If America has Foreign Policy wrong, who’s got it right?
The idea of missionizing transcends Right and Left, but the essential difference that I’m interested in pointing out is that the Left does it in the name of humanitarian intervention, and the Right in the name of freedom; using the term Freedom as an explicit appeal to religious motivation. When George W. Bush came to power he set free the, Religious Right, to use overt religious language, missionizing language that actually moves from “freedom” to “salvation,” as a justification for American power. We cast ourselves against Saddam Hussein and the “Axis of Evil” entirely in terms of a binary evil-versus-good contest, and in doing so set into action two negatives forces: the “eating away” if you will of the ‘Wall of separation” between politics and religion, and our relationship with other religions.
