Minority of One

Since the Cold War ended, a number of scholars and policymakers have sought to chart the future of United States foreign policy. The consensus favors preserving, and expanding, American alliances like NATO and global free trade. Among the beleaguered minority that opposes this emergent orthodoxy, no one is more eloquent--or more vehement--than the pundit and perennial presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan.

Buchanan, who began his career as a conventional conservative, has adopted a kind of populism with many precedents in American history, even if it does not fit under today’s rubrics of “left” and “right.” The figure Buchanan most resembles is William Jennings Bryan, another spellbinding orator who at the turn of the century ran repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, for president (unlike Buchanan, the Democrat Bryan at least received his party’s nomination three times). Bryan resigned as U.S. secretary of state to protest U.S. policy during World War I, and died shortly after serving as prosecuting attorney in the infamous Scopes “Monkey Trial.” In a similar manner, Buchanan, when he has not been promoting isolationism, has found time repeatedly to denounce the theory of evolution.

In his previous book “The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy,” he recounted America’s pre-1945 history of protectionism in an effort to upend today’s free-market orthodoxy. In “A Republic, Not an Empire,” Buchanan, marshaling a similar combination of fact and invective, engages in an equally bold assault on the premises of contemporary American security strategy. Probably to Buchanan’s surprise, his book has become an issue in the presidential campaign, as leading Republicans and conservatives have denounced or distanced themselves from Buchanan’s revisionist views about World War II. But Buchanan’s synthesis of isolationism, protectionism and populism appeals to many Americans--fewer of them on the right than on the left or in the center. As of this writing, Buchanan is contemplating a bid for the Reform Party presidential nomination. Therefore it is not enough to dismiss the messenger without refuting the message.

The bulk of “A Republic, Not an Empire” consists of Buchanan’s revisionist version of the history of United States foreign affairs from the beginning. The accepted version, shared by liberal and conservative internationalists alike, considers 20th century U.S. intervention in the world wars and Cold War as a moral necessity, while treating 19th century U.S. expansion in North America at the expense of the Indians and Mexico as something of an embarrassment. Buchanan takes the opposite position. With relish he describes “the often duplicitous and ruthless” way in which the United States seized Florida along with “Texas, California, Hawaii, the Philippines, and the Canal Zone.” According to Buchanan, “[a]nnexation of Texas, the Southwest and California was Manifest Destiny, not imperialism. These lands were contiguous, largely empty, easily defensible with a small army, and involved no entanglement with the great powers of Europe.” Buchanan’s defense of American continental expansion is based on a geopolitical theory of America’s natural frontiers (in his syndicated column, he has proposed eventual voluntary annexation of Canada, Greenland and Iceland). His geographic determinism leads him to approve of American continental expansion and to disapprove of most of America’s overseas interventions, beginning with the U.S. empire in the Caribbean and the Philippines following the Spanish-American War.

According to Buchanan, America’s intervention in World War I was a disastrous error: “The war to make the world safe for democracy made the world safe for Bolshevism, fascism and Nazism. Such were the fruits of U.S. intervention, victory and Versailles.” Though criticism of America’s entry into World War I is not uncommon, Buchanan is all but alone in criticizing America’s entry into World War II. In his most radical exercise in historical revision, Buchanan argues that Charles Lindbergh and other members of the America First movement were correct to argue that the Nazis, even though they controlled most of Europe, were not a serious threat to American security. In Buchanan’s version of history, Franklin Roosevelt was an inconsistent and dishonest politician in league with the sinister British, who exaggerated the threat of Nazi Germany and provoked an unnecessary war with Japan. Instead of allowing the Nazis and Soviets to cripple each other, “Roosevelt had gone to war to make Europe and Asia safe for democracy, and had [unwittingly] made Europe safe for Stalinism and Asia safe for Maoism.”

A consistent isolationist would condemn the United States effort in the Cold War, along with its participation in the wars against Germany and Japan. But Buchanan’s anti-communism prevails over his isolationism. “Did America’s Cold War alliances--NATO, CENTO, SEATO, the ANDRES and Rio pact, and security treaties with Korea, Japan and Taiwan--violate Washington’s ‘great’ rule against permanent alliances?” Answering in the negative, Buchanan argues that “a close reading of the Monroe Doctrine would justify NATO as conceived, a temporary alliance to keep the Red Army from overrunning Germany and France.” Buchanan does not explain why the Monroe Doctrine could not be similarly stretched to justify efforts to prevent the hegemony of the Nazis and their Axis allies over Europe and Asia.

Turning to the present and the future, Buchanan discusses several strategies that have been proposed to succeed containment as the basis of United States foreign policy in the aftermath of the Cold War. The “Wilsonian school,” in which Buchanan includes President Clinton, seeks to transcend power politics by means of “free trade, one-man, one-vote democracy, and disarmament agreements.” Another school, associated with Republican internationalists, neoconservatives and some liberals, believes that the United States “should exploit its hour of power to impose a Pax Americana. This elite believes the great lesson of history was Munich in 1938, that the way to deal with the dictators and disturbers of the peace is ruthlessly and early, that while it is best to act in concert with other nations, it is often necessary to act alone.” Buchanan contrasts the Wilsonian and hegemonic versions of globalism with his own school, which, “denounced as isolationist, is more accurately described as traditionalist-nationalist, or in [Walter Lippmann’s phrase], ‘enlightened nationalism.’ ”

How plausible is Buchanan’s America First alternative to American internationalism? Unlike many pundits and politicians, Buchanan roots his prescriptions in a consistent vision of American and world history. But his very consistency proves to be a weakness; his proposed U.S. grand strategy collapses if his history is mistaken.

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And his history is mistaken. If some internationalists have exaggerated foreign threats to the United States, Buchanan consistently underrates them. Although the rulers of imperial Germany were not homicidal radicals like Hitler and his henchmen, their geopolitical goal was the same--world domination by a Germany that controlled Europe and the Middle East. To keep the United States out of World War I, the German government hoped to embroil the United States in war with Mexico (by promising the return of Texas and California to Mexico), and tried to turn the Atlantic into a German lake by means of unrestricted submarine warfare. There can be little doubt that German victory in World War I would have given the United States the unpalatable choice of waging a cold war with Germany in unfavorable circumstances or appeasing the new masters of the world.

Relying on the controversial work of the late British historian A.J.P. Taylor, Buchanan argues for a minimalist interpretation of Hitler’s aims in World War II. But Hitler believed that his successful conquest of Europe and the Middle East, destruction of the Soviet Union and subordination of the British Empire would be followed by a final struggle with North America late in the 20th century. The Nazi regime sponsored research on atomic bombs, long-range missiles and even a space plane capable of bombing American cities. A Third Reich that had consolidated its power would have been far more technologically advanced, and perhaps more aggressive, than the Soviet Union ever was.

If Buchanan’s history is flawed, his attempt to define American interests in terms of fixed, unchanging geography is misguided. Whether a region is important to the United States is a question that can be answered not by looking at a map, but by assessing the goals of America’s enemies and allies. Once the United States threw itself into the struggle against the Axis, it was necessary to contest various regions--North Africa and the Pacific islands, which were of little or no interest to the United States apart from that struggle. Similarly, the dynamic of the Cold War turned Korea, Indochina and Afghanistan from peripheral areas into front-line arenas of Soviet-American conflict.

The geography that counts is that of our potential enemies, not our own. North America is an island off the shore of the Eurasian super continent, where most of the world’s people, resources and industry are concentrated. In a world divided into regional blocs, a North American bloc might be eclipsed in terms of military resources and economic influence by a united Europe or a united Asia. In order not to be relegated to satellite status, the United States along with Canada and the nations of Latin America have an interest in preventing a single power or alliance from dominating the world by controlling Eurasia. This imperative, and not the defense of America from invasion, has justified America’s foreign policy of developing Eurasian military alliances and an integrated global trading order.

Thus Buchanan’s equation of overseas intervention with “empire” and isolationism with “republic” is a false dichotomy that obscures the real question: To what degree should the U.S. rely on alliances for its security? The United States will not always be the dominant world power. But even if, in the future, the United States is only a second- or third-tier power, American leaders may still choose to participate in transoceanic military alliances and trade blocs. Indeed, a weak United States arguably might have a greater interest than a superpower America in sending troops to join alliances against hostile Eurasian giants.

All too often, Buchanan’s American Eagle looks more like Chicken Little. “Our country is traveling the same path that was trod by the British Empire--to the same fate,” Buchanan warns. Really? Given the fact that today America’s successful internationalist strategy permits it to extend its influence while cutting its military forces, it is difficult to understand Buchanan’s claim that the United States is overextended and on the verge of geopolitical bankruptcy. The costs of a preventive strategy of permanent European, Asian and Middle Eastern alliances include limited wars like Kosovo, Vietnam, the Gulf War and Korea, but the costs of a Fortress America strategy would probably be even higher. Buchanan’s own isolationist policy would require militarizing the United States-Mexican border and beefing up American military defense, without the ability to share costs with wealthy allies.

There is room for debate about the extent and costs of America’s alliance system, just as there is a legitimate basis for disagreement about how best to promote American interests in the global trading system. But Buchanan will persuade few Americans to abandon an extraordinarily successful United States security and economic strategy for its exact opposite. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.