Via Atrios, Edward Luttwak argues in the NY Times today that, based on recent US history, and contrary to many expectations, a second term Bush national security policy will be more moderate than the last:

...While re-elected presidents who no longer have to face the voters are theoretically free to pursue their wildest dreams, in practice they never do. Consider the last two second-term presidents.

For the second Reagan administration, dovish pundits predicted an even tougher stance against the Soviet "evil empire," as well as a further acceleration of the arms race, led by the so-called Star Wars system against ballistic missiles. After all, in Reagan I, all the ceremonies of détente had been stopped, and a huge budget deficit had been accepted to build up the armed forces as quickly as possible. Some feared that Reagan II might escalate confrontation to outright war.

For Clinton II, the Cassandras warned of an even more passive foreign policy than Clinton I, during which the administration had refused to interrupt the Rwanda genocide, delayed intervention in Bosnia, and left Middle East diplomacy to the most tentative secretary of state anyone can remember, Warren Christopher. The president had shown enthusiasm for every aspect of domestic policy and an indifference to foreign affairs that not even live television coverage of preventable massacres could overcome.

Curiously enough, however, re-elected presidents tend to disappoint their most enthusiastic followers by changing direction: they go right if they started on the left (or vice versa); become active where they were passive; turn dovish if they were hawkish; and in all cases converge toward the center of gravity of American politics, as well as toward the mainstream foreign-policy traditions . . .

Why these reversions to the moderate mainstream? It is not a desire on the part of the president to be more widely loved, or to court the approval of future historians. Such things may have an influence on the margins, but they are overemphasized. Rather, the essential mechanism is simply entropy - the powerful tendency of any dynamic system to revert to equilibrium after being unbalanced. This applies no less to politics than it does to a glass of water.

We'll see.

Update: Henry Nau has more on tribal warfare within the conservative camp. Highly recommended.

Posted by Laura at November 28, 2004 01:42 PM