Word: communisms
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Having slain the dragon of international communism, the U.S. is now flirting with the distinctively American bad idea of isolationism, just as it did after the First World War. This turning inward is now, as it was then, dangerously shortsighted. If worse comes to worst here, Boris Yeltsin may give way to a Russia-Firster like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who has fascistic tendencies, territorial ambitions and an ominously large popular following. The U.S. might then find itself dragged back into another open-ended international crisis that would make the meagerness of its current aid program seem penny-wise and pound-foolish...
...World War I, the U.S. rejected membership in the League of Nations, adopted a restrictive immigration policy and eventually enacted high tariff barriers. It took Pearl Harbor and then communist expansionism to make internationalism the basis of U.S. foreign policy. Even during the heyday of the effort to contain communism, "the public never fully bought the challenge," says Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution. "Only a bipartisan consensus among elites kept the country's latent isolationism...
...COMMUNISM, if anyone other than 1.1 billion Chinese remembers what that is, used to work something like this: You pretend to work, and we pretend to pay you. Let's do the same for this embryonic snit: The IOP pretends to bring Duke, and we pretend to freak out. It's efficient, satisfying and over in a flash...
...when the U.S. was sinking into the quagmire of Vietnam, Robert McNamara resigned as Secretary of Defense and became president of the World Bank. Having retreated from the war against communism, he threw himself into the struggle against another enemy, which has turned out to be more robust and insidious: human misery so extreme and extensive that it can spread across borders in the form of marauding armies or refugees fleeing hunger and chaos...
...Bush policy charge that it is shaped by racism against citizens of a black nation. Others are angered by the contradiction between this policy and the practice in other situations, when the U.S. brushed aside the distinction between economic and political refugees in order to further the fight against communism. From 1983 to 1989, for example, 12,316 refugees from Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua were welcomed by the U.S., and this year alone 2,000 Cubans have been granted permanent-resident status under an anti-Castro law passed in 1966. The U.S. has even criticized its staunchest allies when they...