Marjorie L. Jeffrey
The rise of the American empire during the Cold War has been covered time and again, by better historians and analysts; and yet America still finds itself consumed by the debates of bygone ages. While it is undoubtedly true that, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, in history lies all the secrets of statecraft, since the fall of the Berlin Wall we have found American foreign policy trapped by recent history, largely because of the tremendous influence of leaders who came of age during what James Burnham called “The Struggle for the World.” But the cage of our foreign policy consensus, rattled by the Donald Trump campaign of 2016, has burst open. What follows is a historical reflection on what led up to that campaign and what its consequences have been.
We begin with George F. Kennan’s prophetic critique of America’s emphasis on military power and spending during the Cold War, and then turn to the struggle for the American regime’s political direction, best seen in the battle between Pat Buchanan and George H. W. Bush in the Republican primary of the 1992 presidential election campaign. From there, we can trace the continued rise of what is now called “neoconservative” foreign policy in the Clinton and Bush years, pausing to reflect on the difference between George W. Bush’s campaign promises and his administration post-9/11. With some exploration of neoconservative power during the Iraq War years, we then consider objections to that consensus, including primarily what I call “the libertarian moment.” This begins with Ron Paul’s campaign of 2008 and is carried forward by Rand Paul’s attempts to create a new libertarian-conservative fusionist wing of the Republican Party. Finally, we consider the Trump era, and how it tried to combine noninterventionism with bows in the direction of Buchananist cultural conservatism.
While this study contains some discussion of important political thinkers, with particular emphasis on George Kennan, its aim is to trace the trajectory of foreign policy on the American Right since the end of the Cold War. Of necessity, we cannot include a lengthy discussion of American foreign policy throughout most of its history, though of course this would enrich our understanding of our own position. It must be conceded that there is no going backward; we cannot return to a blissful, perhaps mythic time in American history when we followed perfectly the counsel of Washington’s “Farewell Address” to abjure repeated and endless hostilities with foreign nations, or the fervent prayer of John Quincy Adams that his country “go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy” but defend only “her own” interests. Yet it is only by knowing how we arrived at the present moment that we can possibly hope to guess whither we are going.
In “Communism: The Struggle for the World,” James Burnham notes that throughout most of America’s history, the focus of political life has been directed toward internal issues. But writing in 1947, he says that “we have entered a period in history in which world politics take precedence over national and internal politics.… Everything else is secondary, absolute.”1 Burnham, formerly a dedicated Marxist who became a conservative, was referring to the struggle for global dominance between the Soviet Union and the United States. Burnham today is considered to be the intellectual godfather of several prominent paleoconservatives, but it must be recalled that he was also a founder of National Review. Once upon a time, in the early days of the conservative movement, all were united by a common cause, the struggle for the world; and the recognition of the importance of this struggle is what led many who would later be called “neoconservatives” into the ranks of the conservative movement.
It is easy to understand the Cold War as the formal cause of the buildup and expansion of America’s military presence. The policy of containment, developed by George F. Kennan as a prudential response to a particular situation, necessitated this growth into what eventually became a soft military empire. It is ironic, or perhaps fitting, that it was Kennan himself who became the most prominent conservative critic of this empire, and especially of the “military-industrial complex,” a term that Kennan helped popularize but did not originate.2 In his 1984 essay “American Democracy and Foreign Policy,”3 Kennan surveys the state of American foreign policy, and the history of it since the end of World War II. What is perhaps most striking about the essay as a whole is how much it could apply to our current situation; though, if Kennan’s criticism is valid, then the state we are in is much, much worse. His statements about our accomplishments are brief, since he focuses mostly on our mistakes. But he expects us to learn from this educational judgment: “Just as it does the human individual more good to reflect upon his failings than upon his virtues, I think the national society, too, has more to learn from its failures than from its successes.”4
Kennan seems to hold no reservations about our position as a great world power. He accepts that role and does not advise us to try to change it. His concern is that, as a great power, we operate in the international realm prudently. Part of the difficulty he sees with American foreign policy in the early twentieth century is that it was childish, and likens it to “the relatively innocent erraticism of the relatively young adolescent who is becoming aware of his own strength and would like to use it, but lacks the maturity to know how best to do so.”5 But our real trouble began, as he sees it, with certain mistakes we made in our policy toward the Soviet Union. These mistakes “involved attributing to the Soviet leadership aims and intentions it did not really have,”6 by turning them into a kind of large-scale caricature of the Nazi regime, and by assuming they could be defeated in the same way as Germany had been. Whatever their intentions were, we made a mistake in jumping to conclusions. Our national confidence was high, and we had little experience of anything but success. Furthermore, Wilsonianism—a willingness to spend American blood and might for the freedoms of peoples around the world—contributed to our overreach. Another mistake involved “embracing the nuclear weapon as the mainstay of our military posture.”7 Here, Kennan makes a distinctly moral as well as prudential argument. “We made the primitive error of supposing that the effectiveness of a weapon was directly proportionate to its destructiveness—destructiveness not just against an enemy’s armed forces but against its population and its civilian economy as well. We forgot that the aim of war is, or should be, to gain one’s points with the minimum, not the maximum, of general destruction, and that a proper weapon must be not only destructive but discriminating.”8 It could be argued that any nation in the modern era would have made this mistake, in the wake of the two great European civil wars of the twentieth century. But it may also be a fact of American history, given our limited experience with premodern warfare, that the first great mass democracy was fated to conduct war based on numerical and weapon superiority. Arguably the first truly modern war with massive civilian casualties, a strategy of breaking the spirit of the civilian population, and a penchant for the dehumanization of the enemy was the American Civil War. Moreover, both world wars “ended in unconditional surrender, encouraging us in the mistaken view that the purpose of war was not to bring about a mutually advantageous compromise with an external adversary (now seen as totally evil and inhuman), but to destroy completely the power and the will of that adversary.”9 Kennan’s tone seems to be reminiscent of the argument of the German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt, who believed that modern warfare is characterized by the absolute demonization of the foe.
From these mistaken attitudes, says Kennan, issued our vast military-industrial complex. Kennan attributes this overreliance on massiveness to our lack of a serious diplomatic tradition. Curiously he does not discuss the size of the American bureaucracy or the struggle for power between Congress and the president. He takes issue with American democracy itself. He maintains that American leaders have a tendency “to be more concerned for the domestic-political effects of what he is saying or doing than about their actual effects on our relations with other countries.”10 Policies are often judged by how popular they are at home, regardless of whether they will work outside the country. This “degenerate” foreign policy follows from Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations about the nature of the conduct of foreign affairs in democratic regimes. We have a huge national constituency, which now operates in the form of multiple lobbies and special interest groups that have a corrosive effect on the policymaking process.
What is to be done in this circumstance? Kennan asks. He thinks it would be naive to suppose that the structure of our regime will change to fit the demands of great power diplomacy. Like James Madison, he admires whatever in our system of government protects civil liberties. But the lack of coherence in our international affairs stems, at least in part, according to Kennan, from the dialectic that is implicit in the Constitution, in which ambition counteracts ambition. And if this system is the only feasible one to govern such a heterogeneous mass of people as exists in America, Kennan will accept this situation for want of a better alternative. All he asks for is a modicum of prudence and the acceptance of limits to what we can reasonably hope to change: “Let us recognize that there are problems in this world that we will not be able to solve.” “It will not be useful or effective for us to plunge into dilemmas in other regions of the globe that will have to find their solution without our involvement.”11 This is a plea that has largely fallen on deaf ears.
Kennan was (and still is) seen by many Cold Warriors as an early example of what David Frum would attack as an “Unpatriotic Conservative.”12 But his prediction about the resilience of what he called the military-industrial complex would prove to be true. Not everyone shared his concern. In a critical review of Kennan’s latest book in 1977, Edward N. Luttwak wrote in Commentary that Kennan went too far in calling for a reduction of military spending to an “indispensable minimum.” Kennan expressed disapproval that the Pentagon’s spending had reached 6 percent of GDP. According to Luttwak: “One would have imagined that Mr. Kennan the historian would remember that historically the United States has grossly underspent on defense.”13 Luttwak further contends that Kennan’s objections to tremendous military power and his “refusal to give military power its due reflects only an emotional revulsion.”
Let us note that Kennan wrote prophetically in 1984:
The habit of spending from two to three hundred billions of dollars annually on preparations for an imagined war with Russia—a habit reaching deeply into the lives and interests of millions of our citizens both in and out of the armed services, including industrial workers, labor-union officials, politicians, legislators, and middlemen: This habit has risen to the status of a vast addiction of American society, an addiction whose overcoming would encounter the most intense resistance and take years to accomplish even if the Soviet Union had in the meantime miraculously disappeared from the earth.14
He further observed: “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”15 Kennan’s predictions may have been prophetic. After the wall fell, America was faced with a choice as to which way it would go. Would it continue its mission of world peacekeeper and leader and principal funder of operations for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)? Or, would it find a way to pare back its military obligations and focus on internal rather than external affairs?
The first great skirmish for the soul of the Republican Party (and by extension, of the conservative movement) after the Cold War was in the 1992 Republican presidential primary. In that confrontation the political choice was between Pat Buchanan (a former adviser to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, newspaper columnist, and panelist on Crossfire) and President George H. W. Bush. The 1992 election was unusual because of the number of “outsider” candidates (a relatively new phenomenon in American politics) and because an incumbent Republican president lost to the relatively unknown Democratic governor of Arkansas. But much of this strangeness could be attributed to a new development in American politics, the disappearance of the Cold War as a central issue. In the Republican primary, Patrick J. Buchanan ran against what George H. W. Bush had called the “New World Order,” a phrase that meant to Buchanan the disappearance of national sovereignty. Bush’s “Toward a New World Order” speech, given before a joint session of Congress on September 11, 1990, framed the new world order as an American objective in the Gulf War. The role of the United States would be to enforce the rule of international law, in cooperation with the rest of the international community.
An article in National Review written by Richard Brookhiser in early 1992 throws light on the Buchanan campaign.16 In “Waiting for Righty,” Brookhiser stresses certain aspects of Buchanan’s campaign that seem to anticipate Trump’s, down to Buchanan’s quips about ejecting ACT-UP demonstrators who interrupted his speeches.17 At his campaign announcement in Concord, New Hampshire, Buchanan compared the American situation to the bureaucratic takeover of European nations: “We Americans must not let that happen here. We must not trade in our sovereignty for a cushioned seat at the head table of anyone’s New World Order.”18 From foreign affairs, he turned to economic problems, beginning with America’s outsized financial commitment to the protection of other countries and calling for the reform of international organizations. Finally, Buchanan spoke of the cultural crisis that had been placed on the back burner during the Cold War. The candidate closed with what later would become a Trumpian sentiment: George H. W. Bush “is yesterday and we are tomorrow. He is a globalist and we are nationalists. He believes in some Pax Universalis; we believe in the Old Republic. He would put Americans wealth and power at the service of some vague New World Order; we will put America first.”19
Brookhiser’s criticisms of Buchanan (protectionism, lack of experience, and supposed hints of anti-Semitism) were relatively mild. Moreover, National Review praised the candidate during this election, particularly in its cover story “The Case for Buchanan” in early March.20 This was tame compared with the attacks on Buchanan that came from the neoconservative establishment during his later presidential campaigns. Buchanan’s high water mark in the 1992 campaign was receiving 38 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, but that year he also won the straw poll at Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) with over half the vote. John O’Sullivan, the editor of National Review, wrote that he would support Buchanan until a “millisecond” before he dropped out. Then he would back Bush with reluctance because “no conservative in his heart wants to endorse a President who has raised taxes and extended racial and sexual quotas.”21 Buchanan eventually did drop out, and O’Sullivan then endorsed the president, who in the interest of party unity allowed his former opponent to give a primetime speech at the National Convention. This led to Buchanan’s delivery of the famous “Culture Wars” speech, which was the last time that Buchanan was allowed to speak at a Republican National Convention.
Although Buchanan lost that year, so did George H. W. Bush. He ran again in 1996 but did worse than he had four years earlier. In his 1992 presidential campaign, Buchanan had no chance of going anywhere, but his followers liked seeing him push Bush further to the right, especially on taxes and regulations. In 1996, Buchanan was seen by the party as a mere nuisance. James W. Ceaser and Andrew E. Busch observed that “setting aside all the statements and the mathematics, there was one major political story of 1996 and that was Pat Buchanan. Brief as his moment of national exposure was, its intensity was extraordinary.”22 Buchanan’s appeal to the white lower and middle classes was summed up in one of his campaign slogans: “The peasants are coming with pitchforks.” Buchanan often showed up at rallies with a pitchfork, becoming “Pitchfork Pat” to his supporters, who began buying the same object for their front porches.
In a profile of a likely Buchanan entrance into the election in 1995, Robert Novak wrote that the “second worst nightmare” for “Republican establishmentarians” would be for Buchanan to make strong showings in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and thus to be a genuine “conservative alternative” to Robert Dole.23 (Their very worst nightmare, he wrote, would be an independent candidacy of Buchanan in the general election.) Buchanan won the Louisiana Caucus in a surprise showing and went on to another surprise victory in New Hampshire, a primary that Dole was supposed to win. After that unexpected victory, William F. Buckley criticized Buchanan’s “isolationist” positions on foreign policy and his commitment to repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but praised his positions on cultural issues: his crusade against abortion, his “call for a national common culture … against Bilingual America,” and his “earnest suspicion of predatory government.”24
Though the conservative intelligentsia remained troubled by Buchanan’s isolationism and protectionism, it is clear that his positions on immigration, racial quotas, and the plight of the working-class man and woman were genuinely appealing to many on the right. The editors of National Review wrote after the New Hampshire primary that Buchanan’s appeal to cultural and moral issues was familiar territory for a GOP candidate, but “his appeal to blue-collar voters anxious about their economic future takes him furthest from Republican—and conservative—orthodoxy.”25 The Weekly Standard, an explicitly neoconservative publication, was less subtle in attacking Buchanan’s campaign and published a heated assault on the unconventional candidate by Norman Podhoretz. This critic charged Buchanan with anti-Semitism, calling his positions on foreign policy and the economy “wrong and indeed dangerous.”26 An article in the same edition of the magazine, trying to make sense of Buchanan’s victory in New Hampshire, called his “style and substance … more than a little unpleasant and spooky.”27 The author, David Tell, goes on to explain that there really was no sector of the American population with whom Buchanan’s core issues resonated, especially not, heaven forbid, “economic populism.” In the end, Tell argues that Buchanan is simply a more talented campaigner than Dole, and his success will harm the Republican Party in the long run. All this provides some sense of the mood among neoconservative elites during the ascendancy of “Pitchfork Pat.”
Norman Ornstein, writing for the Weekly Standard in March 1996, concluded that the issues driving Buchanan’s campaign were not going anywhere, but that was true only for the present. “Pat Buchanan will be back in 2000,” he wrote, “with more credibility, a broader base, and even more momentum—and a second Buchanan in the White House, with a Congress more sympathetic to this one’s isolationist and protectionist siren song, will no longer be a farfetched joke.”28 This proved to be only partially true in 2000, but truer in the much longer term. Buchanan’s issues remained, even after the candidate withdrew from the race, after running as the Reform Party nominee and finishing fourth in the general election. In a twist of historical drama, Donald J. Trump also launched an exploratory committee in 1999 to consider a possible bid for the Reform Party nomination. At that time he excoriated Buchanan as “Attila the Hun” and “a Hitler-lover.”29 Trump eventually dropped out of the race and refused to support Buchanan as the Reform Party nominee.30
Pat Buchanan’s prolific writing resulted in several popular books, and in 1999 he published A Republic, Not an Empire, a book peppered with references to George Kennan. In it, he scorned members of the GOP who sought to dismiss his policy recommendations as “isolationism” and “protectionism,” arguing that his positions on economics and foreign policy were born of the long traditions of American political history. In what may now be considered a prophetic paragraph, Buchanan wrote,
I believe deeply that the foreign policy I advocate for the twenty-first century is not only right for America, but will also be seen to be right, and will one day be embraced by the entire nation, for a fundamental reason: Present U.S. foreign policy, which commits America to go to war for scores of nations in regions where we have never fought before, is unsustainable. As we pile commitment upon commitment in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf, American power continues to contract—a sure formula for foreign policy disaster.31
The publication of this book marked Buchanan’s ideological break with the Republican Party, and both events spurred the National Review to produce a Buchanan-themed edition of the magazine, with the cover story by Ramesh Ponnuru, “A Conservative No More: The Tribal Politics of Pat Buchanan.” Ponnuru concluded his article by stating, “Letting Buchanan continue to describe himself as a conservative would be not just irritating but destructive. He is in no important sense a conservative anymore. Let his failure be his alone.”32 In the same edition, Andrew Bacevich published a review of A Republic, Not an Empire, with the deprecatory title “Nativist Son.” According to Bacevich, Buchanan’s critique of “post-Wilsonian internationalism” was not accompanied by plausible alternatives.33 Bacevich’s primary charges against Buchanan were moral and cultural. He objected to Buchanan’s negative attitude toward immigrants coming to America from the Third World. Buchanan, he wrote, wrongly imagined that these people “don’t readily assimilate” or “provide suitable material for making real Americans.”34 According to Bacevich, both Buchanan’s rejection of empire and his call for “enlightened nationalism” are equally ill advised.
George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election on a slogan originally coined by Pat Buchanan: “compassionate conservatism.” According to the political theorist Daniel J. Mahoney, “It must be remembered that neoconservative advocates of a militarily assertive neo-Wilsonian foreign policy were initially wary of George W. Bush and tended to support the internationalist John McCain in the 2000 Republican primaries.”35 In his presidential debates, the younger Bush seemed skeptical of the humanitarian interventions of the Clinton years and promised to pursue a “more humble foreign policy.” Some of this appealed to establishment Republicans because of their congressional opposition to President Clinton’s intervention in Kosovo. A little less than a year into Bush’s administration came the September 11 attacks.
The events of 9/11 accelerated neoconservative dominance over American foreign policy, but while the attacks increased this trend, its organizational infrastructure had been building for years. The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a think tank launched in 1997 by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, was founded to “promote American global leadership,” and sought to put together a political coalition to support what Kagan and Kristol called “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.”36 Of the twenty-five signatories of the PNAC Statement of Principles (which included Norman Podhoretz and Francis Fukuyama), ten went on to serve in the George W. Bush administration, including Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and, notably, John Bolton, now a member of the Trump administration. It seems undeniable that many of the people within the PNAC circle had an enormous amount of influence on the Bush administration after September 11. Following on the success of PNAC, one of its project directors and a Washington lobbyist, Randy Scheunemann, founded the bipartisan Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002. The advisory board included John McCain and Joe Lieberman. Both of these lobbying groups disbanded a few years after the invasion of Iraq, when the former executive director of PNAC proudly noted that “our view has been adopted.”37
What was “their view”? In what may be considered one of the founding documents of what became Bush-era neoconservatism, Kristol and Kagan wrote in “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” that instead of either Clinton’s “Wilsonian multi-lateralism” or Buchanan’s “neo-isolationism,” America should seek a policy of “benevolent global hegemony.”38 Shortly thereafter, in 1998, the same authors announced in the New York Times that “Saddam Hussein must go.”39 While the original aim was to put pressure on the Clinton administration, real success for PNAC came only with a crisis. On September 20, 2001, an open letter presumably written by William Kristol and signed by forty neoconservative policy advocates called for large increases in military spending, military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the removal of Saddam Hussein. The same letter demanded a war against terrorism in general (but specifically against the Taliban and Hezbollah) and added pressure on the Palestinian Authority to counteract anti-Israel activity. According to the letter, these steps were “the minimum necessary if this war is to be fought effectively and brought to a successful conclusion.”40 Most of these demands eventually received the approval of the Bush administration, together with resounding endorsement from neoconservative journals such as Commentary and the Weekly Standard.
Over time, an increased pushback against these policies took place, both from the Left and from the libertarian and paleoconservative Right. In 2002, the journal American Conservative was founded by Scott McConnell, Pat Buchanan, and Taki Theodoracopulos in order to oppose the Iraq War from the Right. Other fusionist antiwar publications then came along, like Justin Raimondo’s Antiwar.com. Against these efforts, David Frum penned his famous “Unpatriotic Conservatives” essay in the pages of National Review, charging antiwar conservatives and libertarians with being anti-American: “They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation’s enemies.”41 In a wide-ranging attack mostly on the hated paleoconservatives, Frum describes those he targets as self-absorbed cranks. In addressing their opposition to Bill Clinton’s war in Kosovo, Frum states that instead of expressing American patriotism, these eccentrics flaunted their “Serbian nationalism.” Finally, on the basis of quotations from Kevin McDonald, Joseph Sobran, Samuel Francis, and Pat Buchanan, Frum levels the charge of “racism” before ending with this searing condemnation:
They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.
War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen—and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.42
Though the American conservative movement had been cracking up for more than a decade, this essay and its publication in National Review marked the end of any pretense of civility between the Neoconservative Right and the Old Right. It says much about the confidence of conservatives who supported the Iraq War that they felt comfortable excommunicating so many influential former members of the conservative movement. Ironically, a year later the founder of National Review, William F. Buckley, confessed that he too was an unpatriotic conservative, stating in the New York Times, “If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.”43
Jerome Tucille wrote a popular history of the libertarian movement—the provocatively titled It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand—that has bearing on this study. Today that book might well be called It Usually Begins with Ron Paul. Much of the generation that came of age during the Iraq War era and that tended toward the Right were skeptical about military intervention. The coalition that provided support for Ron Paul’s campaign in 2008 and 2012 included many young people, as well as older paleoconservatives, American nationalists, and military veterans who opposed George W. Bush’s wars. Longtime congressman Ron Paul was steeped in the libertarian movement from the 1970s onward, but managed to rise above the movement’s internal squabbles and become a symbol of liberty for a younger generation.
Paul’s 2008 campaign was marked by a youthful earnestness, staffed by young people who met through local meetings and were bound mostly by their opposition to what they perceived as American wars of imperialism. There was a folksy charm to this campaign but also an obvious contrast between the aged and cantankerous candidate and his young, exuberant supporters. In what is now perhaps the best remembered moment of that first Paul campaign, a heated exchange about foreign policy took place between Paul and Rudy Giuliani. At the South Carolina primary debate, Paul reminded his audience that the “conservative wing” of the Republican Party “always advocated a non-interventionist foreign policy” and that George Bush had won his first election by campaigning on a “humble foreign policy.” Moreover, “there’s a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican Party.” This message had almost disappeared from the GOP during the Bush years, but now it was presented by the only Republican primary candidate who opposed the Iraq War. Giuliani, seizing on Paul’s use of “blowback” as an explanation for the events of 9/11, won the applause of the crowd with an emotional appeal to his record as mayor of New York City during the attacks.44 While Ron Paul clearly did not represent the majority of Republican voters in 2008, in 2016, at another debate in South Carolina, Donald Trump viciously attacked Bush’s record on Iraq—and won the South Carolina primary.
Ron Paul’s campaigns failed to win electoral victories, but they built a real movement at the grassroots level. New groups such as Students for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty began recruiting the kinds of students who were once drawn to establishment conservative organizations like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and Young Americans for Freedom. In the meantime, the Obama years fueled middle-American resentment against intrusive administration, which gave rise to the Tea Party movement in 2010. The Tea Party was a relatively short-lived phenomenon compared with the institutions built by the Paul movement, but some Tea Party positions (e.g., lower taxes and a strict interpretation of the Constitution) came to the fore in Ron Paul’s presidential run in 2008. While Tea Party groups did not raise foreign policy as a major issue, the midterm elections of 2010 brought an influx of Tea Party candidates into Congress, including Thomas Massie, Justin Amash, and Ron Paul’s son Rand Paul. In 2011, the House Liberty Caucus was founded under the chairmanship of Justin Amash. This caucus includes in its Statement of Principles a strict constitutional understanding of presidential war powers, and expresses opposition to “the exercise of executive War Powers in the absence of a Declaration [of War], except in the face of an immediate and direct threat to the United States.”45
Ron Paul’s campaign in 2012 was a different animal from his earlier run. It was a far more professional outfit, with more serious political operative; and at least for a short time, he had prospects of winning the Iowa caucuses. It may also be worth noting that while Ron Paul fiercely opposed illegal immigration in 2008—and throughout his career—in 2012 he softened his tone and voiced opposition to building a wall on the southern border. Coming in third in New Hampshire, he stayed in the race after everyone else had dropped out. In some ways, this was like the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016, with last-ditch efforts to use party convention rules at the Republican National Convention to change a predictable outcome. Paul was offered a speaking slot at the convention if he would endorse Mitt Romney, which he declined to do.46 Thereafter Ron Paul would act as a godfather to the libertarian movement, while his son Rand would take a different approach, by endorsing Romney in exchange for a speaking slot at the convention. This illustrates the stylistic difference between Ron and Rand: one is totally uncompromising and ran two mostly educational presidential campaigns leading to a lasting movement, while the other has attempted to work within the establishment. The difference between Ron and Rand can be illustrated by how they approach the issue of the Federal Reserve: one hopes to “end the Fed,” while the other wants merely to “audit the Fed.”
In 2011, Rand kept one of his campaign promises by cosponsoring an amendment to end birthright citizenship. He also stood out as a hard-liner in a sea of Republican senators anxious to support amnesty. Early in his Senate career, however, Rand tried to be a voice of moderation on foreign policy. Rand Paul delivered two memorable foreign policy speeches as a U.S. senator: one in February 2013 and another in October 2014. In both he questions what he calls “bipartisan consensus” on foreign policy and military intervention.
But he also showed a willingness to compromise that his father never demonstrated. In his 2013 speech, Rand Paul repositioned himself between neoconservatism and the isolationism of his father, calling himself a conservative “realist.”47 His speech “Containment and Radical Islam” relies heavily on the ideas of George Kennan as a basis for American foreign policy. Paul cleverly acknowledges the enormity of the problem posed by radical Islam—a problem that may require military action—but then asks why there is no substantive debate about what to do about it, or what to do about Iran’s nuclear program. Even in Israel, he argues, there is pushback against a simple military solution to the problem of Iran. Paul states, “Let me be clear. I don’t want Iran to develop nuclear weapons but I also don’t want to decide with certainty that war is the only option. Containment, though, should be discussed as an option with regard to the more generalized threat from radical Islam.” As an alternative model to what he criticizes, he proposes Kennan’s policy of containment developed against the threat posed by worldwide Communism during the Cold War. This containment requires not the military occupation of foreign lands but the working out of less costly intervention. Paul went on to condemn not only the Obama administration but also its predecessor for engaging in nation building. Clearly Rand was going after establishment Republicans and their neoconservative advisers.
In 2014, Rand Paul delivered another foreign policy speech, this time to the annual awards dinner for the Center for the National Interest, entitled “The Case for Conservative Realism.”48 The speech is consciously less intellectual than his earlier one and reads like an appeal by a presidential candidate. Here Paul seems to go easy on radical Islam, stating that rather than having an “Islam problem,” the world may have a “dignity problem.” While Paul insists that wars should be declared by Congress, and that the United States should not “engage in nation-building,” he also supports existing European Union and NATO sanctions against Russia and does not object to defense spending. Kennan is no longer the model for an American foreign policy; instead, Paul ends his speech with a call for increased trade and economic prosperity as preconditions for national security.
Rand Paul’s near-constant rhetorical repositioning—even while he maintained his basic positions on free trade, liberty, individual rights, and a more restrained foreign policy—arguably weakened him as a candidate for president. In trying to be too clever by half, he abandoned the single-minded, fiery, no-holds-barred attacks on the establishment that distinguished his father’s campaigns. But even in the best of circumstances, Rand Paul would not have been a match for the force of nature that Donald Trump was in 2015 and 2016. The question of course remains open whether Trump any more than Rand Paul can claim the legacy of either George Kennan or Pat Buchanan as an architect of foreign policy.
Trump famously began his campaign on June 16, 2015, with the issue of immigration, and it cannot be denied that that issue was more critical for his electoral success than his positions on foreign policy. Trump had been attacking President Obama’s actions in Syria with his Twitter account for a few years, but in the South Carolina primary debate in 2016, which took place in the presence of Jeb Bush and Jeb’s mother, Barbara, Trump unloaded on George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. He did not hold back from asserting that “George Bush made a mistake.… We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” He then piled on his prey: “I wanna tell you, they lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none, and they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.” The crowd (filled mostly with South Carolina GOP officials, operatives, and donors) booed Trump and cheered wildly when Jeb Bush stood up for his brother and his family.49
But a few days later, Trump won the South Carolina primary with 32 percent of the vote in a field of seven candidates. Significantly, Jeb Bush received less than 8 percent of the vote. One cannot overstate the significance of this primary victory, after a direct attack on the Bush dynasty and on neoconservatism, in a state that reelected George W. Bush in 2004, with nearly 60 percent of the vote. Not only did Trump’s repudiation of neoconservatism not hurt him, but it may have even helped him recruit voters who had not been engaged in politics since the days of the Buchanan Brigades. Trump was reintroducing into the Republican Party what the neoconservatives and the party bosses had condemned as “isolationism.”
In April 2016, after his nomination was all but secure, Trump decided to roll out a series of policy speeches. In the first of these speeches he spoke not about immigration or trade but about foreign policy. Trump scoffed at nation building and other forms of intervention undertaken without a clear American interest and called for both the containment of radical Islam and stronger diplomatic relations with Russia: “The world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies, that we are always happy when old enemies become friends and when old friends become allies, that’s what we want. We want them to be our allies.”50 While Trump lacked the principled constitutionalism of Ron Paul, he appealed to voters who were tired of endless war under both Republican and Democratic administrations. In accents that could have come from Pat Buchanan, he called for an America First foreign policy. He tied the question of intervention to trade and immigration with this statement: “Under a Trump administration, no American citizen will ever again feel that their needs come second to the citizens of a foreign country.” The rhetorical centerpiece of the speech once again recalled the campaign issues of Buchanan: “No country has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first. Both our friends and our enemies put their countries above ours and we, while being fair to them, must start doing the same. We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism. The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony. I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down and will never enter.”51 In an influential essay of the 2016 election cycle, “The Flight 93 Election,” the anonymous author Publius Decius Mus (later identified as former George W. Bush administration appointee Michael Anton, who would go on to briefly serve in the Trump administration) likened Trump to Pat Buchanan for bringing back the triad of key issues that appealed to the middle-American voter: trade, immigration, and foreign policy. Whereas Ron Paul was right about war, he wrote, Paul did not put that issue into a winnable campaign strategy. Trump, for all his failures, was the only candidate since Buchanan who had.52
Trump campaigned like a Patrick Buchanan without the sharp religious and social edge. He was admittedly a cultural conservative on immigration and toed the party line on abortion. And yet, in the aftermath of Supreme Court decisions, the Religious Right understood that the culture wars were over and that they had lost. They saw Trump as their best chance for at least minimal protection against the onslaught of the social Left. Buchanan graciously stated in an interview with Politico after the election that Trump had won with issues that he had raised: “The ideas made it, but I didn’t.”53 But for Buchanan, the damage was already done. America had gone too far toward the social Left to be brought back. Although Trump also struck some gloomy notes in his 2016 Republican National Convention speech, he nonetheless promised that he would bring America back from the brink: in short, he would make America great again. Moreover, Trump took over some of Ron Paul’s warnings about interventionism without seeming to be an extreme noninterventionist. Perhaps he came closest to positioning himself in the manner of Rand Paul as a “conservative realist.”
Trump might have become a second George W. Bush under different circumstances, but this has not yet occurred. While his anti-interventionist base was outraged when he sanctioned strikes on Syria in April 2017, the strikes carried out were rather limited. Trump has not (yet) been pushed into war with Syria or Iran and has engaged in the kind of diplomacy with North Korea that has not been seen since Nixon’s opening to China. Due to the swirling Russian collusion narrative, the president has been held back from undertaking ambitious negotiations with Russia.54 And though he has placed pressure on its allies to contribute more money to NATO, he is far from trying to disband the organization. Trump has gotten serious about reconsidering American trade policies toward foreign countries, especially China. The jury is out on whether Trump will actually pursue an America First foreign policy à la Kennan or Buchanan, but he has at least intermittently practiced diplomacy in a new key. Rand Paul praised him for meeting with Putin in July 2018 and expressed scorn for the new Russophobes.55 It would testify to Trump’s commitment to conservative realism if he elevated Rand Paul to the post of secretary of state or national security adviser. So far of course this has not happened.56
In 2000, Kenneth Waltz, the founder of the school of structural realism, wrote the article “Structural Realism after the Cold War,” in which he predicted the disappearance of NATO after the Cold War. Unlike George Kennan, Waltz originally failed to see that NATO would find a new reason for existing even without a Soviet threat. Waltz reasonably asks how one can offer a guarantee if one cannot explain “guarantee against whom?”57 Put another way, how can an alliance have meaning without a clear adversary? But arguing against those who would place the primacy of international institutions above the nation-state, Waltz writes,
The survival and expansion of NATO tell us much about American power and influence and little about institutions as multilateral entities. The ability of the United States to extend the life of a moribund institution nicely illustrates how international institutions are created and maintained by stronger states to serve their perceived or misperceived interests. The Bush administration saw, and the Clinton administration continued to see, NATO as the instrument for maintaining America’s domination of the foreign and military policies of European states.… The European pillar was to be contained within NATO, and its policies were to be made in Washington.58
Waltz supports the argument made by Buchanan that we unnecessarily alienate Russia if we work to bolster and expand NATO. “The American arms industry,” he writes, “expecting to capture its usual large share of a new market, has lobbied heavily in favor of NATO’s expansion. The reasons for expanding NATO are weak. The reasons for opposing expansion are strong. It draws new lines of division in Europe, alienates those left out, and can find no logical stopping place west of Russia.”59 We may wonder whether Trump has absorbed such lessons and, perhaps even more relevant, whether he fully understands the historical context in which he came to power. Part of his electoral success can be traced back to the geopolitical failures of the Bush and Obama eras; and without exaggerating continuities, the alternatives suggested by candidate Trump, however tentatively during his electoral campaign, have something in common with the older American conservative realism of Kennan and Buchanan. The million-dollar question is whether the present administration will return to that understanding of the world, in earnest.