Restraint Is Conservative

I n every movement or institution, there is a generational turnover that can be discomfiting. A shift of emphasis or perspective can be taken as an accusation. This is currently happening on the right as younger voices advocating for more “restraint” in the use of America’s military rise in stature in the party and in the broader conservative movement. Their critique is starting to sting, and, consequently, the yelps are getting louder.

Such a thing should be expected. If anyone had forgotten, Matthew Continetti’s recent century-spanning history of the American right demonstrates that skepticism of American foreign adventurism, and a genuine repudiation of anything that smacks of imperialism or entangling alliances, is native to the American right and was natural for many American conservatives before the Cold War, even for William F. Buckley Jr. No surprise then that, as we enjoy more and more distance from the Cold War, more conservatives are coming to the same conclusion that Cold Warrior Jeane Kirkpatrick did in the early 1990s. “Most of the international military obligations that we assumed were once important are now outdated. Our alliances should be alliances of equals, with equal risks, burdens, and responsibilities,” she wrote. “It is time to give up the dubious benefits of superpower status and become again an unusually successful, open American republic.”

Conservatives who are still dedicated to building a maximalist foreign policy on the institutions and achievements of the Cold War have taken three rhetorical strategies to meet this ideological challenge. The first is to make demagogic accusations of disloyalty. The second is to conflate this challenge with left-wing criticism. And the third is to write it off as an Iraq War syndrome. My colleague Dan McLaughlin, recently contemplating some of the resistance to joining Israel’s war in Iran, tries all three.

After picking a variety of nutjobs (left and right) to quote among some saner if vociferous critics, McLaughlin conflates their views, including that of one who called for the bombing of Tel Aviv with those of JD Vance, who (I should not have to note) has not been calling for bombing Tel Aviv but offering a qualified defense of America’s ally in some quarters where it is less welcome. Offering to explain this phenomenon, McLaughlin writes that “these factions have a fundamentally similar view of America’s role in the world, in which American power is a bad thing, and American victory at best unthinkable, and at worst an outcome to be actively avoided.”

Is that it?

Shortly after this, McLaughlin chides Vance for engaging his critics on foreign policy in a way that “never allows for the possibility of good-faith disagreement uncorrupted by bad motives.” McLaughlin continues, “There’s no way to justify changing one’s mind, no path to agreeing to disagree for the sake of party unity, and no rationale to explain why two of your allies come to different conclusions unless you are ready to burn bridges with one of them.”

Physician, heal thyself.

McLaughlin says these groups (left and right anti-interventionists) “hate to be reminded how much they have in common.” I’m not as sure they do. But conservative foreign policy maximalists have just as many strange bedfellows. Does McLaughlin like knowing that his favored foreign policy in Ukraine is now favored by the German Green Party with its roots in the German new left of the 1980s? That the institutions supporting it, like NATO, have been run by men like Jens Stoltenberg, who grew up protesting American militarism, a man who during the Reagan era was the leader of the Workers’ Youth League?

The attempt to attribute opposition solely to the Iraq War is silly. Most advocates of restraint also opposed our intervention in Libya and criticized our covert operations in Syria — on legal, moral, and strategic grounds. That Vance and Barack Obama discovered political utility in articulating views broadly shared by the public is like criticizing a successful restaurant for serving food at dinner time. You can criticize the patron’s taste, but not gainsay the electoral success that Vance/Trump and Obama had measured against hawkish opponents like John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

Now, I can construct a good-faith account of neoconservative and foreign policy maximalist views. They can make the most natural conservative argument possible: that the world order bequeathed to us after the Cold War was the product of great effort and sacrifice by earlier generations, and it bestows on us many goods that we don’t sufficiently appreciate or even properly trace back to it. Our task is to be sufficiently grateful and make appropriate sacrifices to maintain it. It’s a neoconservative argument that could be endorsed by Roger Scruton.

To this argument, I would respond not with hatred of my country or fear of its victory but with the words of William F. Buckley Jr.: “Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.”

McLaughlin knows well the history of the right. And that the reemergence of restraint as a foreign policy on the right began not with the Iraq War but with the end of the Cold War and in debates between Charles Krauthammer and Jeane Kirkpatrick. It found expression in the mainstream right back when Sean Hannity was asking whether a single American airman was worth sacrificing for whatever could be won in Kosovo.

He knows well that the very critiques of statism that conservatives apply to domestic policy — that its advocates overpromise and under-deliver, that it is subject to mission creep and unintended consequences, and becomes the moralizing hobbyhorse of utopians — are simply applied by conservative restrainers consistently across all government. He knows that restrainers also argue that the techniques used in war sometimes migrate to use by domestic law enforcement (see debanking of conservatives). And he knows that this is a perennial strain in American politics, because it was bequeathed to us by a small-r republican founding that “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

So why does he write as if the only motivations available are discreditable ones?

I don’t know. But an ungenerous advocate for restraint might say that many conservative maximalists are stuck in a kind of nostalgia for a world that long ago ceased to exist. An ungenerous advocate for restraint would quote liberally from the demagogic characters like Mark Levin who commend us to personal loyalty to the president. An ungenerous advocate would say that the conservative hawks feel an obligation to a false memory of the 1980s — one where Reagan didn’t withdraw after Beirut, or engage in so much summitry — and this false memory has misled them into defending a series of commitments and institutions that were long ago taken over and redefined by progressives who use them for their own ends, not America’s.

But we have no ungenerous advocates here.