"Time-Honored Tradition"?

In today's Washington Post, Robert Kagan brings up some interesting points about the Kerry foreign policy as expressed by Kerry's acceptance speech. In essence, Kerry said that if he is elected President, America will return to its "time-honored" tradition - "The United States of America never goes to war because we want to; we only go to war because we have to. That is the standard of our nation." As Kagan points out, historically this has not been the tradition at all. The only two wars that the US has "had to" go into were the two times when America was attacked - WWII, and Afghanistan. All the other wars and military interventions from the Spanish-American War in 1898 all the way through Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, and Iraq were arguably "wars of choice".

Kagan's point is that this argument is an example of the Kerry foreign policy.

Why is Kerry invoking an American "tradition" that does not exist?

Perhaps he's distorting American history simply to cast the Bush administration and the war in Iraq in the harshest possible light. But maybe Kerry is not being cynical. Perhaps, finally, he is saying what he really believes and not what American policy has been, but what it should be.

The doctrine Kerry enunciated on Thursday night, after all, was the doctrine initially favored by the antiwar movement and the mainstream of the Democratic Party after the debacle of Vietnam. "Come home, America" was the cry of those who believed America had corrupted both the world and itself in "wars of choice" in Vietnam and elsewhere.

Advocates of this doctrine did not propose a "return" to some mythical American past. Rather, they proposed a radical departure onto a very different course in American foreign policy. Their goal was a retraction of American power and influence from around the globe. Nor did they have any doubt that their view of America was patriotic. They would cleanse America of its sins.

Would it really be surprising if John Kerry, whose life and thought were so powerfully shaped by his Vietnam experience, now returned to the view of American foreign policy which that experience led him to three decades ago? There seems to be a conspiracy on both sides in this campaign not to take Kerry seriously as a man of ideas and conviction. But the fact that he has waffled so visibly on Iraq may be the best proof of his commitment to the beliefs about American foreign policy he came to hold in the 1970s.

The upshot of this foreign policy is that all wars are ruled out, no matter what their justifications, except when America is directly attacked.

It would rule out all wars fought for humanitarian ends, all interventions to prevent genocide, to defend democracy or even, as in the case of the Persian Gulf War, to uphold international law against aggression. For those are all wars of choice.

I think Kagan is slightly mistaken in this last assessment. It seems that what Kerry is saying is not that all "wars of choice" are ruled out, but only the ones where he doesn't agree with the choice. Kerry's foreign policy is very similar to Clinton's. And the only wars that would then be fought, would be wars where America does not really have a strategic interest; war would once again be seen and used as social policy as Clinton did in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Haiti. Any wars where there may be an Selfish American interest would be ruled out because of the Left's beliefs of the purported sins of America.