LITTLE ROCK — One of the more amusing aspects of following world politics is watching how liberals react to threats.
Instead of beginning with the obvious-that we will always have enemies to deal with, at least occasionally through the threat and actual use of military force-they tend to embrace a series of dubious assumptions designed to avoid such harsh realities.
First among these is that America faces no genuine enemies because the idea of conflict is itself a consequence of misunderstanding and misperception. It is assumed, in this way of thinking, that countries with which we have difficult relations are either the victims of our own bellicosity and ignorance or, if truly hostile toward us, hostile only because we have bullied or mistreated them in the past.
The clearest case of this thinking at present concerns our relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is said by liberals to be developing nuclear weapons and supporting terrorism not so much out of aggressive intent but as a defensive reaction to American belligerence and because we sponsored a coup that restored the shah to his throne way back before the vast majority of Iranians (or Americans) were born.
Put differently, liberals believe that the world is teetering on the brink of war not because of anything Iran is doing but because we are being excessively bellicose in trying to stop it. In the liberal mindset, it is not the aggression of obnoxious regimes but the efforts of our own nation to confront them that most threatens the peace.
Closely related is a tendency to downplay the seriousness of issues that cause conflict. The drums of war are said to beat within our country needlessly, because thedifferences we have with other countries aren't any worse than the kind that develop between neighbors who have conflicting views of where their property lines run. The casual observer is left to conclude that things would be just peachy-creamy if we only let Kim Jong Il continue to launch missiles over the Sea of Japan, the Iranian mullahs continue to finance terrorism against Americans and American interests, and the Syrians continue to ship roadside explosives across the border into Iraq.
For liberals, the great danger is that our "war party," always Republican, will rush us into war by exaggerating the seriousness of the threats we face. That they might be committing the opposite mistake of underestimating those threats is rejected out of hand.
Third is a remarkable ability to ignore the nature of the regimes we oppose and how that nature might have consequences for their behavior. That Iran, North Korea and Syria rank among the world's most brutal dictatorships doesn't seem to signify at all in liberal thinking. They are simply depicted as unpleasant governments that we have no choice but to engage.
No thought is given to the well-established correlation noted throughout history between regimes that threaten their neighbors and those that abuse their own citizens. An idea that was once central to the liberal world view-that America has an obligation to oppose despotism andaid the oppressed-is casually discarded from contemporary liberalism.
Finally, there is the persisting but invariably untested belief that things called negotiations and diplomacy can always alleviate tensions. Because the differences that separate America from its enemies are so modest, all that is required for reconciliation is a less hostile, more cooperative stance on the part of our side. Diplomacy will solve all, even if, conveniently, the grounds for negotiation are never specified and liberals take the military option that supports effective diplomacy off of the table at the outset.
It is not that each of these liberal nostrums is always wrong, only that it is wrong to always reflexively apply them, as so many liberals do, to all confrontations between America and other nations. Because liberals tend to see all conflict as the result of misperception and misunderstanding, they reject the idea of implacable evil as a source of such conflict. Because they downplay the nature of the threats we face, they demonstrate no interest in the doctrines of our foes and disregard the possibility that movements like Islamic fascism might pursue our destruction regardless of our policies.
In short, liberals believe that there are no genuine aggressors out there, no enemies who are beyond reason and with whom we cannot negotiate.
Conservatives often are accused by liberals of seeing too many would-be Hitlers, and liberals are accused by conservatives of never seeing any. But which is the worse mistake to make in a nuclear age?
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Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz teaches politics at Lyon College at Batesville.
Editorial, Pages 99 on 10/07/2007