The foreign policy of the Reagan administration has many source documents, none of which mention cowboys.
There is a big difference between `cowboys have always been my heroes' and `I've going to sell arms to Iran to free American hostages because that's what a real cowboy would do.'
But the cultural impact of the cowboy archetype does seem to be highly significant.
I think you might lack a sufficiently broad experience to see how unusual the adoption of this kind of cultural imagery is. If you saw a Japanese prime minister walking around in laquered armour, or British prime minister crouching in a tree wearing a hat with a feather in it, you'd recognize a significant and unusual cultural phenomenon. Being too close to it, and habituated to it, you don't see the fundamental oddness of it.[ Parent ]
As for the lacquered armor point, it's a silly point. That cowboys have been culturally influential in the US is not in dispute. The question is whether the cowboy myth has fundamentally altered US foreign policy.
You're the one who brought up this "foreign policy" strawman. I've never made any claims about it.
The nature of culture is that it's virtually impossible to point to it as a single factor behind a policy decision. But the pervasiveness of culture still makes it a significant force across all decisions.--"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise." -- Bertrand Russell[ Parent ]
I thought that to be a clear indication we were talking about foreign policy, the against terrorism of which is a significant part.
But if you don't want to narrow the discussion to foreign policy, that's fine. Point me to any aspect of the Reagan administration's policies that would be substantially different were Reagan not a self-styled cowboy.
``The nature of culture is that it's virtually impossible to point to it as a single factor behind a policy decision.''
Right. I'm not asking for that. But if it is that significant, there will be decisions where the influence is clear. For example, there are spots in al-Farabi's writing where you can clearly see the influence of Islam and there are points in his writing where he differs from Aristotle and Plato whom he usually follows pretty closely. Quite a few of those differences are explicable through the influence of Islam. If Farabi wasn't a Muslim, it is hard to believe that he would have wrote those passages. But that doesn't mean that those passages are solely written because of Farabi's religion.
Likewise, if being a cowboy holds that much sway over Reagan and Bush, then it seems to me that there must be some element of the policy of their administrations that a guy can point to and say, `see, normally you'd expect someone of this particular ideology to say X but because they are cowboys, they said Y.' But if you can't do that, there is no sound basis to say that being a cowboy was anything other than a bit of public posturing.
History is not a subject in which causes can be determined with certainty. Any time Historian A says Cause 1 was important, it's possible for Historian B to say, no, that was trivial, it was Cause 2 instead.
Now if you want specific examples where the cowboy role could influence policy, there are obvious things to choose from. Alaskan oil-drilling for example: if your self-image is as a frontiersman, you're more likely to want to explore and exploit the frontier. The disbanding of the Iraqi army is another example: co-opting them would have been the pragmatic thing to do given the lack of stabilizing manpower. But cowboys and sheriffs defeat their enemies, they don't co-opt them (unlike Robin Hood after he beat Little John at quarterstaffs, for instance).
But there's not much point me naming a bunch of instances. There are very many to choose from, and you're just going to say "oh no it isn't" to each one. Possibly you're on the far-Realist edge of the Realist-Idealist spectrum.--"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise." -- Bertrand Russell[ Parent ]
