The Fulda Gap Is Not On The Laffer Curve Exit From Nato

I have been thinking about the NATO problem since 1983, when The American Spectator hosted a journalistic junket to Rome, Paris, and London. Tom Bethell went along on that trip too, and for a group of conservatives it was pretty grim. We did manage to find one free-market economist in Italy, but he assured us that, apart from ideological singularity, as a Sicilian he was regarded in Rome, and certainly in Milan, as barely human. There were more free-marketeers in France, but not many, for the intellectual tradition of the French governing classes for the last three hundred years has been colbertisme, named after Louis XIV’s controller general who believed that the art of taxation consisted in plucking as many feathers from the national goose as possible without making it squawk. Charles de Gaulle’s view of the economy and economists was that “the quartermasters” would follow him. Only in Thatcherite England did we find significant soulmates, but even they were hemmed in by socialists and wets. Late one night at a dinner at the Turf Club, one young economist confided to me that the only hope for England’s prosperity was for Englishmen to develop the habit of breaking the law.

We didn’t spend all that much time talking about NATO. But I think experiences like these play a large role in shaping conservative attitudes on the subject. We, and the anti-NATO crowd in particular, apply judgments and analogies drawn from domestic affairs to an international problem. And I say that’s a hell of a way to run a foreign policy.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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I have been thinking about the NATO problem since 1983, when The American Spectator hosted a journalistic junket to Rome, Paris, and London. Tom Bethell went along on that trip too, and for a group of conservatives it was pretty grim. We did manage to find one free-market economist in Italy, but he assured us that, apart from ideological singularity, as a Sicilian he was regarded in Rome, and certainly in Milan, as barely human. There were more free-marketeers in France, but not many, for the intellectual tradition of the French governing classes for the last three hundred years has been colbertisme, named after Louis XIV’s controller general who believed that the art of taxation consisted in plucking as many feathers from the national goose as possible without making it squawk. Charles de Gaulle’s view of the economy and economists was that “the quartermasters” would follow him. Only in Thatcherite England did we find significant soulmates, but even they were hemmed in by socialists and wets. Late one night at a dinner at the Turf Club, one young economist confided to me that the only hope for England’s prosperity was for Englishmen to develop the habit of breaking the law.

We didn’t spend all that much time talking about NATO. But I think experiences like these play a large role in shaping conservative attitudes on the subject. We, and the anti-NATO crowd in particular, apply judgments and analogies drawn from domestic affairs to an international problem. And I say that’s a hell of a way to run a foreign policy.