AN
APPEAL TO INNOCENCE
Here,
in a few brief declarative sentences, the author sets down
his thesis, the insight that informs his remarkable account
of how the U.S. became an empire and what this has to mean,
encapsulating the urgency and the basic analysis of the noninterventionist
position. Whether he is making the distinction between Manifest
Destiny and European-style imperialism, revisiting the tragic
history of how the Brits dragged us into two world wars, or
mocking the pretensions of a self-infatuated elite which aspires
to "world hegemony," this is Buchanan at the top
of his form, not only as a writer but as a serious thinker.
His thesis is of particular interest to regular visitors to
Antiwar.com. Buchanan's theme is, indeed, the central
thesis of any American antiwar movement worthy of the name;
that is, one with any legitimate hope of influencing the American
people. Buchanan's anti-imperialism, like that of the conservative
noninterventionists who came before him, such as Senator William
C. Borah, the "Lion of Idaho," is rooted in the
wisdom of the Founding Fathers and the basic aversion to empire
that is ingrained in the American character. It is to this
basic distrust of would-be kings and self-proclaimed global
"hegemons," that the author appeals.
THE
LAST AND ONLY SUPERPOWER
America
has survived, the Last and Only Superpower, while so many
others have fallen by the wayside, their bones littering the
road to empire: Rome, Spain, Portugal, France, Russia, and
– closest to ourselves – a once-great Britain, whose
tatterdemalion "Commonwealth" is not even a ghost
of her Britannic Majesty's former glory. Are we immune from
the decadence that seems to set in shortly after dreams of
empire are realized, or is our hubris likely to catch up with
us in the coming century? This is the question asked and definitively
answered in this book – a tour-de-force of riveting historical
narrative, pyrotechnical polemics, and programmatic clarity
that is sure to inspire a whole new generation of conservative
noninterventionists.
WHO
WILL STAND AGAINST US?
We
have extended guarantees to the Baltic nations, who clamor
for NATO membership, the doomed princes of the Gulf, who live
in fear of the "Arab street, " the Koreans and the
Taiwanese, the Albanians and the East Timorese – all
of which may seem, for the moment, a burden of empire that
can be shouldered with relatively little effort. Who, after
all, will stand against us? The question may soon be answered,
says Buchanan. We feel invincible, now –
"But
so did Britain's guarantee of Belgium's neutrality in 1839,
which dragged Britain into the Great War, cost it hundreds
of thousands of dead, and inflicted on the empire a wound
from which it would never recover.
Our
country is today traveling the same path that was trod by
the British Empire – to the same fate. Do we want America
to end that way?"
This,
then, is the underlying theme of A Republic, Not an Empire:
We can go the way of our British forebears, or chart a new
course, one that is uniquely American.
BEYOND
THE DREAMS OF ALEXANDER
In
chapter 2, "Courting Conflict with Russia," Buchanan
exposes the most immediate and dangerous foreign policy gambit
of recent times, the effort by US policymakers to encircle
and threaten Russia, restart the Cold War, and provoke a reaction
inside the former Soviet Union that can only lead to World
War III. Most importantly, Buchanan does us all a service
by underscoring the evil "Wolfowitz Memorandum,"
a remarkable document prepared by then-Undersecretary of State
Paul Wolfowitz, a forty-six-page manifesto for those who envision
the US as a world empire beyond the dreams of Alexander, dominating
the globe and slapping down any who would aspire to even nominal
independence.
WORLD
HEGEMONY
Described
in the media as a classified document leaked by anonymous
sources, the memo purports to be a foreign policy blueprint
for the next century. If so, it will be a century of endless
wars, for it targets Russia as the biggest threat to American
interests and projects a U.S.-Russian confrontation over NATO
expansion. Having assured Gorbachev and the former Communist
regime that America and her allies would not move eastward
if the Berlin Wall were allowed to fall, US policymakers were
now going back on their word. America, declared Wolfowitz,
must be ready to go to war, and many should be prepared to
die, for the principle of NATO expansion: if Russia dared
to assert her own version of the Monroe Doctrine, and moved
to block the NATO-ization of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia,
the US must be prepared to move against Moscow. Not only that,
but our troops and "vital interests" must inhabit
– even dominate – every continent. The great goal
of the Wolfowitzian vision is to prevent the emergence of
any regional powers as possible rivals to American world hegemony.
All must be reduced to the status of small and militarily
impotent states, lest they challenge the imperial dominance
of the One and Only Superpower. Was a madder, more megalomaniac
vision ever conceived outside of a loony bin?
MASTERS OF ALL WE SURVEY
We
must prevent the rise of any possible threat to our global
dominance, and, according to Wolfowitz, this prevention policy
is the "dominant
consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy
and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power
from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated
control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions
include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former
Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia."
DUBYA
AND THE WOLF
In
other words, the US will now virtually annex most of the civilized
world – and a great deal of it that is not quite civilized
– in an act of hubris so reckless, so contrary to the
lessons of history and common sense, that it is positively
breathtaking in its folly. That Paul Wolfowitz, the author
of this mad memorandum, is now a top foreign policy to George
Dubya, the theoretician and behind-the-scenes policymaker
who could well be the next Secretary of State, is a thought
that ought to send chills down the spines of noninterventionists
of every political persuasion and coloration. What could be
clearer? If Dubya slips into the White House, we are headed
for war.
GENERALS
FIGHTING THE LAST WAR
As
a conservative, Pat naturally turns to the lessons of history,
and the news is not good for the empire-builders, but
before he does that he looks into the possible futures awaiting
us, the wars of tomorrow that we could well find ourselves
(or our children) fighting. With Communism dead for a decade,
and no great enemy having arisen to challenge us, America's
elites pine for the good old days of certitude that shaped
the foreign policy of yesteryear – but our policymakers,
says Buchanan, are generals fighting the last war. Locked
into a Cold War stance, the foreign policy Establishment that
guides government officials has planted its flag on every
continent: we are bound by treaty and tradition to defend
not only Europe and North America, but also the Balkans, the
Middle East, the Persian Gulf, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan,
the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan, Australia, and Latin
America. Listing this astounding catalog of de facto dependencies,
Buchanan, citing Senator Robert A. Taft, makes a point central
to the urgency of his thesis:
IMPERIAL
OVERSTRETCH
TIMES TEN
"Nothing
can destroy this country except the overextension of our resources.
. . . Indeed, it would be an understatement to describe the
commitments above as an over extension of our resources. In
their totality, they make the nineteenth-century British Empire
look isolationist; truly, this is imperial overstretch."
WARS
OF THE FUTURE
Buchanan
sets out a frightening and all-too-realistic scenario of five
future wars: his portrait of the "Second Balkan War"
reads like a news dispatch hot off the wires from AP or Reuters,
and may have been written before the attack on Serbia. If
so, it loses nothing in terms of realism, and differs from
what actually happened only in minor details: as either a
prediction, or a portent of things to come, his description
of the burgeoning Balkan crisis has the ring of authenticity.
Then there is "the Second Korean War," a reenactment
of the earlier conflict with the added feature of nuclear
weapons. In "the Baltic War," Russia and Belarus
overrun Lithuania and demand that the Baltics remain a "weapons
free zone," a Finlandization that the West finds unacceptable:
"The US President declares, 'This will not stand,'"
avers that "there will be no Munich in the Baltics,"
and takes us to the brink of nuclear war – in the name
of NATO "credibility." In the Middle East, the "Arab
street" explodes, toppling the Saudi princelings and
provoking a massive US intervention in Iraq: the "Second
Gulf War" (wouldn't that be the Third – or does
it only seem like that many?) pits the US and Israel
against virtually the entire Arab world in what Buchanan rightly
calls "a nightmare scenario." It seems a nightmarish
future awaits us. But it doesn't have to be that way.
A
MODERN PAUL REVERE
The
tripwires buried by our rulers in the soil of every continent
will reap a harvest of woe – and that is a prediction
that is unfortunately bound to come true, unless and until
the country wakes up. God bless Pat for sounding the alarm,
a modern-day Paul Revere riding through the American political
scene shouting "To arms! To arms! The warmongers are
coming!"
THE
TAIWAN QUESTION
Most
interesting is Buchanan's disquisition on "the China-Taiwan
War," which starts in the shadow of an economic downturn
that drags down China and all of the Far East in the slough
of depression. As the People's Liberation Army puts down riots
in Hong Kong, "Taiwan declares independence in Jefferson's
own language and asks the United States and the United Nations
for recognition. Both refuse." Taiwan proceeds to recklessly
threaten the mainland with nuclear retaliation if Beijing
dares to even contemplate an invasion. The Chinese leadership
responds by informing the US and the rest of the world to
stay out of it, blockades the island, and the siege of Taiwan
is begun. "Should the navy engage Chinese air and naval
units in the waters around Taiwan," asks Pat, "or
stay out of the war?"
FOREIGN
POLICY BANKRUPTCY
The
answer may surprise many conservatives, who misunderstand
Buchanan's position, particularly on the question of China,
but clearly Buchanan favors the latter course; that is, a
policy of strict nonintervention. As he puts it,
"In
none of the wars would any vital US interest be at stake to
justify sending a large American army to fight or to risk
nuclear war. In each of the wars described above, America
is drawn in because of commitments dating to a Cold War that
has been over for a decade, a Gulf War that ended in 1991,
or a commitment to a Balkan peninsula that should never have
been made. Should simultaneous wars break out in the Gulf
and Korea, and should the Middle East or the Balkans flare
up, American will come face to face with what [Walter] Lippmann
called foreign policy bankruptcy."
AN
AMERICAN NATIONALIST
As
an American nationalist, Buchanan's concern is the interests
of this country as fundamentally distinct from all
others, and deserving of a special place – indeed, the
only place – in the affections of our makers of
policy. He is, above all, an American patriot, deeply in love
with the tradition and spirit of a people uniquely averse
to empire-building on account of their love of liberty. Yet
any assertion of this kind of Americanism is "shouted
down as `isolationist!'" he complains, and "it is
time to expose this malevolent myth of 'isolationism,' so
that our foreign policy debate can proceed on the grounds
of what is best for America." What is best for America
– not the multinational corporations, or the United Nations,
or the peoples of the world, or even the New World Order.
No, not any of these, but for America First – a slogan
that Pat has revived single-handedly, and one that deserves
the widest possible circulation.
BUSH'S
BIG LIE
One
of Buchanan's major achievements in this book is to rescue
the memory of the old America First Committee from the slanders
of the War Party. Citing a particularly egregious example
in the speech of Bush senior on the occasion of the fiftieth
anniversary of Pearl Harbor – "Isolationists flew
escort," said Bush, "for the very bombers that attacked
our men"! – Buchanan avers that "President
Bush had stood history on its head." Uttered at the height
of Buchanan's assault on the Bushian Establishment, this lying
canard no doubt enraged Buchanan at the time, and in an important
sense much of the rest of A Republic, Not an Empire
is a refutation of this Big Lie.
It
wasn't the "isolationists" who had control of the
White House when Japanese bombers rained death on our unsuspecting
fleet, but the Great Interventionist himself, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, who had furthermore been angling and maneuvering
to get us into the war for many months. But isolationism,
says Buchanan, is a myth, a useful one for the War Party,
but a myth nonetheless, and proceeds to make his point in
the next few chapters as he tells the story of the expansion
of the US from a struggling confederation clinging to the
Eastern shore to a continental republic on the brink of empire.
It is an enthralling and – as told by Buchanan –
engaging account, packed with historical details and odd facts.
The fateful turn toward Empire, says Buchanan, began with
the acquisition of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the "liberation"
of Cuba, and he dramatizes the temper of the times with such
fascinating doggerel as the Boston Transcript's ode
to Commodore George Dewey, the conqueror of Manila:
ODE
TO COMMODORE DEWEY
"O
Dewy at Manila
That fateful first of May,
When you sank the Spanish squadron
In almost bloodless fray,
And gave your name to deathless fame;
O glorious Dewey, say,
Why didn't you weigh anchor
And softly sail away?"
KIPLING
AND T.R.
History
buffs will love it when Buchanan digs up such gems as the
correspondence of Rudyard Kipling, the poet laureate of British
imperialism, and our own Teddy Roosevelt; it seems Kipling
sent T. R. a copy of his ode to "The White Man's Burden,"
who dryly remarked that he found it "rather poor poetry,
but good sense from the expansionist viewpoint." Buchanan
cites the New York World's riposte to Kipling (and
can't you just hear the screams of outrage coming from our
politically correct critics?):
THANKS
BUT NO THANKS
"We've
taken up the white man's burden
Of ebony and brown
Now will you kindly tell us, Rudyard,
How we may put it down?"
A
FATEFUL DECISION
Americans
exulted in the taking of the Philippines, but, as Buchanan
shows, it was a fateful – and near fatal – decision,
one that we would fully pay the price for as this most vulnerable
possession had to be defended. Indefensible against the rising
peoples of the East, who were nation-building in spite of
Western interference, the Philippines instead of becoming
the forward position of an expanding American power in the
Orient became our Achilles heel – as the events of World
War II in the Pacific would demonstrate.
THE
BACILLUS OF IMPERIALISM
The
bacillus of imperialism, as one critic of the Spanish-American
war put it, had infected the American body politic, and, most
importantly, taken root in the consciousness of the financial
and intellectual elites. Instead of upholding the republican
tradition and foreign policy of the Founders, the "progressive"
imperialists were committed to a frankly imperial vision:
the new prophets of an overseas empire "broke with the
vision of the Farewell Address and raised Manifest Destiny
to a new level." We had become a mirror image of the
Mother Country, against whose depredations we had rebelled
– and were now inflicting on the conquered peoples of
the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean isles. No
longer our nemesis, Great Britain was now "our exemplar."
PERFIDIOUS
ALBION
The
great departure, however, wasn't really experienced by Americans
on a grand scale until the tragedy of World War I unfolded.
Buchanan asks "Why did Woodrow Wilson break with all
tradition and lead American into a slaughterhouse that had
consumed millions of the best and bravest of Europe's young,
when no vital interest was at risk?" In his answer to
this agonizing question Buchanan points to the Anglophilia
rampant among the nation's elites, and cites historian Ralph
Raico in an analysis that bears repeating here:
"The
President and most of his chief subordinates were dyed-in-the-wool
Anglophiles. Love of England and all things English was an
intrinsic part of their sense of identity. With England threatened,
even the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court,
Edward D. White, voiced the impulse to leave for Canada to
volunteer for the British armed forces."
A
MORTGAGED NATION
While
the British propaganda effort in America was massive and quite
effective, it wasn't just Perfidious Albion all by itself
that dragged us into a war that marked the end of Western
civilization and the beginning of a new barbarism. There was
also, Pat points out, the all-pervasive influence of "the
money power." The munitions industry grew fat on the
profits of war, and were a mighty lobby for intervention,
but also there was the indebtedness of the Allies to the New
York banks. Without an Allied victory, those loans would never
be repaid. The economic future of the nation had been mortgaged
and linked to the victory of England and France. The American
people had no interest in the victory of either side, it was
a war between empires in which our old Republic could have
no part, and Wilson campaigned on the slogan "He kept
us out of war!" Not long after he took the oath of office,
Wilson, the sanctimonious "man of peace, took us into
the war – and planted the seeds of the next one.
THE
TRIUMPH OF INTERVENTIONISM
It
is Buchanan's account of the events leading up to World War
II that will prove to be the most controversial section of
his book, and already the San Francisco Examiner columnist
and television commentator, Chris Matthews (of "Hardball"
fame), has
taken him to task for upholding the proud tradition of America
First. In Buchanan's view, this war was a mistake that
could and should have been avoided; it gave rise to the creation
of the Soviet Empire and fifty years of a life-and-death struggle
that never had to be. Hitler was intent on going east, and
never wanted war with the Western powers. England was out
of danger after the Battle of Britain, with the US not yet
in, and the Germans' failure to cross the Channel signaled
that the Brits were beyond the power of the Nazi armies. Having
secured his Western front, Hitler then moved East: the invasion
of the Soviet Union could have meant that the two totalitarian
powers might have destroyed each other and thus eliminated
the two main dangers to liberty in a single blow. But it was
not to be. The American Left, including the Communist Party
and its many allies among the liberals, were determined to
save the Soviet Union, which they worshipped as the socialist
"fatherland." As soon as the Soviet Union was attacked,
they went into action, while, on the other side of the barricades,
the conservatives and their libertarian brethren, were organizing
the America First Committee.
THE
STORY OF AMERICA FIRST
Buchanan's
recounting of the story of the founding of the America First
Committee (AFC), and its many distinguished supporters, covers
much of the ground first turned over by such historians as
Wayne G. Cole and Justus Doenecke, popularizing and dramatizing
the trenchant point made by these pioneering scholars: that
the AFC, far from being "a Nazi transmission belt,"
as its leftist and Communist opponents insisted, was the beginning
of a movement to take our old republic back, a mass-based
antiwar movement that embodied the traditional American aversion
to the turmoils and intrigues of Europe. Eight-hundred thousand
strong, the AFC developed a sophisticated analysis of the
world situation that reflected the instincts of the ordinary
American, who (in June of 1940) opposed US entry into the
war under any circumstances in overwhelming numbers: 86 percent.
Only 5 percent wanted us to fight, and this, as Buchanan points
out, at the nadir of the Allied predicament, when the fate
of England was still in some doubt.
THE
POLITICS OF DECEPTION
The
role of FDR in all this was to lay low until safely elected
for a third triumphant term, pretending to be more isolationist
than America First and declaring "I will not take us
into any European war." If we parse his words with Clintonian
exactitude, however, we discover that he wasn't lying: after
all, he did not take us into a European war directly, but
only got us into it by the back door, in the Pacific. The
President's war message to Congress in the wake of Pearl Harbor
did not even mention the Germans. Hitler declared war on us
a few days later, a blunder that Buchanan understandably calls
"monumental." Yet he does not relate the whole story,
if he knows it, and that is Hitler's declaration of war was
in reaction to the fake news of a supposed "Victory Plan"
planted in the media – ironically enough, in the antiwar
Chicago Tribune – by British intelligence: it
told of American plans for an expeditionary force of millions
to aid the Allied war effort in Europe. Hitler cited this
report in his war message – and so it turns out
that both the German Fuehrer and the American people fell
for this ruse, with disastrous consequences for both.
FDR's
policy of deception and deliberate provocation is here chronicled
in detail, from the Gulf of Tonkin-like incident of the sinking
of the Greer – supposedly on a "mail run,"
but actually involved in targeting German subs for the Brits
– to the fake map of the alleged Nazi master plan for
the conquest of the Americas, cited by the lying Roosevelt
in one of his "fireside chats." The map the President
spoke of was a forgery cooked up in the dirty tricks laboratory
maintained by British intelligence in the US, which purported
to show the reorganization of Central and South America under
"five vassal states" under German dominion. Buchanan
cites Nicholas John Crull, author of Selling
War: The British Propaganda Campaign Against American Neutrality
in World War II, as saying that "the most striking
feature of the episode was the complicity of the President
of the United States in perpetrating the fraud."
HE
LIED US INTO WAR
Citing
the famous remark by Clare Booth Luce that FDR "lied
us into a war because he did not have the political courage
to lead us into it," Buchanan defends the heritage of
the modern conservative movement against the leftist charge
of "treason" and "subversion":
ISOLATION
FROM WAR
"This
needs to be said again and again: The America Firsters did
not want to 'isolate' America from the world; they wanted
only to isolate America from the war. The struggle with FDR
was over one issue: Should we follow the example of Washington
and stay out of European wars, or the example of Wilson and
go in? By the fall of 1941, the two great combatants were
Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Most Americans did not
believe their husbands, fathers, or sons should die for either
one."
JAPAN
BY THE THROAT
When
the war finally came, it came through the back door, in the
attack on Pearl Harbor: Buchanan's account of the long series
of provocations, diplomatic blunders, and wrong-headed policies
that set us on the road to that "day of infamy"
is riveting and can only be summarized here. The roots of
the conflict were in the acquisition of our Achilles heel,
the Philippines, and the proclamation (and failure) of the
overarching policy of the Open Door in China; both, says Buchanan,
led directly to the events culminating in war with Japan.
The catalyst, however, was the economic embargo declared by
FDR after the Japanese seizure of French, British, and Dutch
colonies in Indochina and outlying islands. As Buchanan puts
it, Japan was thus "gripped by the throat," and
had to fight or perish. They chose to fight, and the rest
is history – but history as written by the victors, a
self-serving chronicle of self-justification and self-glorification,
composed by "court historians" historians –
in the phrase of the revisionist historian Harry Elmer Barnes,
adopted by Buchanan – to honor the vanity of statesmen
and whitewash their crimes.
AGAINST
THE COURT HISTORIANS
Against
the court historians, Buchanan has raised up an alternative
view of American history that challenges the premises and
vital assumptions of the victors of World War II. Particularly
interesting is his take on the campaign of repression unleashed
by FDR on the antiwar movement of the early 1940s, which seems
in many ways very much like a similar campaign unleashed by
President Richard Nixon, his old boss, on the antiwar movement
of the 1960s. After detailing the smear campaign unleashed
by the President and his henchmen, Buchanan writes: "But
a vengeful FDR was not finished with America First. He had
unleashed the FBI and IRS on its members, tapped their phones,
had them hauled before grand juries, charged them with near-treason,
and smeared them as 'appeaser fifth columnists' and Nazi sympathizers."
To anyone who grew to political consciousness in the sixties,
all of this sounds awfully familiar – yet Pat does not
remark on the parallels with our own experience, an omission
that is interesting in itself.
CALLING
THEIR BLUFF
The
Bushian smear that the America Firsters were "riding
escort" on the Japanese warplanes that devastated Pearl
Harbor is, here, refuted in detail and at length, to the satisfaction
of anyone who cares about the truth of the matter. Yet that
will not stop the smearmongers and the Hate Buchanan Brigade
from babbling nonsense about "Father Coughlin" and
the "Nazi sympathizers" of the antiwar movement.
If Norman Thomas is a Nazi – as he was called by the
pro-war Commies of his day for aligning himself with the AFC
– then the epithet means nothing, a political four-letter-word
meant to stifle all discussion, and, most importantly, all
debate about the future course of American foreign policy.
All they have to do is start babbling about "Munich"
and "Hitler" and invoke all the familiar catchphrases
and stock images of old war movies, and the War Party thinks
it can literally get away with murder. The publication of
this book marks the beginning of the end of that kind of overweening
arrogance: it is time to call their bluff, and tell the people
the truth about the delusions they have been fed all these
years. In A Republic, Not an Empire, Pat Buchanan does
a masterful job of telling the real story behind two world
wars – and the threat of yet another.
THE
COLD WAR
I
will not tarry over my disagreement with Buchanan's thesis
that Stalin started the Cold War and that the US was fighting
in a noble cause – and that any of this had the slightest
effect on the ultimate fate of the Soviet Union and its satellites
other than to prolong their existence. His interpretation
of the Vietnam war, and his view that we could have "won"
it, is belied by his own analysis that concludes we should
never have been involved to begin with. He veers close to
the revisionist view, however, at several points in the text,
such as when he remarks that, in Vietnam, "the New Frontiersmen
were pursuing Wilsonism – with guns." He gives a
very abbreviated account of how Ronald Reagan supposedly
won the Cold War, in three paragraphs; nothing is said about
the economic impossibility of socialism, but economics is
not Buchanan's strong point. History is his forte, and he
tells it with a narrative drive that clearly and colorfully
illustrates the central thesis of this book: that the road
from a republic to an empire is one-way, but it is not too
late to change course.
Buchanan's
book reminded me of Garet Garrett, a writer even more eloquent
than Buchanan, who wrote so eloquently about the same subject
in his classic pamphlet, Rise of Empire:
RISE
OF EMPIRE
"We
have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire.
If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single
stroke between day and night; the precise moment does not
matter. There was no painted sign to say: 'You are now entering
Imperium.' Yet it was a very old road and the voice of history
was saying" 'Whether you know it or not, the act of crossing
may be irreversible.' And now, not far ahead, is a sign that
reads: 'No U-turns.'"
CAUSE
FOR OPTIMISM
But
Garrett, chief editorial writer for the Saturday Evening
Post and certainly the most lyrical of the Old Right journalists,
was also among the most pessimistic. Perhaps the publication
of Buchanan's brave book would have lightened up his dark
vision, in that it implies a movement to take back what has
been lost, to make a U-turn away from the fate of the Brits
and so many before them, and get our old Republic back. No,
I won't go on about the Cold War, who started it and what
ended it, but merely point out Buchanan's great insight about
the post-Cold War world: "The difference between crafting
foreign policy then and now is the difference between arithmetic
and calculus." It is indeed a qualitatively leap in the
expectations and demands we make of our leaders: Buchanan,
in this book, shows above all that he is up to the task. This
is not some cheap politician, or even a populist leader, but
a thinker and potentially a statesman whose ability to recognize
greatness in others, in this detailed and fascinating history
of American foreign policy, is a measure of his own.
AN
AMERICAN GULLIVER
I
can hardly resist one last quote, one that seems to sum up
this book thematically and stylistically. In describing the
victory of America in the Cold War, and the wave of euphoria
that swept the world as the Soviet Empire was tossed into
the dustbin of history, Buchanan writes:
"All
that America had ever sought had come to pass. Yet rather
than seize the opportunity to pull up our 'trip wires' around
the world and shed unwanted commitments – to recapture
our freedom of action and restore a traditional foreign policy
– Republican internationalists were now joining with
Wilsonian globalists to tie America down like Gulliver in
some 'New World Order' where US wealth and power would be
put at the service of causes having nothing to do with the
vital interests of the United States."
THE
FOREIGN LOBBYISTS
And
that is where we are today, with only Buchanan championing
the freeing of the American Gulliver. In opposing the internationalists
who control both parties and holding aloft the banner of America
First, Buchanan dared to stand up against his President and
the leader of his own party during the Gulf War, just as he
stands up to the same gang today. In this book he makes a
salient point about the character of the War Party, and the
motives of the interventionists who lobby for foreign aid
and intervention. They are the various "amen-corners"
of foreign governments, whose views and activities reflected
the agenda of interests who most definitely do not
put America First. During the first Gulf War, this sent the
War Party into a towering rage, when they practically demanded
his head on a silver platter for daring to expose the dirty
little secret at the core of their lobbying efforts. But somehow
Pat survived their furious smear campaign, and the War Party
suffered a big setback. For the first time in a while it was
stuck with the image of being the party of foreign interests,
the creature of ethnic and religious constituencies in the
US which are routinely mobilized for the purpose of decisively
influencing the course of our foreign policy.
DISSECTING
THE WAR PARTY
Seen
as an alliance of ethnic lobbies, special interests groups,
a sensationalist warmongering media, and what he calls "the
new Religious Crusaders," the War Party is identified
in virtually all of its constituent parts. Nor does he leave
out another crucial component, and that is the transnational
corporate elite that owes allegiance to nothing and no one
but the Company. In the Buchananite analysis, economic interests
become another major factor in the mix, working hand-in-hand
with those who lobby for intervention in China and elsewhere
to secure universal religious freedom as a matter of American
foreign policy.
A
GOOD CATHOLIC BOY
To
these various factions, each with their own motives for getting
us involved in foreign wars, Buchanan's answer is blunt and
definitive: "When one considers that today, nuclear,
chemical, and biological weapons can be delivered by such
conventional means as merchant ships and truck bombs, the
case against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy
becomes conclusive." As a devout Catholic, Buchanan upholds
the "just war" theory developed by the Jesuits which
insists on, among other things, "proportionality"
– that is, that the punishment meted out by aggrieved
party in any conflict must be proportional to the original
aggression. Is the defense of Taiwan worth the risk of a nuclear
exchange? Does the defense of Lithuania have to mean the nuclear
decimation of Europe? To a good Catholic like Buchanan –
and to any decent human being – the answer is clearly
and emphatically no.
HITTING
THE HEGEMONISTS
I
won't tarry over the many details of Buchanan's excellent
case against globalism, except to note that he makes short
work of the two most pompous (and well-funded) spokesmen for
the new imperial "hegemonism," the dwarfish Bill
Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and the Little
Napoleon of the Neoconservaties, and Robert Kagan, the Standard's
chief foreign policy maven and "hegemonist" theoretician-in-residence
(p. 359-62).
MUST
WE GO TO WAR FOR TAIWAN?
I
would also point out to conservatives that Buchanan, in the
essentials of his position on China, upholds the same position
that we have been energetically taking at Antiwar.com, and
that is most ably expressed by the remarkably talented Bevin
Chu, our newest columnist: that the US cannot and must
not intervene in the ongoing Chinese civil war. For all his
bellowing at China on the issue of trade, Buchanan estimates
that "China does not today threaten any vital US interest."
He quite properly says that "United States policy toward
China should be neither to aggravate nor appease Beijing,"
and as for defending Taiwan against a Chinese invasion force:
"the first defense perimeter of Free Asia should be manned
by Asians themselves, united in regional alliances, with the
United States relegated to" a supporting role. Would
President Buchanan go to war with China over Taiwan? The answer
is clearly no.
THE
VERDICT OF HISTORY
Korea
and Japan must also defend themselves, and US troops should
be withdrawn. These are relics of a Cold War that has ended,
and old alliances must not be allowed to drag us down into
new quagmires – especially on the mainland of Asia. The
American people will never stand for it, not again –
and that is the lesson not only of Vietnam, but also, as Buchanan
shows, the verdict of history: we must not overreach. If we
do, we follow Great Britain into the imperial bone-yard.
THE
CHOICE
We
must choose between a Republic and an Empire. Which will it
be? This is the question posed by Buchanan's book. That such
a man is asking such a question, and millions are hearing
it for the first time, is cause for celebration. In the antiwar
movement of the new millennium, in which hippies and aging
flower children will play absolutely no part, Patrick J. Buchanan
is a towering figure, our A. J. Muste, our Gandhi, the standard-bearer
and publicist of our cause.
A
MILESTONE
Whether
or not he really believes he can be elected President is not
the subject of this column, and I take no position (and neither
does Antiwar.com) on whether he will or ought to be elected
to that exalted office. I can only say that the appearance
of this book is a milestone in the history of the opposition
to war in this country. For here, between two covers, is the
case for peace and nonintervention, for a foreign policy that
puts America not only first, but also – as Pat likes
to put it – second and third as well. Aside from his
few allusions to trade protectionism – a view with which
I thoroughly disagree, but which is easily separable from
his foreign policy stance – this book is a near perfect
summary of the most important issue of our time: the vital
question of war and peace. There are not many guideposts we
can point to that offer a consistent vision of what a pro-American
noninterventionist foreign policy would be like, or why it
is preferable to the crusading globalism of our bloody-minded
rulers: A Republic, Not an Empire is one of them.
|
