Civil War by Other Means

Michael Lind

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 1999

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Summary:  The debates over Kosovo blurred the old divisions between liberals and conservatives, but they did not rise above an even older split in American politics and foreign policy: the enduring divide between a hawkish South and a dovish North. Regional differences based on culture and values have made Greater New England the heartland of opposition to foreign wars and the U.S. military establishment since the 1700s; they have also made the South a bastion of interventionism. All too often, the regional divides over U.S. foreign policy have just been a reprise of the Civil War -- and they are a recipe for paralysis.

Michael Lind is Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and Washington Editor of Harper's Magazine. This essay is adapted from his latest book, Vietnam: The Necessary War.

AMERICA'S DOVISH NORTH AND HAWKISH SOUTH

The war in Kosovo opened more fissures in the American public and the U.S. foreign policy elite than any U.S. military intervention since the Vietnam War. Many have remarked that viewpoints about the war transcended the ideological categories of left and right, producing unusual alliances of conservatives and liberals among both supporters and opponents of the NATO campaign against Serbia. What has been overlooked, however, is the influence of American regional culture -- not only on attitudes toward the war in Kosovo but on the domestic politics of foreign policy throughout American history.

That so little attention has been paid to regional influences on U.S. foreign policy is surprising. After all, the polarization of American domestic politics along regional lines is one of the most obvious and striking phenomena of our time. The disproportionately southern congressional leadership reflects the new southern base of the Republican Party. Both liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans find their strongest support in the states of New England and the northern tier. The superimposition of regional cultural loyalties atop partisan ideologies accounts for much of the increase in partisan rancor in the United States. To name only one example, the impeachment of President Clinton revealed a stark division between this southern president's political enemies, who are overwhelmingly southern, and his predominantly northern defenders.

While the sectional division in domestic politics has become familiar, the impact of the divisions between America's regions on its diplomacy is a neglected subject. When the influence of sectionalism on U.S. foreign policy is discussed at all, it is usually in the context of trade disputes, which pit the northeastern-midwestern manufacturing belt against the high-tech industries and commodity exporters of the South and West. But regional influences on U.S. foreign policy go far beyond conflicts of economic interest. Regional differences in the United States based in culture and values -- particularly the enduring differences between anti-interventionists in the North and pro-interventionists in the South -- have shaped debates over American foreign policy in every generation and will continue to do so.

REGIONALISM AND AMERICA'S EARLY WARS

Regions in the United States are notoriously difficult to define. The best guide, perhaps, is provided by speech regions. Most linguists identify four regional dialects of American English: northern, midland, highland southern, and coastal southern. The Greater New England or northern speech region, according to the historian David Hackett Fischer, includes "New England, upstate New York, northern Ohio and Indiana, much of Michigan and Wisconsin, the northern plains, and the Pacific Northwest, together with islands of urban speech at Denver, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco." Since the late 1700s, this area has been the heartland of opposition to foreign wars and the U.S. military establishment. Pro-war, pro-military attitudes have been strongest in the areas identified with coastal southern speech (the Tidewater South) and, to a lesser degree, in the Highland South, from West Virginia through Tennessee to Texas.

The pattern of Greater New England's opposition to wars and ...

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