As 65-year-old letters between conservative heavyweights reveal, the right’s internecine clashes on foreign policy are nothing new.
As 65-year-old letters between conservative heavyweights reveal, the right’s internecine clashes on foreign policy are nothing new.
D onald Trump, who promised to “not seek to impose our way of life on anyone” in an inward-looking first inaugural address, has bombed seven countries in the year since his second inaugural.
This Shyamalanian plot twist, of the type that infuses political theater with more shock value than the movie theater, unleashes drama among the president’s more melodramatic well-wishers. When Tucker Carlson, who opposes intervention in Iran, visited the White House earlier this month, Laura Loomer referred to him as “Tucker Qatarlson,” the “virulent Jew hater,” and “mouthpiece for Islamic jihadists.” Days earlier, Carlson had suggested that she rename her Loomer Unleashed podcast Loomer Unhinged.
The dustup highlights the online right’s ongoing internecine war over America’s proper role in the world. The U.S. overthrow of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June, bombs dropped on Nigeria on Christmas Day, support for Ukraine and Israel in their wars, and the threatened takeover of Greenland did not create fissures on the right. They exposed them.
Two conservative heavyweights — University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss and National Review senior editor Frank Meyer — discussed international affairs in letters discovered in an Altoona, Pa., warehouse in 2022. The lack of insults in a political discussion may appear somewhat alien. The 1961 correspondence otherwise engages a 2026 audience on familiar turf.
One epistolic exchange, revealed here for the first time, showcases a spectrum of views regarding the Middle East. Strauss wanted the United States to more robustly support Israel. Meyer wanted the United States to stay neutral and subordinate all concerns to defeating the Soviet Union. A pox-upon-both-your-houses article on Israel-Egypt disputes, titled “Why They Flout the UN in the Middle East” and penned by freelancer W. J. Granberg, appeared in the June 3, 1961, issue of National Review, provoking the heretofore unknown exchange.
Though Granberg likened Gamal Abdel Nasser to a “bush league fighter,” Strauss juxtaposed the writer’s description of the Egyptian leader as “the personable Mr. Nasser” with his reference to Israel’s leader as “David Ben-Gurion the Zionhearted” to convey that he regarded the article as anti-Israel.
In late 1956, Strauss had written another of his great admirers at the magazine, Willmoore Kendall, about a pseudonymously written article that cited bigotry in such countries as Brazil, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel — whose inclusion disturbed Strauss — as a means of conveying that discrimination in the United States may not shock foreigners as much as it does Americans. He argued that conservatives should view Israel with favor as an outpost of the West, a preserver of heritage, and a nation that centers the Hebrew Bible in its educational system.
Strauss refashioned his private missive to Kendall as an early 1957 letter to the editor. In 1961, Strauss asked Meyer to share his concerns with the magazine’s board. Meyer replied that he had raised the matter with William F. Buckley Jr. The submission remained Granberg’s lone article in National Review.
“This kind of thing confirms the liberals in their prejudice that one cannot be consistently anti-liberal without becoming anti-Jewish,” Strauss wrote in the June 27, 1961, letter to Meyer. “I simply do not have the time to explain to you that the question of right and wrong regarding the establishment of the state of Israel is of infinitely greater complexity than Granberg presents it.”
Strauss faulted National Review for an article premised on the idea that Israel’s noncompliance with United Nations edicts represented some grave sin, a point Meyer conceded.
“American policy in the area is constantly dragged one way or the other by considerations extraneous to American national interests,” Meyer held.
He lamented a reflexively anti-Israel position in some quarters on the right. He nevertheless confessed “no certainty that either side is in any fundamental sense ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’” calling fights over territory and much else “one of those historical tragedies in which it is impossible to make a moral judgment.”
“American foreign policy,” Meyer wrote, “were it directed as it should be, would favor neither side but would simply step into the Middle East, as the British would have done when they accepted imperial responsibility, knocking the heads of both sides together and enforcing a peace.”
The “conservative” outlook on international affairs still defies consensus almost 65 years later; strangely, the knee-jerk anti-Israel stance then common enough on the right has reemerged, here and there, from hibernation. And no Cold War exists to paper over the substantive disagreements among anti-Communists.
Then, Meyer advocated a detached approach that served just national interests, and Strauss saw Israel as an outpost of the West whose challenged existence morally called for a champion in the nation leading the West. Now, conservatives, who take fairly lockstep positions on taxes, transgender athletes, immigration, and much else, still clash on foreign policy — they just do so less intelligently and by wielding more ideological swear words (and, increasingly, actual swear words).
Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican senator from Michigan who embodied a restrained, self-interested American diplomacy before embracing an idealistic, interventionist one, famously said after his Pearl Harbor–induced shift: “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” As the right’s intramural debate over foreign policy shows, ideology intensifies there.