Congressional Quarterly: At a Glittering Georgetown Dinner, a Pitch for Bipartisanship
By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff
The setting was a shimmering Georgetown dinner party, crackling with power. The guests, pillars of American foreign policy, U.S. senators and congressmen, a few national security intellectuals and influential Washington journalists.
The subjects: War and peace, what to do about Russia, the Middle East, terrorism.
It was, in short, just the kind of gathering that conservative Republicans have mocked and scorned since Richard M. Nixon occupied the White House.
In truth, however, the so-called foreign policy establishment — Cold War Democrats and moderate Republicans — had long gone the way of the typewriter, when polite discourse gave way to such shouting and insults over Vietnam that even longtime friendships were destroyed.
But a dinner party at John and Theresa Kerry’s Georgetown mansion last week provided a glimpse of the once and future foreign policy establishment, particularly if the Democrats win in November.
The occasion was a book party for Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisers to two American presidents, and the debut of the American Security Project, the brainchild of august Republicans and Democrats who believe that partisan politics has poisoned the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.
Gary Hart, the Colorado Democrat and national security maven, and Richard L. Armitage, the Republican foreign policy official, are co-chairing the organization, whose board includes retiring Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel , former Reagan chief of staff Kenneth M. Duberstein, former Democratic Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and a dozen other luminaries from Congress, the armed services, the diplomatic corps and business, many of whom attended the dinner.
The name calling and character assassination has got to stop, said Scowcroft, a retired Army general who served in four Republican administrations, including as national security adviser to the current president’s father.
“I’ve been increasingly disturbed by this politicization,” he said, as waiters quietly cleared the dinner plates of the 60 or so guests. “It pushes you to extremes because it doesn’t solve the problem.”
Both sides need to radically lower the volume, said Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser.
The first step is to agree on what the problem is, then work out differences over how to solve it.
“I don’t try to destroy his arguments,” Brzezinski said, referring to Scowcroft. Showing respect is “no guarantee” that you’ll convert someone to your side, he said, but at least “you will have had a thoughtful consideration of the issues.”
Scowcroft lamented “the disintegration of bipartisanship,” which he said began with Vietnam and Watergate, and from which “we’ve never really recovered.”
“My fear,” he added, annoyed by at all the smack-down talk about Iran and Russia, “is that this is a wonderful country full of ignorant people who are susceptible to demagoguery.”
Take Georgia.
“Where would we be now if Georgia was part of NATO?” Scowcroft wondered, mocking the breezy advocacy of many conservatives — including the party’s vice presidential candidate Sarah Plain — to invite the former Soviet state into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Georgia’s membership in NATO would have required the United States to go to war with Russia over its invasion of a country on its border — or capitulate.
Either way, a nightmare, Scowcroft suggested.
Likewise, repeatedly threatening Iran with air attacks may persuade the great unwashed that unilateral U.S. military action is the way to go, despite all current evidence to the contrary, but it’s demagoguery, he and Brzezinski said.
It won’t stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon — quite possibly the opposite — any more than it did North Korea. President Bush and other responsible officials probably know that, but banging war drums — not negotiations — keeps the party’s base stirred up.
And now the Bush administration wants to give Georgia a billion dollars, including military aid, Scowcroft scoffed, to rebuild.
But Brzezinski, getting into the bipartisan swing of things, said it wasn’t a bad idea. Although Georgia, and perhaps Ukraine, shouldn’t be offered full NATO membership, maybe a looser association with the Western alliance might work.
“Whoa,” interjected David Ignatius, the Washington Post columnist, who was moderating the discussion. “Brzezinski agrees with Bush”?
No, no, protested Brzezinski, a Polish immigrant. “Defensive arms only.”
Scowcroft, the military professional who has actually had to fight wars begun by politicians, was agitated.
Re-arming Georgia in any way, or bringing it into an alliance of any kind, is ridiculous, he said (somewhat ironically, since he was the Republican of the duo).
“They would still be defenseless.” Why delude them, and ourselves, about an alliance?
“The Russians didn’t invent the Monroe Doctrine,” he scoffed. That was our invention, to keep Europe out of our “back yard,” 200 years ago.
Why wouldn’t the Russians feel entitled to their own back yard?
“I’m not saying we should abandon the Georgians,” Scowcroft said. But “provoking the Russians” by arming its former Soviet state is “wrong.”
“We need them to help us on Iran and terrorism.”
But, Brzezinski said, ”Vladimir Putin views the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest calamity of the twentieth century — not World War I, not World War II, or the Holocaust.”
The Russian wants it all back.
The European Union’s political and commercial instruments, Scowcroft countered, were the appropriate means to help protect Georgia, not empty pledges to defend it with force.
“A new cold war over this,” Scowcroft said, “would be preposterous.”
The general was directing his scorn at politicians clamoring for a military showdown with Russia, not really Brzezinski. But it sounded like fighting words, nevertheless.
“A revolution is not a dinner party,” Mao tse-Tung said.
Neither is a dinner party a revolution. In this vicious political season, it’s only a shot in the dark.
But it’s a start.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
