Before beginning his lecture Thursday evening, J. Peter Scoblic '97, executive editor of The New Republic, took a quick political poll of his audience. Of the roughly 30 students and others in attendance, not one supported John McCain for president.
"Wow," said a surprised Scoblic, whose appearance in Smith-Buonanno 106 was co-sponsored by the College Republicans, the Brown Democrats and the Brown Journal of World Affairs. But as his lecture and subsequent question-and-answer session revealed, his politics mirrored those of his audience.
Scoblic, who served as co-editor of the Brown Journal of World Affairs as an undergraduate and later worked as editor of Arms Control Today, is the author of "U.S. vs. Them: How a Half-Century of Conservatism has Undermined America's Security." A former visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment's Nonproliferation Program and fellow at the New America Foundation, Scoblic explained and sharply criticized the rise of a dichotomous, moralizing standard in American foreign policy.
For Scoblic, the "most important thing" in the upcoming presidential election is "whether the candidates see the world in black-and-white terms" or acknowledge that there exists greater complexity in foreign relations. In his speech, he called McCain, the Republican nominee, the inheritor of a conservative ideology that divides the world into good and evil. According to Scoblic, this binary has "ramifications for policy choices" because, ultimately, "good cannot co-exist with evil."
Scoblic said McCain has endorsed this worldview for "well over a decade," identifying the Arizona senator as among a group of conservatives who searched for America's next foreign policy adversary after the end of the Cold War. This "contrasts remarkably" with Barack Obama's ideology, Scoblic said, adding that while Obama has used phrases like "good" and "evil" in his campaign, he does not fundamentally divide the world into those categories.
For Scoblic, the "us versus them" mentality is dangerous in an era when the "existential" danger of nuclear terrorism poses "the greatest national security threat facing the United States." He said the Bush administration was - with the possible exception of the "first few years of the Reagan administration" - the first to "fully embrace" that black-and-white doctrine, and he blamed it for a failure to adequately confront nuclear proliferation.
Scoblic argued that Iran and North Korea posed a greater threat to the U.S. in terms of nuclear capabilities than Iraq, but that the latter was selected for invasion in 2003 because of its relative military weakness and because it offered the possibility of regime change. Scoblic pointed out that since the invasion, North Korea has detonated a nuclear weapon and Iran has continued to enrich uranium.
But Scoblic's lecture traced the origins of the "good and evil" worldview to the modern conservative movement that began decades before the Bush and Reagan administrations. Scoblic said the Great Depression and World War II undermined the traditional conservative ideals of laissez-faire capitalism and isolationism, which in turn gave way to a new set of priorities in the post-War era. The new conservative movement was comprised of economic libertarians, pre-Religious Right traditionalists and a vehement group of anti-communists who made their cause a "quasi-religious struggle between good and evil," he said.
While most Americans in the era opposed communism, Scoblic said the latter coalition saw the Cold War "not as a geopolitical controversy but as an apocalypse."
In time, Scoblic said, the libertarians and traditionalists coalesced around the anti-communists to lead to a binary worldview that pitted the "good" of America against the "evil of the Soviet Union." While Scoblic stopped short of attributing "every mistake in U.S. foreign policy" to this framework, he warned that the ideology leads to dangerous "overzealousness" and oversimplification.
For example, he said, the U.S. strategy against terrorism failed to take into account the different ideologies and goals of groups like al-Qaida and Hezbollah. Responsible foreign policy, Scoblic said, requires talking "about each case specifically" rather than building "one worldview through which you can filter everything."
He acknowledged a "political benefit" to the good-versus-evil framework to the extent that it "energizes people" and serves an instinct of defensiveness for a nation under threat. But he had no doubts that changes in American politics were imminent.
"Between the Iraq War ... and the financial crisis," Scoblic said, "you're looking at a situation not entirely dissimilar from the 1930s, when the legs of the conservative movement were undercut by international events." Though unsure of the future of the Republican Party, he predicted there may be a "resurgent moderate" voice in the party. On the other hand, he said, it may be that the socially and religiously conservative arm of the party rises to political dominance.
Though Scoblic said he did not think Obama is ahead in national polls "because he has a more enlightened foreign policy," he said he had no doubts about the outcome of the election.
"Obama's going to win," Scoblic said, "and that is going to put this worldview out of commission for four years." But he added that the polarizing ideology that has dominated U.S. foreign policy for the last eight years can never be discarded completely. If current international threats escalate during the next administration, Scoblic said, it could "come back with a vengeance."
