Friday, February 19, 2010

An Analogy – Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama!

“Dictatorships and Double Standards” - A Redux

Professor Jeane Kirkpatrick’s seminal article and what it has to teach us about the condition of Obama’s foreign policy

These are just excerpts from a marvelous analogy By Ilan Wurman

COMMENTARY January 2010

THIRTY years ago, an article criticizing the Carter administration’s foreign policy appeared in these pages under the title “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” Its author was Jeane Kirkpatrick, then a professor of political science at Georgetown University: “Dictatorships and Double Standards” went on to become one of the most controversial and influential articles published in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century.Kirkpatrick’s central argument was very much focused on the singular events of the year 1979, one of the most difficult in American history, and therefore would seem to have limited application to the very different world order to be found in 2009. Nonetheless, “Dictatorships and Double Standards” remains a potent and devastating critique of how American progressives think about U.S. power and foreign policy and the approach it condemns—the way in which the Carter administration viewed the world and conducted American policy.

It is worryingly similar to the approach of the Obama administration today. Certain policies pursued by the Carter administration, ostensibly in the name of American principles and interests, Kirkpatrick argued, were in fact undermining those interests and leading to America’s international isolation and a loss of power and authority: -

... THE disastrous state of American foreign policy under Jimmy Carter was neatly encapsulated in Kirkpatrick’s blunt opening: “The failure of the Carter administration’s foreign policy is now clear to everyone except its architects.” But, worse was yet to come. Kirkpatrick did not know that, only a week after COMMENTARY’S November 1979 issue hit the newsstands, the U.S. embassy in Tehran would be raided and 52 of its American employees taken hostage—nor could she have imagined that the hostage crisis would last 444 days.

The year would come to a close with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. We are not even a year into Barack Obama’s term, but given what we have seen of it so far, we have reason to fear that the “Dictatorships and Double Standards” of our time will see its way into print more quickly than Kirkpatrick’s, which appeared in the 33rd month of Carter’s ignominious single term.

ILAN WURMAN, making his first appearance in COMMENTARY, is a student at Claremont McKenna College.
http://www.israel-commentary.org/

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