars of choice in the presidential candidacies of Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich. 

Again, the pattern of the early 1950s and the late 1960s repeated itself: After a period of presidential overreach, this time under the Republican Bush, the Rooseveltians offered a corrective in the person of Barack Obama. Yet their influence fizzled within mere days of Mr. Obama’s historic election. Hillary Clinton was named secretary of state; Robert Gates remained at his post at the Pentagon; and Leon Panetta was handed the reins at CIA. In terms of both personnel and policy, the Achesonians triumphed during the Obama years and set the stage for a new Cold War.

In an October 2016 retrospective piece on Obama’s foreign policy in The Nation, I observed,

It was widely assumed that Obama would pick up the pieces of the Bush years and exorcise hegemonic fantasies from the body politic. Instead, over his two terms in office, the convergence of the neoconservative and Wilsonian interventionist creeds has solidified into orthodoxy. No better evidence of this exists than the fact that the neocons who served as the instigators and defenders of George W. Bush’s foreign policy have become devoted supporters of Hillary Clinton. Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and Eliot Cohen, among others, have all voiced their preference for [Hillary] Clinton over the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

The bitterness and rank hysteria that Trump’s surprise victory over Clinton engendered within the ranks of the Democratic Party establishment then pushed it toward a near-total adoption of Cold War, Achesonian-style policies. 

Our story ends where it began: With a perilous Cold War between nuclear armed powers. The difference this time is that the New Cold War involves the United States, Russia, and China in addition to, as of this writing, a proxy war between NATO and Russia in Eastern Europe. Under President Biden the Achesonian vision has triumphed: Last weekend the Ukrainians were handed long range missiles—missiles that require US servicemen to operate. And the Rooseveltians are nowhere to be found on the national stage. Even, sadly, Barbara Lee and the few progressives in Congress have joined the ranks of the new Cold Warriors. 

Dissenters such as Tulsi Gabbard are now branded “Russian assets” by Democrats channeling Tailgunner Joe. There are now no elements within the Democratic Party who might serve as a brake on the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s dangerous delusions.