REVIEW, JEANNE KIRKPATRICK, THE REAGAN PHENOMENON

Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick. THE REAGAN PHENOMENON, AND OTHER SPEECHES ON FOREIGN POLICY. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, c. 1983. xv +230 pp.





In late mediaeval times a unique form of "how to do it" literature known as the "mirror of princes" literature arose in Europe. Holding up examples of virtue and vice, pious clerks hoped to inspire the virtuous prince to rule justly and in a Christian spirit in order to attain good fortune on earth and fitting disposition after death. One of the later practicioners was Niccolo Machievelli, secretary to the Florentine Republic in Italy, whose splendidly condensed job-seeking tract THE PRINCE redirected a formerly pietistic genre into realistic or amoral politics with a strong undercurrent of nationalism. Guided, as it were, by the Italian precedent, Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick, the present US ambassador to the United Nations, has published some selected addresses on the present Administration's UN policies and the significence of the Reagan victory of 1980 as her contribution to a "mirror for reps" literature.

In six subdivisions of addresses to variegated bodies, the virtues and vices of Mrs. Kirkpatrick and the current Administration's foreign policy are luminously mirrored. Some sixty pages in Parts 3 and 4 are selected from speeches treating Israel's Drang nach Osten and the not-so-splendid isolation America enjoys within the UN. Some fifty pages in Part 5 are titled, with questionable understatement, "Some Troublesome Problems of Foreign Policy" such as most of Asia, Africa and Central America. These proportions are instructive and may suggest inter alia that a mote in the State Department's eye may prevent it from seeing the (falling) beams all around it.

Perhaps, too, an element of Machiavellian realism may have intertwined with other motives in issuing this collection. But not too much, for the Ambassador formally abjures rationalism in foreign policy and advocates "taking the cure" of history, which at her hands teaches that the liberties we are privileged to enjoy as putative victors in the Revolution and as descendents of Englishmen are sufficiently protected in the wise arrangement of offices provided in the Constitution and "...not by the Bill or Rights." (p. 44) O tempora! O Watergate!

It is not surprising that her address to the Natinal Urban League on "Goals in Africa" appears not to have touched the normal concerns of that body. The term "supply-side" is not in her vocabulary, but she finds "The case of Sri Lanka is particularly interesting..." (p. 24) The line separating neo-realism from neo-Phiilstinism is a thin one and at times Mrs. Kirkpatrick's formulations seem too close to that line for comfort. But her problems with a human rights formula stem largely from the Administration's commitment to throw out former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski while keeping the bath water, i.e., a tepid human rights pollicy that is less zealous and more manageable. Driving in the fast lane with one or two wheels skittering off the track, Jeanne the K nevertheless zooms to the finish line under the yellow-and white checkered flag of Christendom with a proposal to encourage the Brezhnev regime to withdraw from Afghanistan, factual rebuttals to the Sandinista spokesmen for Nicaragua and a heartfelt repudiation of Kampuchea's former leader, Pol Pot. And the Bill of Rights is suddenly (without being identified as such) fundamental once more (p.62).

It is bodacious to assert that the election of Ronald Reagan marked a watershed in American political life. (When has a recent Presidential election NOT been so characterized?) An excess of reductionism may be seen in her condensation of the twenty years from Truman's Point Four to the Tet offensive (1948-68) as the Cold War era. The decade from 1968 to about 1980, seen through these Reaganite goggles, is characterized as the interlude of detente, opening with the turgid rise of the New Left and detumescing during the flaccid presidency of Jimmy Carter. The Third Period, like the Third Rome, promises to a true believer's eyes to stand forever--"a fourth there shall not be"--but this is holding up a mirror to prince to show them in court regalia rather than as they actually, warts and wattles, are.

In the realistic spirit of Machiavelli, Mrs. Kirkpatrick decries the illusion that possession of armaments is eo ipso an incitement to violence. Indeed, she could point at MiG-23's in Cuba which can deliver nuclear devices, the airframe toggles that could carry them, and a Soviet brigade that guards them, but forbears for some reason to do so. Her conviction that peace and liberal democracy rests on American power is firmly expressed (p. 14).

Poised midway between Kissinger and Brzezinski, Mrs. Kirkpatrick may be characterized in Continental erms as a Liberal-Conservative. She is a better rhetorical driver than a mechanic of ideas: it has been a painstaking and sometimes painful exercise for her to tune her philosophcal engine to run without embarassing ideological backfires. As a political scientist, she demonstrates her forte to be analysis and presentation. Her addresses may be commended for their lucidity. It is liberalism in the traditional sense that underlies her most atttractive prose. This is seen at its best in her reflections on"The Reagan Phenomenon an the Liberal Tradition" in Rome. (How much more persuasive she could be staging "Hamlet" without Reagan as the Prince!) her tribute to the Italian political tradition from Marsilius of Padua in the 14th century (too radical, perhaps, for John Paul II) to Gaetano Mosca in the 20th century (but why not Vilfredo Pareto?) is intelligent and informed. A liberal commitment shines through her persistence in reminding audiences that words make a difference--as they do, if we are to communicate rationally, and if Humanidad is to be a criterion of civilized life. Any speaker who can deliver a readable commencement address deserves to be heard in policy council as well as in public advocacy. (Where ARE those speeches on Argentina?)
If the CIA should incur an expedient vacancy before the Orwellian year of 1984, Mrs. Kirkpatrick might approach the Great Communicator with the words of Portia in The Merchant of Venice:

Happy in this, she is not yet so old
But that she may learn: happier than this,
She is not bred so dull but she can learn;
Happiest of all, is that her gentle spirit
Commits itself to yours to be directed.

Tempered, qualified and humane CIA directors are precious few, and Mrs. Kirkpatrick is one of the few intellectuals in the Reagan Cabinet who, despite her understandable confusion in domestic politics, is apparently capable of looking into the mirror of princes and taking a long view.

Review commissioned by the Baltimore Sun, which declined to publish it. The Sun sent a $15.00 kill fee.