At a recent National Review seminar, appropriately held in the well-conserved town of St. Michaels on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, I had the pleasure of listening to Bill Kristol analyzing the current state of American politics. It was masterfully done--thoroughly informed, judicious, full of interesting connections and distinctions, even witty. But one thing was striking: in a thirty-minute talk, he found it necessary to make only one passing reference to foreign policy.
True, what he had been asked to speak about was domestic politics. But it is also true that anyone given the same task between 1949 and 1989 would have found it impossible to proceed without repeated references to foreign policy and the way it impacted on the domestic scene. In the 1950s, McCarthyism, the implications of Sputnik for American education, and the "missile gap" (phoney, as it turned out, but crucially important in the presidential elections of 1960) would have been essential topics. Throughout most of the 1960s there was, of course, Vietnam. After that came OPEC and the oil crisis, ping pong diplomacy, detente and the hostages in Iran, all of which intruded seriously into internal politics. And in Reagan's 1980s the greatly increased defense budget, "Star Wars," the rise of Japan and the decline of America that it allegedly foreshadowed, and "Irangate" would all have had to be woven into the sort of review that Bill Kristol gave.
Such references to foreign and security policies would have been inescapable during those Cold War years for the same reason that they would have been inescapable in a discussion of Napoleon's France, or Great Britain in the late Victorian era: because the country involved was a superpower, and because the external policies of a superpower are so extensive and compelling, so essential to its entire sense of itself, that they have a pervasive influence on its internal political life.
