What if with Gary Hart

Former senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart has been in the news lately. I first saw this with an article in The Atlantic. According to this article, Lee Atwater engineered the scandal which took Gary Hart out of the presidential race, fabricating Mr. Hart's extramarital affair. Mr. Atwater reportedly told this story to his counterpart in the Hart campaign shortly before his death from a brain tumor.

I'll ignore whether the account is true or not. Lee Atwater did report creating the Willie Horton scandal against Michael Dukakis but didn't publicly take responsibility for the Gary Hart scandal, just a private statement to his opposite number.

Still we are now seeing a stories speculating about what might have been if Gary Hart had won the presidency instead of George Bush, including an interview with Gary Hart. This speculation is filtered through the lens of today, of course. Thus, speculation centers around there never having been a Gulf War, extending to neither George Bush being president and by extension no Donald Trump.

Let's look at the what if's. First, in 1988 when Mr. Hart was running and through 1989 the big foreign policy issue was not the Middle East but the fall of Communism. The Berlin Wall fell in November, 1989, 9 months after Mr. Bush was inaugurated. So the unasked question is whether the Berlin Wall would have fallen under President Hart, or would he have come into office announcing defense cuts (reversing the Reagan buildup), giving Soviet Russia time to rebuild its strength. Of course we'll never know.

On the subject of the Gulf War there are two questions. First, would Iraq under Saddam have still invaded Kuwait? I haven't investigated but Saddam's invasion was based on Kuwait being a province of Iraq. This doesn't seem to have anything to do with George Bush being president. So the Kuwaiti invasion would still have happened. The argument seems to be that Gary Hart as president would not have invaded to drive out the Iraqis.

If there had not been a Gulf War then Osama Bin Laden would most likely not have turned as strongly against the United States and would not have created Al Qaeda. So there likely would not have been a Twin Towers attack and Middle Eastern history would have changed.

On the other hand, there would have been a Middle East with a strong, beligerent Iraqi regime bullying its neighbors. Iraq had just concluded its war against Iran (fought to a stalemate). Iraq would likely have turned against Saudi Arabia or more directly against Israel. So instead of a Gulf War in Kuwait we might well have had another oil embargo or a new Arab Israeli war. Either of these results would not have been the peaceful result that commentators and Mr. Hart envision but could easily have been a much less stable world.

This is the nature of "what if" speculations. It's easy to change one event and argue how great the world would be but we need to consider other events which may go a different direction.

As to the argument there would never have been a Donald Trump, Mr. Trump was elected 20 years after the election Mr. Hart pulled out of. Many things could happen over 20 years. Much of the support for Donald Trump was opposition to "coastal elites", to use a broad stereotype. None of the coastal elite philosophies tie even indirectly to the Gulf War, so the rise of Trump or a similar nationalist leader likely would still have happened even if there were a President Gary Hart.