Blog Archive

For the last couple of nights I have been posting on the topic of Conservatism, Labels, and American Foreign Policy. My goal was to see if we couldn’t gain insight into conservatism and foreign policy through the eyes of three very different writers. On Monday, we found that Francis Fukuyama lacked a solid grasp of American conservatism but shed some light on the idealist versus realist debate. Last night we found that Max Boot struggled to define Neo-conservatism but did posit an interesting term: Hard Wilsonianism; a kind of modified idealism for conservatives. After all of this, however, we are not any closer to understanding how conservatism and American Foreign Policy relate.

Perhaps, we have just looked to the wrong people. After all neither Fukuyama nor Boot are really a part of the conservative movement. Sure they are on the conservative side of the spectrum but they really wouldn’t call themselves conservative in the “movement” sense. In the terms I outlined Monday they are political conservatives not philosophical ones. So tonight we will turn to someone who claims to be the true voice of conservatism, Pat Buchanan.

Buchanan points the finger right back at Boot and the neocons in his article “The Democracy Worshipers.” While Boot takes pride in his idealism without the bleeding heart, Buchanan accuses the neocons of being ideologues. In order to do this Pat brings out the big guns. He uses as his source text a man many consider the father of modern American Conservatism, Russell Kirk. In a lecture at the Heritage Foundation Kirk threw ice water on the triumphalism of that neo-conservative watchword: “democratic capitalism.”

“Various American voices have been raised these past few months to proclaim enthusiastically that soon all the world … will embrace an order called ‘democratic capitalism,’” said Kirk. “It seems to be the assumption of these enthusiasts-many of them members of the faction called Neoconservatism-that the political structure and the economic patterns of the United States will be emulated in every continent, for evermore.”
“Democratic capitalism” is “neoconservative cant,” said Kirk. It is an ideological folly to attempt to recreate in foreign lands with utterly different cultures what 200 years of American history produced here.

Buchanan fears that Kirk’s wisdom is not being heard today and to make matters worse what these “democracy worshippers” want is more hair of the dog that bit them:

Like all ideologues-be they Marxist, socialist, or Wilsonian-democracy worshipers attribute their disasters not to a flawed ideology but a lack of energy. We should, they argue, have gone back into Lebanon in force after the bombing at the Marine barracks and occupied Somalia after U.S. Army Rangers were massacred. But this is folly. There was never any vital U.S. interest at risk in Beirut or Mogadishu worth sending any U.S. soldiers to die for.

So what we have here is realism in the name of non-intervention. After all Buchanan is far removed from the mandarins like Kissinger, Baker, and Scowcroft despite his having worked for Nixon. And yet Buchanan speaks of national interest and excoriates idealists who dream of democracy for all. Buchanan views the past as having shown the quest for an ever spreading democratic capitalism is an illusion. On practically every continent he points to failure: Africa, South and Latin America, Asia, even Europe. Pat rejects the use of democracy as a first principle. He chooses a particularly conservative word instead: “prudence.”

The mark of a “soundly conservative foreign policy,” said Dr. Kirk, is prudence. “Its object should not be the triumph everywhere of America’s name and manners under the slogan of ‘democratic capitalism’ but … the preservation of the true national interest and acceptance of the diversity of economic and political institutions throughout the world. Soviet hegemony ought not be succeeded by American hegemony.”

Now wait just a minute, you may say. Kirk is beginning to sound like a multiculturalist and a leftist one at that! Fear not Kirk is not using the term in the politically loaded way that Marxist college professors do. No Kirk was no America basher nor was he a relativist. Kirk was simply trying to reclaim diversity and variety from its tangled leftists entrapment. Kirk was warning against hubris and vanity, not attacking American values.

Just like Fukuyama and Boot before him, Buchanan actually sheds little light on conservative principles but rather uses Kirk as a weapon against his political antagonists the dreaded Neocons. The problems with Pat Buchanan is that he seeks to use conservatism in the philosophical sense I mentioned previously to further a goal that is more tethered to a political conservatism. Buchanan likes to quote Russell Kirk and speak as if conservatism was hijacked by the neocons but what he is really mad about is the fact that the Old Guard Republicans have disappeared. Men like Robert A. Taft and John Bricker (two Ohio Senators) are gone and forgotten in today’s internationalist Republican Party. Buchanan wants to return to a pre-Cold War era, actually to a pre-World War era, and that is simply not possible.

But we should not throw out the baby with the bath water. Buchanan does have a point! The point is that there are aspects of conservatism that lend themselves to a realist view of foreign policy and that skepticism, prudence, and caution should be the bywords of our actions. Kirk was not rejecting the use of American power; in fact he was a hearty Cold Warrior. But he was warning America of taking its exceptionalism too far by turning our cherished values into universally applicable ideas regardless of time or place. Kirk’s vision was organic and interrelated not based on cold ideology. Ideology refuses to let circumstances change its mind. If the supposed solution doesn’t work just get a bigger hammer! Conservatism rejects utopian projects. It sees the need to balance freedom and order; equality and variety; ideals and prudence. It realizes that solutions must fit the circumstances rather than be concocted out of thin air. It is this realism that should inform any conservative foreign policy.

What makes this difficult is that conservatives often have very different views of what realism is and what it means. Traditionalist conservatives and a great many libertarians see realism as Realpolitik – a cynical, if not downright immoral, Machiavellian approach to foreign affairs. Many conservatives view this as a rejection of our core values and see it as full of opportunities to sell out to power and corruption. But the foundation of realism doesn’t require this darkness. At base realism means dealing with the world as it is not as you would wish it to be – hence its critique of an international do-goodism based on treaties and pledges of goodwill alone.

What is needed is a realism that is informed by our values and ideals but not to the extent that it turns into moralism or utopian projection. In my next series, I hope to take a closer look at what this realism might look like. Stay tuned . . .