Morgan N. Knull

    While George W. Bush labors mightily to distinguish Greeks from “Grecians” and Slovenia from Slovakia, and other presidential candidates still are developing foreign policy positions, it should surprise no one to find that Pat Buchanan has written an entire book devoted to the subject. 

    Unlike the campaign tract industry, which normally pumps out eminently dispensable works (has anyone read Bill Clinton’s Putting People First lately?), Buchanan offers a spirited narrative of America’s expansion into a nation and ultimately a superpower. A Republic, Not an Empire is an epic account of the America’s posture in relation to other countries, one which illustrates that independence, not isolation or intervention, is our tradition.

    The book aspires to redeem the reputation of foreign policy based on self-interest and unilateralism, as opposed to one that advances “the brotherhood of man” through globalism. He forcefully contends that the charge of “Isolationist!” serves as an epithet “intended to silence an adversary, end an argument, and stifle debate.” He writes from experience. In fact, Buchanan’s survey of American history reveals few true isolationists and exonerates in other cases those movements, like the America First Committee, that unfairly have been smeared as such. 

    George Washington and John Adams are praised for their sagacious counsel about avoiding “entangling alliances” that could only ensnare the infant nation in the old conflicts of Europe. Thomas Jefferson is applauded for doing business with Napoleon in purchasing the Louisiana territory. As only Buchanan could describe the questionable legal circumstances surrounding its acquisition: “America was taking possession of stolen goods being fenced by the greatest thief in Europe, but there was no denying the bargain.” Andrew Jackson, whom Buchanan terms the most underrated president in American history, contributed his bit by recognizing the importance of acquiring Florida and Texas. The pantheon of great men who advanced the frontier is bipartisan; the irony is that they nowadays are “mocked as isolationists.” 

    If the methods used in expansion sometimes were “duplicitous and ruthless,” Buchanan’s conscience remains untroubled. “That is the way the world worked in that age of empires,” he observes, “and that appears to be the way the world will work in the twenty-first century.” A country’s destiny is determined by its people, he declares, and it is to America’s credit that Manifest Destiny was undertaken to extend liberty rather than contract it. Jackson, for example, often is harshly depicted in history books but seems downright benign when compared against some of his contemporaries, like the ruthless Mexican general Antonio Santa Anna. 

    It has become commonplace in modern scholarship to object to such analogies; surely the United States must be judged according to a higher standard of justice?  But this is a fallacy that Buchanan assaults as a product of naive, escapist assumptions: history rarely affords a choice between the imperfect and the ideal; in reality, men must cast their lot with the best possible situation. With William Seward’s purchase of Alaska, which occurred less than a century after independence, Buchanan concludes that America was a completed nation. Much of the ill-considered globetrotting that followed and continues to this day involves, then, a recurrent expression of the deformed desire for earthly perfectionism. “The fatal flaw in the globalist vision is that it is utopian,” he argues. “It envisions a world that has never existed and can never exist, because it is contrary to fallen human nature.”

    The roster of villains who unwisely catapulted the United States into foreign conflicts begins with William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt. Buchanan allows that McKinley and TR principally sought to advance America’s self-interest, even if they misconceived it. The same cannot be said for Woodrow Wilson’s crusade to end all wars; in the book’s account, Wilson comes off as duped by European powers who first enticed the United States to enter World War I and then cleverly outfoxed the idealistic president at the Versailles peace table. America gained little by making war on the Central Powers, the most lasting effect of which was to inaugurate the tradition of “compulsive interventionism” that has characterized foreign policy ever since. 

    Advocates of globalism often suggest recourse to “the lessons of history” when pressed to justify their messianic vision, but Buchanan sees history as vindicating Hobbes’s understanding of man’s nature. Wilson substituted “liberal sentimentality for hard thought” and persisted in his gullible naiveté even after it was apparent that the British, French, Russian, and Japanese empires did not share his ardor for democracy. “The war to make the world safe for democracy made the world safe for Bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism,” he notes. 

    It is a credit to FDR’s facility at demagoguery that Pearl Harbor came to be blamed on isolationism, when he himself was most responsible for the relentless escalation of tension with the Axis powers. Roosevelt pursued the peculiar policy of inflaming tensions with Japan and Germany even while spending less on defense than Congress appropriated. The America First Committee, Buchanan writes, “did not want to isolate America from the world, but to isolate America from the war.”  Roosevelt’s success in later painting anti-war congressmen and citizens as traitors is truly shameless considering how many Soviet agents and fellow travelers went undetected in his White House. 

    Just as with the aftermath of the First World War, the capitulation of Germany and Japan failed to usher in a new era of brotherhood; from the power vacuum the Soviet Union and Maoist China emerged as new nemeses. “The Cold War was an exceptional time that called forth exceptional commitments,” Buchanan remarks, even as he deplores the military-industrial complex that arose to permanently arm the militarized society that it required. 

    If there is a common thread here, surely it concerns the elusiveness of a perfect peace, which like ideal democracy never can be quite achieved. “Perpetual war for perpetual peace” is what the phenomenon came to be termed by its critics, and not until the election of Ronald Reagan was there reason to believe that the West might prevail. Reagan is credited with “an almost perfect blend of realism and idealism” in foreign policy, and this is the posture Buchanan endorses as his own. The collapse of communism had much to do with America’s courageous opposition, but is attributable also to the internal exhaustion of the Soviet regime and failure of socialist economics. Buchanan notes with some bitterness that even by 1941, when the United States formally allied itself with Josef Stalin for the duration of the war, communism already had killed millions more innocent people than Adolf Hitler would. 

    Just a decade ago, there was heady talk about the “peace dividend” that would be possible with the Cold War’s closure. But it has yet to be delivered. “At the close of the twentieth century, U.S. foreign policy seems frozen in time,” Buchanan laments. The military-industrial complex cranks along, finding new enemies in places like Panama, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, and the Balkans. The NATO alliance, which was formed to serve a temporary purpose, has been reinvented to make war on Serbs who pose no threat to the United States. Americans now are pledged to the defense of Poland and Hungary, despite their abject lack of strategic value. “Our assignment is complete, our mission done,” Buchanan says wistfully. But there will be no “peace dividend” until and unless America abandons its self-appointed mission as “global bounty hunter.” 

    In his final chapter, Buchanan surmises that the United States is overextended in its treaty obligations, pledged to defend more than 50 countries with a defense budget that is 3% of its GDP. The Clinton administration’s strategy (“chaotic, incoherent, unworthy of sustained support”) has alienated Russia, which is the one power that should be incorporated into the West and permitted a modicum of self-respect, including a sphere of influence in the Eastern European countries that instead are being gobbled up by NATO.  Congress, meanwhile, is in the clutch of ethnic and religious pressure groups that agitate for intervention around the globe. Buchanan quips: “The result is a foreign policy as incomprehensible as a Jackson Pollock canvas.”

    The solutions Buchanan offers include the withdrawal of troops from Europe, Japan, and the Korean peninsula and a revision of the NATO charter to make military action voluntary rather than obligatory. American troops should be forbidden to serve under United Nations command, lest they become the “Hessians of a New World Order.” And American foreign policy should be directed by a strict standard of self-interest and enforced by an adequately sized and equipped military stationed at home.

    Buchanan acknowledges that not only the liberals still enthralled with Wilsonian utopianism oppose his vision of foreign policy, but also the neoconservative “democratic capitalists” who wish to impose a hegemonic order upon the universe, with America single-handedly taking up the mission once performed by the Congress of Vienna. “Whether a nation is democratic should be of less concern to us than how it views America,” Buchanan retorts. “The form of government nations adopt is their own business, and a foreign policy that declares global democracy as its goal is arrogant and utopian.” 

    Only in passing does he consider whether enthusiasm for democratic capitalism might have been cultivated unwittingly by the Cold War rhetoric espoused by anti-communist Westerners, who often used its vocabulary when admonishing Sovietism. Even if Reagan employed such words, Buchanan explains, unconvincingly, they merely were instruments designed to bring down communism. Another curious omission from the book is a sustained treatment of militarism’s social costs.

    Imperialism is the enemy of liberty. Empires eventually overextend and become corrupted. Geography, history, and traditions should influence a country’s foreign policy. Military adventurism saps national vitality. The United States has outlasted dictatorships and democracies, tribes and empires, but it may not survive its own prideful interventionism. These are the true lessons of history.