Summary of “The Carter Syndrome”
In this article, Mead explains that the US Presidents adopt four types of foreign policy: the Hamiltonians, Wilsonians, Jeffersonians, and Jacksonians. The aspects that the Hamiltonians love include a strong national government, strong military power, realist point of view, and how the economic development can be promoted both domestically and internationally. The Wilsonians, on the other hand, love the ideology of democracy and human rights in the implementation of the US’s foreign policy. The Jeffersonians’s major goal is to minimize the US commitments and roles in the world. While the Jacksonians are those who are always suspicious about the other three’s foreign policy, and they are those who also despise people who target civilians during a war. Even though these point-of-views seemed to occupy the end of the spectrums, Mead stressed the fact that most US presidents do not only adopt a single view, but plenty.
Bush is one of the US Presidents that tried to bring the Jacksonians and Wilsonans into a coalition after the incident of 9/11. The Jacksonians demanded a response from Bush, since this terrorist group had targeted civilians during their action and they also originally thought that Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction, and that he has a close link with Al Qaeda. Then, Bush decided to invade Afghanistan and roll the Taliban government over. But since he could not prove Hussein’s link with Al Qaeda and hisweapons, Bush switched to a more Wilsonian approach. He claimed that the war in Afghanistan was to promote democracy in the region. Those two beliefs collide with each other. The Jacksonians have little interest toward expensive democracy-venture abroad (the cost of military or sending young Americans to fight in the Middle East are expensive), but they are also unwilling to see the United States lose its honor since it has meddled in this issue. Bush failed to create this coalition between the...