A conservative American foreign policy is not one based on illusions or reflexive hostility to the use of power.
A conservative American foreign policy is not one based on illusions or reflexive hostility to the use of power.
I n the grand tradition of internal National Review debates in our own pages, a few replies are due to Michael Brendan Dougherty for his response to my horseshoe coalition column on the alliance of progressives and the anti-interventionist “restrainer” right against American action on the Iranian nuclear program.
Factions and Party Leadership
First, Michael misses entirely my point about JD Vance. My concern is not simply that it is “ungenerous” for Vance to take the sort of scorched-earth ad hominem approach he customarily deploys in any foreign policy argument toward any voter, elected official, or public voice in the party or on the right who disagrees with him. (You can tell that Vance is not that comfortable defending Trump’s strike on Iran because he is, uncharacteristically, not doing this.) It’s one thing to approach intra-right arguments this way as a pundit or a House backbencher or even, if you can manage the statewide electorate, as a Senate gadfly. But Vance is now the vice president of the United States and aspires to be the party’s presidential nominee this time three years from now. I remember how well it went when John McCain used to open both barrels on whole segments of the party. It’s no way to build a coalition as a national leader. Comparing Vance to me, or to Mark Levin, only underscores that point.
This is a broader topic for another day, but it’s healthy and necessary for political parties and movements to prune around the edges by periodically purging handfuls of their very worst people, at least from positions of leadership; it’s insane to seek large-scale schisms and purges of big segments of your supporters.
Triage and Straitjackets
Second, this really misses the point about the approach taken by the likes of Tucker Carlson (who is, pace Michael’s invocation of “younger voices,” older than I am) or Charlie Kirk:
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? . . . 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. . . . The reemergence of restraint as a foreign policy . . . 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.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with finding the occasional ideological strange bedfellow in this or that controversy, and my argument is not against ever questioning the wisdom of foreign military adventures. I was against the 2011 Libya war and critical of bombing Syria. (I can’t speak for Sean Hannity, but one suspects that his critiques of Kosovo had more than a little to do with skepticism of Bill Clinton rather than philosophical rigor). As a rule, one prefers to avoid wars, and if wars are necessary, it is better to fight air wars than ground wars, better to fight short wars than long ones, and better to fight proxy wars rather than direct engagements. These are all elementary observations, but as I often say of political principles, they’re supposed to be a compass, not a straitjacket. Everything is contingent on the actual situation. Bombing Libya was a good idea in 1986, and that action did not result in a protracted ground war on the shores of Tripoli.
Michael cites Ronald Reagan’s withdrawal from Beirut, but this is not an argument against sound use of American power. The deployment of Marines to Lebanon (which Reagan later regarded as the greatest mistake of his presidency) was an error precisely because it did not project American power to advantage us and our friends at the expense of our enemies, nor did it take off the table a weapon that could be used against us by those enemies. The first principle of foreign policy is triage, and the overwhelming priority in 1983 was the Cold War — a point that Reagan’s liberal and progressive critics always misunderstood in demanding that, say, he should apply the same policies to South Africa that he applied to Nicaragua. Moreover, the first principle of war is victory over the enemy — and the category error of sending “peacekeepers” to Lebanon was that they weren’t there to seek and destroy an enemy.
Today, aside from the immediate issue of our doorstep in Mexico, the greatest threat is the great-power Eurasian axis of China-Russia-Iran. That organizes our triage of the global threats, as it did 40 years ago. I’d love to see America bring peace to Sudan and Congo and Nagorno-Karabakh, but I’m not willing to devote a lot of resources, much less American lives, to those causes. Dealing with aggression and the accumulation of power by China, Russia, and Iran is another level of priority. We should not send men abroad to nation-build for its own sake. When we send armed men into harm’s way, they are there to fight an identified enemy, or at least to defend an identified friend.
As for Reagan’s “summitry,” which is Michael’s other example of Reagan departing from the use of American power abroad? Reagan was indeed criticized at times by hawks for talks, but he resolutely refused to sit down with the Soviet leaders until he could do so from a position of strength — a position fortified not only by the grand defense buildup but also by the willingness to deploy American power (directly in Grenada and Libya, indirectly in Afghanistan and El Salvador). And Reagan’s summitry, in fact, not only helped ease the pathway to regime change all over the Soviet bloc, it also helped resolve far-flung conflicts such as the Angola war in ways favorable to American interests. None of this is much of an argument against the wisdom of an overall posture of projecting American power into the world in order to advance American interests. You jaw-jaw when your opposite number respects what you’re willing to do instead.
Iraq Syndrome
As for it being “silly” to see Iraq as the weight-bearing pole of the anti-interventionists’ current approach, the reason why I cited monomania about Iraq is that the voices I’m criticizing seem incapable of discussing any other foreign policy situation without waving the bloody shirt of Iraq, or of acknowledging that not every situation is the same. We heard all manner of dire insistences — I cited several of them — that bombing Iran’s nuclear program could not be done without it inevitably engaging us in a years-long ground war in Iraq, even though we had seen multiple prior examples of Israel doing something similar strictly as an air campaign. In fact, we have been repeatedly told by many of these same people that sending money and weapons to Ukraine would result in American troops there and/or nuclear war, neither of which has materialized after more than three years of grinding war between the Russians and the Ukrainians.
As I observed in 2014, the Iraq War was sui generis, and efforts to turn it into the master key for all foreign policy debates is, literally, fighting the last war. The reasons why included “the fact that the prior U.S. war with Iraq had never resulted in a stable peace, but was still subject to a cease-fire being violated by Iraq and being enforced, sporadically and at great expense, by American troops”; “the fact that Iraq had, almost alone even among hostile regimes, openly celebrated the September 11 attacks in its state-run media”; “the fact that Saddam’s regime was an ongoing state sponsor of terror that had previously hired terrorists to assassinate the first President Bush, was known to be financing suicide bombings against Israel and harboring a number of prominent terror figures”’; and “the fact that the economic sanctions regime against Iraq had been pervasively compromised and corrupted.”
While there are some similarities to the situation with Iran — including the length of our ongoing conflict with Iran, the toxicity of the regime, its promotion of international terrorism, and its success in corrupting the American diplomatic establishment in order to weaken sanctions regimes — we are still in a very different situation than we were in 2002 after twelve years of armed conflict with Iraq that already had no end in sight. While removing the Iranian regime would be a desirable end, it is sufficient for now — unless and until a movement arises within Iran to topple the regime — to defang its nuclear ambitions. The fact that so many critics of the strikes refused to even engage with the possibility that this was the end goal cannot be discussed without reference to their endless effort to relitigate Iraq.
An Empire of Liberty
Michael evokes the foreign policy of early Americans. It is true that early American foreign policy thought in terms of, as Michael says, “a small-r republican founding that ‘goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.’” That’s a quote from a July 4 speech given by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821. Of course, the speech was given two years after Adams negotiated the wresting of Florida from Spain by force when Florida was unable to control violence emanating across its borders, and two years before Adams helped James Monroe promulgate his famous doctrine.
The impetus for the Monroe Doctrine was precisely the American aim to prevent self-governing republics in our hemisphere from being gobbled up by aggressors — specifically Russia, whose saber-rattling was the immediate trigger for Monroe’s announcement. Monroe, drawing on private advice from Thomas Jefferson, drew a distinction between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres specifically on the theory that the former had always been ruled by monarchies, while the latter was covered with republics (many of them newly minted) who must be defended:
With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected, and by causes which must be obvious to all enlightened and impartial observers. . . . The political system of the [European] powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America. This difference proceeds from that which exists in their respective Governments; and to the defense of our own, which has been achieved by the loss of so much blood and treasure, and matured by the wisdom of their most enlightened citizens, and under which we have enjoyed unexampled felicity, this whole nation is devoted. . . .
In regard to those continents [North and South America] circumstances are eminently and conspicuously different. It is impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent without endangering our peace and happiness; nor can anyone believe that our southern brethren, if left to themselves, would adopt it of their own accord. It is equally impossible, therefore, that we should behold such interposition in any form with indifference. [Emphasis added.]
From the earliest days, the republic drew a connection between its vital interests and the political systems of its neighbors — even neighbors thousands of miles away. The fundamental nature of international affairs has not changed since then. But the practical realities have. The Founders had no need to worry that our navy could face a sneak attack from Japan, or that our major cities could be set ablaze from Afghanistan. They similarly lacked globe-bestriding military power — a lack that George Washington in particular felt keenly. As realists, they accepted the umbrella of the protection that the British Navy provided to free navigation and to the actual enforcement of the early Monroe Doctrine. They operated in a world that lacked telecommunications, air travel, and nuclear weapons, and in which the spread of republics and democracies across Europe and Asia was a distant dream. Their philosophical insights remain current; their assessments of the realistic calculus of powers and threats that existed in their own day, however, are simply obsolete. They’d be the first to tell us that if they reappeared today.
That’s even before we get into the extent to which American foreign policy was much more globally engaged in our first century than the anti-interventionist crowd would like to admit. Thomas Jefferson sent Marines to Tripoli and James Madison fought the British Empire to protect our rights of free navigation. During the 1848–49 revolutions, Zachary Taylor sent an envoy authorized to recognize an independent Hungary, and Lewis Cass Jr. handed out American passports to get Italian revolutionaries out of Rome. Secretary of State Daniel Webster wasn’t even on speaking terms with the Austrian ambassador over Webster’s pro-Hungarian posture. Commodore Matthew Perry, in opening Japan to Western trade, argued for acquiring coaling stations on Okinawa. At the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln sent an American warship to bombard Japan, William Seward tried to negotiate a telegraph line connecting us to Russia, and both welcomed the Russian fleet to our shores during a threatened European war over Poland. At the war’s end, Ulysses S. Grant sent the army to the Rio Grande to threaten France if it didn’t evacuate from Mexico.
A Matter of Methods
Michael argues that we should be skeptical of military power in exactly the same way that we are skeptical of, say, welfare-state social engineering. As a general caution, this is fine, but it also misunderstands the extent to which the government’s competence varies by the roles it undertakes and how far afield those roles are from its core competencies.
The application of military force to kill the enemy is something that government is quite good at. It’s what governments are constituted for. Of course, before committing to the use of military force, we ought to ask carefully whether we are doing so in a way that does the things we are good at.
My own view of regime changes (such as those in postwar Germany and Japan) is the conservative view that men can change governments more easily than governments can change men. If we aim to fundamentally change foreign societies, we cannot — at best, as in Japan, we can change governments and perhaps enable major shifts in society to take place without the hand of government holding them back. Sometimes, as in post-Soviet Russia, the society is offered an opportunity and fails to keep it.
What Iran today has in common with Saddam-era Iraq is that our quarrel is with the governing elite, and we have reason to believe that its foreign policy would change if the regime was gone. Isn’t that the more modest view than believing that we can reform Iran by diplomacy? In the case of Iraq, it was the restrainers who argued that we should have faith in the competence of international bureaucratic regimes to conduct a perpetual inspection and surveillance regime that our military would actively enforce for the rest of time; it was the hawks who thought that the problem was Saddam and the solution was not more government oversight but elimination of the problem. Were we wrong? The Iraqi regime itself has made no major trouble for us since then, and the foreign forces that poured into the country to prevent by bloodshed the self-determination of the Iraqi people at the ballot box did so because they believed that a self-governing Iraqi society (even a very illiberal one) was a greater threat to them than to us.
Republicans and Predators
The anti-interventionist argument is, fundamentally, not about restraint in this or that conflict. It is an argument about the kind of country we should be — but an unrealistic one founded at bottom on very un-conservative assumptions.
Where Michael has a fair point about conservatism and a limited foreign policy is in saying that “restrainers also argue that the techniques used in war sometimes migrate to use by domestic law enforcement,” and more broadly that a large national security state is in serious tension with the small, modest government that conservatives prefer. It would be better, surely, to live in a country that had no need for major investments in military, intelligence, and other security services, and could rely upon a Pax provided by someone else.
But by whom? This is where the restrainers and the progressives begin to converge in their utopianism. In domestic law enforcement, conservatives understand that predators exist and can be countered, suppressed, or deterred only by force — force that is ever-present and credible. The more visible the force, the less it is apt to need use. Progressives, by contrast, start with the desire to avoid using the force of law and its armed defenders, and from this premise they must come up with justifications for downplaying the threats of predators and spinning arguments for how they can be contained without locking them up. Inevitably, this process creates psychological pressure to present justifications for their point of view and their right to abuse their neighbors. We see the same dynamics at work in foreign affairs, which is how you get people like Carlson justifying the thinking of Vladimir Putin regarding Ukraine and Dave Smith doing the same for Hamas.
Might may not make right, but it makes responsibility. We’d prefer not to be the world’s policeman, but we won’t very much like the way force is applied by the other applicants for the job. Like it or not, power not exercised is power given away — and if we abdicate our power to the likes of China, Russia, and Iran, they will extend their reach as ours recedes. The result will be more war, not less. It is a naïve understanding of the whole history of international affairs to pretend otherwise. The world we live in is constantly in motion, but humanity is not actually that radically different from how it was when the United States defeated Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Soviet Russia. We should not so lightly discard the hard-won lessons of that era — not if we think those victories were worth winning.
The other commonly observed psychological dynamic that we see play out over and over in these situations is the critics of American action becoming wedded to a narrative of American defeat and fearful of the implications of American victory. True, on the restrainer right this does not always play out as it does with progressives, as a manifestation of the view that our country and Western civilization are bad. The liberal and progressive tendency to fear victory and power helps explain why the same people who side with Ukraine as the underdog against Russia cannot bring themselves to do so with Israel, which is likewise the morally superior combatant but has the vice of being the stronger one.
But once committed from the jump to the notion that we erred in getting involved, there is a powerful impulse to look at all times for evidence to confirm that we must fail, and to resist any effort that might bring about success. We must come home immediately, lest we succeed, disprove the critics, and take the wrong lessons in the future. That was how Barack Obama approached Iraq, it was how Joe Biden approached Vietnam and Afghanistan, and it is how Vance at every turn has approached Ukraine.
So long as we live in a dangerous world, we will need not only to protect our interests but to use the great power we have to maintain our relative preeminence over our enemies. That inevitably entails constant effort to resist allowing them to expand their territory, their weapons, and their suzerainty over their neighbors. We should, of course, act with prudence in committing both blood and treasure that are ever harder to come by. But if we build around our minds a Maginot Line of illusions about the harmlessness of revanchist great-power predators and religious fanatics and the capacity of diplomatic blandishments to control them, we are doing nothing I recognize as conservative.