Yes, politicize national security

Jamie Kirchick writes,

The truth is, politicization of an issue ought not be an accusation at all. It’s by politicizing issues, no matter what they are, no matter which party does it, that we debate them. And it’s through debating them that we engage in the democratic process…It seems the maxim about the [politics stopping at the] “water’s edge” holds only when one’s own side is in power.

I couldn’t agree more. Actually, I could agree more, in the sense that even Jamie concedes too much to the advocates of non-partisanship. He writes:

One of the more annoying conservative mantras, slung often during the Bush administration at those who opposed its foreign policy, is that politics “stops at the water’s edge.” That may have been the case in 1950, when the dictum was attributed to Sen. Arthur Vandenberg. Then, there was a foreign policy consensus about both the nature of the external threat (the Soviet Union) facing the United States and the best means of combating it (containment).

But that consensus ripped apart with the Vietnam War, and it’s never healed.

What consensus? In the late 1940s, FDR’s erstwhile VP, Henry Wallace led the Democratic left in a campaign for cooperation with the Soviet Union. Then conservatives starting asking “Who lost China?” Now heralded as a great president, Truman got bashed from every side.

As a matter of fact, ideological and partisan debates about foreign policy go all the way back to the founding of the republic. For a superb account of that era, read the first chapters of Dangerous Nation by Robert Kagan.

Of course, the outcome of partisan, ideological debate is often sub-optimal. Like democracy, it’s the worst system except for all the others.