Newt Gingrich v. John Reid

Patrick Doherty

March 07, 2006

Two articles on TomPaine.com today make me wonder just how long the White House communications office can continue to convince Americans that terrorism, an asymetric political tactic, is the main threat facing the country. In our marquee slot, "The Coming Resource Wars," we have an analysis about U.K. Defense Secretary John Reid's admission last week that global warming is going to destabilize the international political order. Meanwhile in our News Worthy section, we have Reid's opposite number in the Pentagon, Don Rumsfeld, pushing a recent strategy paper by Newt Gingrich in which the arch-conservative assumes that it is ideology that is driving threats.

Reid's analysis is the new element here, of course. Reid and his prime minister, Tony Blair, have placed climate change on their list of long-term strategic threats, and this speech was Reid's first foray into the issue. It was a dark tale: water shortages, wars over arable land, widespread famine. Of course, Klare points out is that the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessement came to the same conclusions two years ago. The difference is that the U.K. is listening.

What is perhaps more concerning, though, is that if I had to locate Democratic candidates for president on a continuum between the U.K's John Reid and Newt Gingrich, many have taken positions that resonate more with Newt Gingrich. Hillary Clinton, Evan Bayh, John Kerry and Joe Biden have all staked out positions that resonate more with Newt in a short-sighted attempt to look "tough" on defense.

Obviously, Democrats will need more than merely the one-off intervention of the U.K.'s defense minister before they abandon their pollster's myopic advice. That help is out there. Two weeks ago, former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer declared that America and Europe need "a new strategic consensus." He cited "energy, energy, energy" as the basis of that consensus. In essence, Reid is singing from the same page. Reid says that climate change is a major cause of the emerging threats to international peace and security. Climate change, as we know, is fundamentally a product of our post-war industrial economic order—an economic order based on a transportation system that is 96 percent dependent on oil.

That Reid and Fischer generally agree on the big strategic picture should be a powerful wake-up call to Democrats. Two senior European statesmen have now posited the basis of a new transatlantic strategic consensus: the interdependent issues of energy security and climate change. But to join that consensus, the U.S. must agree to decisively transform its own economic system away from scarce, destabilizing fossil fuels and do so in a way that increases overall security, peace and prosperity.

In contrast, Gingrich and Rumsfeld are developing plans that implicitly defend that dysfunctional economic order. This immediately means their conservative path will foreclose the kind of collaboration with Europe they claim to be seeking. Indeed, the full title of the Chatham House event Secretary Reid addressed was, "Transatlantic Defense Partnerships: Managing Divergence." Divergence indeed.

This is the debate America ought to be having about national security. Instead, we are left watching a bunch of senators trying to demonstrate how tough they can be. In light of this emerging European strategic consensus, Democrats need to take a hard look at where their short-term national security policies will get them, and then say goodbye to Newt.