GOP Losing Its Will

Michele Bachmann (who I once predicted would be the right-wing dark horse in 2012; never listen to my political predictions) was quoted tonight as saying that Barack Obama's foreign policy made him the most dangerous president in history. George Will (who cut his teeth during the Cold War on the staff of Democratic super-hawk Scoop Jackson) has grown tired of such insubstantial fear-mongering:

Romney says: “It is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” that if he is elected, Iran will not get such a weapon, and if Obama is reelected, it will. He also says that Obama “has made it very clear that he’s not willing to do those things necessary to get Iran to be dissuaded from” its nuclear ambitions.” Romney may, however, be premature in assuming the futility of new sanctions the Obama administration is orchestrating, and Panetta says Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is “unacceptable” and “a red line for us” and if “we get intelligence that they are proceeding with developing a nuclear weapon, then we will take whatever steps necessary to stop it.” What, then, is the difference between Romney and Obama regarding Iran?

Osama bin Laden and many other “high-value targets” are dead, the drone war is being waged more vigorously than ever, and Guantanamo is still open, so Republicans can hardly say that Obama has implemented dramatic and dangerous discontinuities regarding counterterrorism. Obama says that, even with his proposed cuts, the defense budget would increase at about the rate of inflation through the next decade. Republicans who think America is being endangered by “appeasement” and military parsimony have worked that pedal on their organ quite enough.

Bashing Nixon To Build Up Reagan

On Tuesday, Michael Gerson used the distasteful Nixon-Kissinger conversation about a hypothetical Soviet holocaust against Jews to promote the ideology that Ronald Reagan brought about the fall of the Soviet Union. He goes so far as to imply, outrageously, that Nixon really would've let Soviet Jews be gassed:

[F]rom this historical episode, it is clear that repeated doses of foreign policy realism can deaden the conscience. In President Nixon's office, a lack of human sentiment was viewed as proof of mental toughness - an atmosphere that diminished the office itself. Realists are often dismissive of Manichean distinctions between good and evil, light and darkness. But in the world beyond good and evil, some may be lightly consigned to the gas chambers.

Gerson's comment is especially appalling in view of an historical reality which he neglects to mention, namely that Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union reached its Cold War apogee as the direct result of Nixon's policies. That means Russia's Jews were safer because of Nixon, and yet Gerson claims to have gotten a whiff of gas. While the taped Nix-Kiss exchange is impossible to defend on its merits, it's nothing but hot air.

Since the tape was opened earlier this month, Kissinger's friends have defended him strenuously. No word yet from Nixon's men -- except, now, Kissinger himself. Knowing him, I'd say his response became inevitable after Gerson used the opportunity of the tapes opening to suggest that the Jackson-Vanik amendment (which tied U.S.-Soviet trade relations to rates of emigration and ended up making it far harder for Jews to get out than it had been under Nixon) somehow helped end the Cold War. In response, Kissinger took to the Washington Post op-ed page on Christmas Eve. He began by apologizing for his loose talk in the White House and then took aim at his Reagan-boosting critic:

Gerson ascribes the collapse of the Soviet Union in part to the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The amendment played no significant role in what resulted from imperial overstretch, incompetent economic management and the determined resistance of a succession of presidents from both parties, culminating in the Reagan period.

Gerson sneers at detente as if it were a kind of moral abdication. Memories are short. The conversation under discussion occurred on March 1, 1973. The Vietnam War had just ended; prisoners had not yet returned.

An effective global strategy was in place with the opening to China, a broad dialogue with the Soviet Union, and major progress in Egypt and on emigration. It was to preserve that policy that the conversation in the Oval Office took place, and it is in that context that it must be viewed.

Scoop's Fault

JTA, the Jewish news service, on Henry Kissinger's 1973 comments about a hypothetical Soviet holocaust:

Kissinger in an e-mail to JTA would brook no request for an apology and did not even directly address his gas chambers remark. Instead he appeared to insist on context: His frustration at the time with the insistence of the Jewish community and U.S. senators such as Jacob Javits (R-N.Y.) and Henry "Scoop"Jackson (D-Wash.) on attaching human rights riders to dealings with the Soviets.

“The quotations ascribed to me in the transcript of the conversation with President Nixon must be viewed in the context of the time,” Kissinger wrote to JTA.

He and Nixon pursued the issue of Soviet Jewish emigration as a humanitarian matter separate from foreign policy issues in order to avoid questions of sovereignty and because normal diplomatic channels were closed, Kissinger wrote.

“By this method and the persistent private representation at the highest level we managed to raise emigration from 700 per year to close to 40,000 in 1972,” Kissinger wrote. “We disagreed with the Jackson Amendment, which made Jewish emigration a foreign policy issue. We feared that the Amendment would reduce emigration, which is exactly what happened. Jewish emigration never reached the level of 40,000 again until the Soviet Union collapsed. The conversation between Nixon and me must be seen in the context of that dispute and of our distinction between a foreign policy and a humanitarian approach.”