Democrats today are far from FDR’s “Good Neighbor” foreign policy.

Jack O’Rourke
| Guest Columnist

The Democratic Party was once the party of the working class and peace. These two things are intertwined because wars largely bleed the working class.

But Democrats today are a far cry from the days of Franklin Roosevelt’s “good neighbor” foreign policy. The pinnacle of civilized leadership was Roosevelt’s defiant stance in the face of Nazi barbarity. “Nothing can convince the peoples of the earth that any governmental authority has any right or necessity to inflict the consequences of war upon itself or any other people, except for the purpose of self-evident internal defence.”

General Dwight Eisenhower’s encouraging message on D-Day read: “To the peoples of Western Europe: The Allied Expeditionary Force was landed this morning on the coast of France. This landing is part of a concerted United Nations plan to liberate Europe together with our great Russian allies.”

Roosevelt’s top priority in the postwar world was to invite “our great Russian allies” into a peaceful new world order. Roosevelt’s death and the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought this persecution to an abrupt end.

Republican President Ronald Reagan boldly took Roosevelt’s lead in ending the Cold War with his Communist Russian counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev “to make the world a safer place.” Democratic President Bill Clinton foolishly expanded NATO, the anti-Soviet military alliance, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why? The Cold War is over. Peace reigned. At best, NATO was no longer a priority.

Then 9/11 happened. The George W. Bush administration was captured by the war-obsessed neoconservative ideology of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. “Our first goal is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, whether in the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat similar to that previously posed by the Soviet Union.”

Why? The Soviet Union no longer existed. Russia has become a young capitalist democracy eager to work with the West. China was a friendly trading partner. After 9/11, Bush-era neocons had nearly eight years to covertly strengthen equally hell-bent anti-Russian nationalists in Ukraine, realizing the neocons’ “first goal.”

Barack Obama’s successful political campaign of hope and change ignited such a compelling fire among believers that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before he had done anything to deserve it. But peace never came under Obama. He redoubled his focus on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Syria and Libya were never a threat to the US, but we bombed them anyway.

Instead of stopping what the neocons were doing in Ukraine, Obama put Joe Biden in charge of Ukraine, and as vice president and president, he never stopped pouring gasoline on the fire. On 9/11 our national debt was $3 trillion. Today that’s a catastrophic $35 trillion, all of it war-related. Our leaders have committed to spending $57 billion annually over the next 30 years, plus cost overruns, to “modernize” our nuclear arsenal.

In a 1947 Armistice Day speech that resonates to this day, Eisenhower’s deputy during the European Campaign, General Omar Bradley, spoke from the heart. “We have comprehended the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Our world is a world of nuclear giants and ethical babies. We know more about war than about peace, more about murder than about life.”

We were once the last hope of humanity.

Jack O’Rourke lives in Narragansett.

Democrats today are far from FDR’s “Good Neighbor” foreign policy.

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