Foreign policy was for years the great point of agreement between the paleo Right and the radical Left, with the familiar polemicists from those respective camps insisting that the United States acts as an “empire.” Patrick Buchanan wrote a big foreign-policy book called A Republic, Not an Empire, with the romantic subtitle Reclaiming America’s Destiny. Noam Chomsky published angry essays with titles such as “Modern-Day American Imperialism: Middle East and Beyond,” in which he observed that, “Talking about American imperialism is rather like talking about triangular triangles.”
The points of particular harmony are amusing and illuminating: Chomsky identifies George Washington as the father of American imperialism, and crackpot paleo-libertarian hero Murray Rothbard denounced the founding father as “Generalissimo Washington,” a thug and a caudillo.
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