GOP Embrace of Yesterday’s Foreign Policy Undoes Today’s Principles

The conservative foreign-policy agenda, like much of the Republican “contract with America,” is frozen in time.

When Ronald Reagan captured the presidency in 1980, he assailed Jimmy Carter for leaving the United States with a “hollow military force.” The new President doubled the military budget, launched “Star Wars” and pushed a large NATO buildup and, scorning the United Nations as a hotbed of anti-Americanism, slashed support for global initiatives. Now, 15 years later, House Republicans have passed a diluted version of the National Security Revitalization Act, the foreign-policy plank of their contract. Assailing Bill Clinton for creating a “hollow military,” the act calls for spending more on the military, reviving the “Star Wars” program, expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and gutting support for the United Nations.

But this commendable consistency is a bit bizarre when you consider the dramatic transformation of the world since Reagan’s election. In the new reality, the old shibboleths often end up offending the very principles that conservatives now claim to hold dear. Consider.

* Republicans charge that Clinton’s defense cuts have created a “readiness crisis.” In truth, the Pentagon spends more on readiness per soldier than it did in the Reagan years at the height of the Cold War. If there is a problem, it isn’t a question of money.

In trumpeting the readiness gap, conservatives ended up fronting for a classic Pentagon budget ploy. When Congress dithered in appropriating funds for military activity in Bosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere last fall, some routine exercises had to be postponed at the end of the fiscal year. Irritated that the Army had suffered deeper cuts than the other services, its officers exaggerated the import of poor ratings received by three divisions. Republicans raised a furor, not mentioning that two of the three divisions were slated to be disbanded this year. As a result, House Republicans voted last month to give the Pentagon more money than it asked for, adding to the deficit they are pledged to eliminate.

* The Republican contract vows to “reverse the decline” in spending on the military. Republican defense hawks seek a $120-billion increase in expenditures over the next five years, which would return Pentagon spending to roughly the levels planned or projected by George Bush before the Soviet Union broke apart.

Even if they want a more powerful military, it is curious that conservatives would argue that spending more money is the answer. The Pentagon’s financial management, as Defense Secretary William J. Perry has admitted, “is a mess”--the largest source of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. Last month, the General Accounting Office revealed that the Pentagon still holds $36 billion in inventory that is “no longer needed”; is disbursing $25 billion to vendors without knowing if the payments are proper, and is paying billions in unnecessary costs when buying weapons. The GAO reports that no military service has been able even to obtain an auditor’s opinion, because of “hundreds of billions in assets not accounted for and countless failures in performing the most rudimentary bookkeeping tasks.” Yet, conservatives, the antagonists of big government, support spending more on the world’s most expensive bureaucracy.

* The contract calls for reviving Reagan’s beloved “Star Wars” program. Under Reagan and Bush, the country spent $36 billion chasing the fantasy of a missile-defense system and deployed nothing. The Pentagon already plans to spend another $19 billion on missile-defense programs through the end of the century. Conservatives say $55 billion is not enough.

What this continuing commitment to Reagan’s dream reveals is a rather remarkable faith in government. Somehow, the same ideologues who believe that government can’t run the Post Office want to spend tens of billions in the belief that the biggest bureaucracy of all can create, deploy and operate an airtight missile-defense system indefinitely.

* The contract treats the United Nations in the spirit of Reagan, hobbling U.S. participation in, and funding for, peacekeeping activities.

This ignores the fact that the United Nations has become essentially an arm of U.S. policy. The United States dominates its councils and largely shapes its policies. The international organization enlists others to share the burdens of efforts we think are important.

Moreover, peacekeeping and multilateral humanitarian interventions are largely what the military does in the modern world. The Republican assault on U.N. peacekeeping leaves them supporting a military that costs more and does less, while blocking mechanisms to get other nations to bear some of the cost.

* The contract revives the Cold War emphasis on Europe, calling for immediate steps to incorporate Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak republics into NAT against the threat of a revived Russia. But if Russia poses a threat these days, it is less a product of its strength than its weakness. Its people are growing desperate. Crime is rampant. And the central threats faced by the fragile republics in the East are economic and social, not military.

Here again, the Reagan-era shibboleths contradict current conservative principles. Free-market economists insist that the “emerging democracies” of Eastern Europe cut government spending to free up capital for private investment. Yet, a rapid expansion of NATO would require these countries to spend billions upgrading their militaries to NATO standards.

* The Republican contract omits mention of central challenges that face the United States in the modern world--growing economic instability; the spread of plagues and environmental despoiliation; rising migratory flows, and nationalist, racial and ethnic strife.

How did congressional Republicans end up frozen in this position? In part, it is traditional pork-barrel politics. Pentagon spending provides the public-works jobs that conservatives can love. Liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, lawmakers fight to retain contracts and bases in their districts.

The larger reason is partisan politics. The contract was cobbled together by pollsters, not by policy-makers. Since Vietnam, Republicans have benefited by charging Democrats with being weak on defense. Failure to spend more on the Pentagon, warned Republican defense hawks in a letter to Speaker Newt Gingrich, would be “politically damaging for a Republican Party that has successfully secured the national-security issue as its own on the battlefield of ideas since the Vietnam War.”

But the contradictions posed by the Reagan-era shibboleths are growing too large to ignore. “I’m a hawk, but a cheap hawk,” says Gingrich. He contends the Pentagon needs to be “radically overhauled,” with new weapons financed from cutbacks in the bloated bureaucracy. House Budge Chairman John R. Kasich wants to put the Pentagon budget under a “microscope.” He priced the net cost of the GOP security program at zero, claiming that any increases could be taken from savings elsewhere in the defense budget. Kasich is now resisting any dramatic increases in defense spending over the next five years. Moreover, the old routines are no longer very popular. A CNN/USA Today poll taken in late November revealed that increasing defense spending was the only contract provision opposed by a majority of Americans.

The conservative confusion on national-security priorities reflects a broader failing of Gingrich’s self-proclaimed “revolution.” As leader of a minority faction of a minority party for 15 years, he had the perfect opportunity to update conservatism for what he calls the “third wave” civilization that is upon us. Instead, he merely put new-age packaging around old conservative staples.