WASHINGTON - It was Jim Hoagland, the
Washington Post's liberal hawk par excellence, who
first pondered the possible foreign policy
consequences of Hurricane Katrina and the
destruction of New Orleans.
"Will
post-Katrina America be humbler, more cooperative
and more understanding of other nations' problems
and failures?" he asked in his regular column. "Or
will the United States let its active engagement
in the world's human and political crises become
another casualty of Katrina's winds and
floodwaters - and of the political turmoil they
have triggered?"
Even as Congress and the
Bush administration tote up the staggering costs
of the most expensive natural disaster ever to hit
the United States - current estimates range from
US$100 billion to
$200 billion just in relief
and rebuilding costs - few analysts have hazarded
an answer to Hoagland's questions.
There
has, of course, been speculation that the storm
will weaken Bush's political authority,
particularly over fellow-Republicans, many of whom
- even before Katrina struck - had become
increasingly, if still mostly privately, nervous
about the impact of the Iraq war on their
reelection chances in 2006.
The fact that
an unprecedented number of Republican lawmakers
have criticized the federal government's response
to the crisis is one indication the president is
headed quickly toward lame-duck status or worse.
"The Bush Era is over," declared Post
political columnist E J Dionne Jr, arguing that
the "source of Bush's political success was his
claim that he could protect Americans", but that
that notion was drowned "in the surging waters of
New Orleans".
Others have pointed to the
fact that some 7,000 National Guard troops from
Louisiana and Mississippi, who could have been
available for rescue and security operations at
home when Katrina hit, were instead deployed to
Iraq, along with their equipment.
"They
should be fighting the effects of flood waters at
home - helping people in the communities they know
best - not battling Iraqi people who want them to
go away," noted left-wing media analyst Norman
Solomon.
Even before Katrina made
landfall, however, some of Washington's foreign
policy elite were worrying that the US
difficulties in Iraq were souring many citizens on
global engagement - at least in the form pursued
by the Bush administration - much as an
increasingly unpopular Vietnam War turned the
country inward, if not isolationist, beginning in
the late 1960s.
Just hours before much of
New Orleans was submerged in floodwater, Francis
Fukuyama, famous for his 1992 The End of
History, published a broadside attack in the
New York Times on the administration's decision to
take the country to war in Iraq instead of
building a more sustainable international
coalition focused on destroying al-Qaeda and
pressing for a stricter proliferation regime that
would have attracted far more domestic and foreign
support.
The article, entitled "Invasion
of the Isolationists", noted that Republican
support for the Iraq war has been confined to only
two sectors: "the neo-conservatives [who lack a
political base of their own but who provide
considerable intellectual firepower] and from ...
'Jacksonian America' - American nationalists whose
instincts lead them toward a pugnacious
isolationism".
Worse, according to
Fukuyama, the administration's failure to back up
its pre-war rationales for invading Iraq - weapons
of mass destruction (WMD) and ties between
al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein - has resulted in its
defending the war on the neo-conservatives'
"idealistic policy of political transformation of
the broader Middle East", a justification,
however, in which Jacksonians have no particular
interest.
"If Jacksonians begin to
perceive the war as unwinnable or a failure, there
will be little future support for an expansive
foreign policy that focuses on promoting
democracy," Fukuyama said. "That in turn could
drive the 2008 Republican presidential primaries
in ways likely to affect the future of American
foreign policy as a whole."
That Katrina's
wrath was focused on the Deep South, the heartland
of the "Jacksonians" (named for former president
Andrew Jackson, the brutal Indian fighter who
also, coincidentally, expelled the British from
the United States at the Battle of New Orleans in
1814) was especially ironic - and potentially
politically significant - given the weight
Fukuyama gives that constituency in sustaining
Bush's aggressive unilateralism.
"I think
there are a lot of southern Republicans who are
asking why we're still spending blood and treasure
in Iraq and Afghanistan when we can't seem to take
care of our own at home," said one Congressional
aide this week. "Katrina brings home those kinds
of policy choices in a very dramatic and concrete
way."
That thinking is certain to have an
impact on foreign policy, according to Charles
Kupchan, a foreign policy specialist at the
Council on Foreign Relations. "On balance, the
impact of Katrina will likely be to make the
United States more inwardly focused," he told
Inter Press Service (IPS). "I think the American
public will tend to ask, 'We have plenty of
troubles here at home. Why should we be doing such
heavy lifting abroad'?"
He added, "Iraq
has been an unpopular war, and its prosecution is
eating up ever more political and financial
capital, so I think Katrina on balance will dampen
the appetite for a wide range of global
commitments."
Indeed, the American
Conservative Union (ACU), another Jacksonian
bastion that has been very reluctant to criticize
the $5-billion monthly cost of the Iraq war and
the nearly $500 billion annual defense budget,
issued a statement Tuesday warning of a political
revolt by its constituents. "Conservatives
throughout the United States are increasingly
losing faith in the president and the Republican
leadership in Congress to adequately prioritize
and rein in overall federal spending," ACU
president David Keene said. He noted that even
before Katrina, "American taxpayers have witnessed
the largest spending increase under any preceding
president and Congress since the Great
Depression."
Anatol Lieven, a foreign
policy analyst at the New America Foundation, also
foresees foreign policy consequences to Katrina.
"I wouldn't call it withdrawal from the world, but
there had already been a certain tailoring of
ambition as a result of Iraq," he told IPS. "But
Katrina will push it further both because of the
public mood and the financial constraints."
As to whether such a retreat would be one
of "pugnacious isolationism" or, as Hoagland put
it, a "humbler, more cooperative" course, remains
uncertain.
Judging by Washington's
performance at the World Summit at the United
Nations this week, the Jacksonians, one of whose
foremost exponents is US ambassador to the UN John
Bolton, retain the upper hand - although the US
negotiating position was obviously worked out
before Katrina hit.
