Hawks Fight Doves As America Transitions to a Global World

Americans elected a liberal president in 2008 to take the country forward in an era when challenges equaled those of the industrial revolution 150 years before and the Roosevelt era some 60 years later. Globalization was a fact. The information highway spread enlightenment and distortions with equal rapidity. With the election, America embraced the challenges while the losing conservatives rallied to preserve the old ways.

The Oxford dictionary defines conservatives as averse to rapid change while liberals favored individual rights and moderate reform. "Rapid" and "moderate" are relative terms but two associated terms are not. Those are political hawks, who advocate an aggressive or warlike policy, especially in foreign affairs, and political doves, who advocate a peaceful policy. The term "hawk," by that source, also refers to a rapacious person.

The hallmark of the 2008 US election was the choice to make radical changes to meet an unprecedented global economic crisis. By the above definitions, neither conservatives nor liberals would advocate the necessitated course precipitated by hawkish elements in the prior conservative administration that continued a warlike policy despite dwindling support for the approach in an obviously interdependent world. China's well-publicized responses to global sensitivities during the 2008 Olympics just before the American national political conventions exemplified the interconnectedness. World opinion mattered when a record-breaking number of a global audience tuned in on television, internet and emerging electronic devices to affect economics.

American voters recognized those globalizing international sensibilities but the conservative administration was deaf to them. Numerous sources repeatedly reported dissatisfaction with the sitting administration's policies that by the election in November were approved by less than a third of Americans.

That disconnect between the American public and the administration with regard to unilateralist and preemptive policies for protecting the country was echoed by the world's 200 other countries, as evidenced by the continued drawdown of coalition troops in Iraq. Similarly losing favor both at home and abroad were protectionist economic policies of a hawkish campaign to preserve the leading American economic status quo by a hands-off deregulation of American financial institutions controlled by the moneyed.

The old order of conservative male white dominance exploded in 2008 and caused the global economic crisis to clearly prove the approach no longer worked. America broke the global glass ceiling of racism to meet the challenge of the unknown by electing the first non-white leader of a western industrialized nation as most likely able to address the crisis. Predictably enough, that historic step was a trumpet call to hawks of every stripe.

A non-white leader for the world's leading power was not coincidental in a world of 200 countries claiming equal rights to the future. The Pacific island states that provide seafood and vacation spots for the world, as an example, are directly affected by climate change, as documented by the United Nations among others. Trailing behind the industrialized powers on the development scale, they have newly established forums to protect and empower themselves. Those mechanisms, however, have proven to be slower than the world's terrorist hawks, who have laid claim to those emerging areas as headquarters for operating beyond the reach of developing law.

Such non-state terrorist actors were responsible for the brutal 9/11 attack against the world's most prosperous country in 2001. The conservative retaliatory response of the sitting administration at the time continued to escalate until it evolved into a presumptive right to take preemptive military action against not just terrorist groups but other states, using measures of questionable legality by either national or international standards.

Important as they are, the economic issues facing the United States in a global world are a mere integral part of the challenge mandated by the 2008 election. Having broken the global racial glass ceiling to continue on its path as a country blessed with abundance to lead the world by providing opportunity, America in the new Obama era was faced with adjusting to a world in which the developing rule of law was not only sacrosanct but essential for survival.

Rule of law has been the standard for human relations since England's 1215 Magna Carta set limits on the rights of monarchs and gave rights to the people in the form of common law and Babylonia's King Hammurabi set down the principles of governance and conflict dispute in 1250. The rule of law is upheld through national, bilateral, multilateral and international compacts, treaties and accords, all of which are agreements to abide by standards for settling differences, disputes and conflicting approaches to attaining aims without the resort to armed conflict.

In essence, the rule of law signifies cooperativeness and implies constraints on the deepest human primal instincts for the drama of conflict. In the twenty-first century and a nuclear age in which the weapons of conflict are a lucrative staple of human commerce, the resistance to the rule of law represents a terminal activity. It takes the form of suicide bombings, nuclear threats or the promulgation of warnings about cooperating with a global world.