The Economics of Liberty

APPENDIX

A Foreign Policy for a Free-Market America: Two Views

A New Nationalism

Patrick J. Buchanan

Ben Franklin told the lady in Philadelphia, “Arepublic if you can keep it.” Surely, preservation of the Republic, defense of its Constitution, living up to its ideals—that is our national purpose.

“America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” John Quincy Adams said. “She is the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

Yet, when the question is posed, “What is America’s national purpose?” answers vary widely. To Randall Robinson of TransAfrica, it is overthrow of South Africa; to Jesse Jackson, it is to advance “justice” by restoring the wealth the white race has robbed from the colored peoples of the earth; to AIPAC, it is to keep Israel secure and inviolate; to Ben Wattenberg, it is to “wage democracy” around the world.

Each substitutes an extra-national ideal for the national interest; each sees our national purpose in another continent or country; each treats our republic as a means to some larger end.

In Charles Krauthammer’s “vision,” the “wish and work” of our nation should be to “integrate” with Europe and Japan inside a “super-sovereign” entity that is “economically, culturally and politically hegemonic in the world.” This “new universalism,” he writes, “would require the conscious deprecation not only of American sovereignty but of the notion of sovereignty in general.”

While Krauthammer’s super-state may set off onanistic rejoicing inside the Trilateral Commission, it should set off alarm bells in more precincts than Belmont, Mass.

When Adams spoke, he was echoing Washington’s farewell address that warned his fickle countrymen against “inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others.... The nation which indulges toward an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosities or to its affections, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

For a century after Washington’s death, we resisted the siren’s call of empire. Then, Kipling’s call to “take up the white man’s burden” fell upon the receptive ears of Bill McKinley, who came down from a sleepless night of consulting the Almighty to tell the press: “God told me to take the Philippines.” We were launched.

Two decades later, 100,000 Americans lay dead in France in a European war begun, as Bismarck predicted it would begin, “because of some damn fool thing in the Balkans.”

“To make the world safe for democracy,” we joined an alliance of empires, British, French and Russian, that held most of mankind in colonial captivity. Washington’s warning proved prophetic. Doughboys fell in places like the Argonne and Belleau Wood, in no small measure to vindicate the Germanphobia and Anglophilia of a regnant Yankee elite. When the great “war to end all war” had fertilized the seed bed that produced Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, Americans by 1941 had concluded a blunder had been made in ignoring the wise counsel of their Founding Fathers.

The isolationism of our fathers is today condemned, and FDR is adjudged a great visionary, because he sought early involvement in Britain’s war with Hitler. Yet even the interventionists’ arguments were, and are, couched in terms of American national interest.

America wanted to stay out. Americans saw, in the world’s bloody conflict, no cause why our soldiers should be sent overseas to spill a single drop of American blood. Pearl Harbor, not FDR, convinced America to go to war.

After V-E Day and V-J Day, all America wanted to “bring the boys home,” and we did. Then, they were sent back, back to Europe, back to Asia, because we Americans were persuaded—by Joseph Stalin—that the Cold War must be waged. As the old saw goes, you can refuse almost any invitation, but when the man wants to fight, you’ve got to oblige him.

If the Cold War is ending, what are the terms of honorable peace that will permit us to go home? Are they not withdrawal of the Red Army back within its own frontiers, liberation of Central Europe and the Baltic republics, re-unification of Germany, and de-Leninization of Moscow, i.e., overthrow of the imperialist party that has prosecuted the 70 Years War against the West?

The compensating concession we should offer: total withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe. If Moscow will get out, we will get out.

There is another argument for disengagement. When the cheering stops, there is going to be a calling to account for the crimes of Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam, where the Great Men acceded to Stalin’s demand that he be made cartographer of Europe. In the coming conflicts, over Poland’s frontiers east and west, over Transylvania, Karelia, Moldavia, the breakup of Yugoslavia, our role is diplomatic and moral, not military.

As the United States moves off the mainland of Europe, we should move our troops off the mainland of Asia as well. South Korea has twice the population, five times the economic might of North Korea. She can be sold the planes, guns, missiles and ships to give her decisive superiority.

We are not going to fight another land war in Asia; no vital interest justifies it; our people will not permit it. Why, then, keep 30,000 ground troops on the DMZ? If Kim Il Sung attacks, why should Americans be first to die?

It is time we began uprooting the global network of “trip wires,” planted on foreign soil, to ensnare the United States in the wars of other nations, to back commitments made and treaties signed before this generation of American soldiers was even born.

The United States has been drained of wealth and power by wars, cold and hot. We cannot forever defend wealthy nations that refuse to defend themselves; we cannot permit endless transfusions of the lifeblood of American capitalism into the mendicant countries and economic corpses of socialism, without bleeding ourselves to death. Foreign aid is an idea whose time has passed. The Communist and socialist world now owe the West a thousand billion dollars and more, exclusive of hundreds of billions we simply gave away.

Our going-away gift to the globalist ideologues should be to tell the Third World we are not sending the gunboats to collect our debts, neither are we sending more money. The children are on their own.

Americans are the most generous people in history. But our altruism has been exploited by the guilty-and-pity crowd. At home, a monstrous welfare state of hundreds of thousands of drones and millions of dependents consumes huge slices of the national income. Abroad, regiments of global bureaucrats siphon off billions for themselves and their client regimes.

With the Cold War ending, we should look, too, with a cold eye on the internationalist set, never at a loss for new ideas to divert U.S. wealth and power into crusades and causes having little or nothing to do with the true national interest of the United States.

High among these is the democratist temptation, the worship of democracy as a form of government and the concomitant ambition to see all mankind embrace it, or explain why not. Like all idolatries, democratism substitutes a false god for the real, a love of process for a love of country.

How other people rule themselves is their own business. To call it a vital interest of the United States is to contradict history and common sense. And for the republic to seek to dictate to 160 nations, what kind of regime each should have, is a formula for interminable meddling and endless conflict; it is a textbook example of that “messianic globaloney” against which Dean Acheson warned.

“We must consider first and last,” Walter Lippman wrote in 1943, “the American national interest. If we do not, if we construct our foreign policy on some kind of abstract theory of rights and duties, we shall build castles in the air.”

“Enlightened nationalism,” was Mr. Lippman’s idea of a foreign policy to protect America’s true national interest. What we need is a new nationalism, a new patriotism, a new foreign policy that puts America first, and not only first, but second and third as well.

America First, Once More

Bill Kauffman

As the Cold War approaches the midnight hour, and the Soviet threat turns into a pumpkin, typewriter hawks in Washington and Manhattan are scrambling to find a new foreign bogeyman: Hispanic drug lords? Russian nationalists? German neutralists?

Their quest is urgent, even a little pathetic. The swiftness of revolution in Eastern Europe has caught everyone off guard. As the Soviets chip off the old bloc, the rationale for keeping 300,000 U.S. troops in Europe—the “field of slaughter,” Jefferson called it—vanishes. Poof! At the same time, the strategic importance of foreign aid clients like Israel, El Salvador, and Pakistan diminishes.

Put yourself in the place of a Cold War intellectual. For years you’ve lived comfortably on the foundation and government dole, Truman and Churchill quote books at your side, composing paeans to the majesty of $325 billion defense budgets. And the grant money flows like blood.

In little more than a revolutionary fortnight, your world crumbles. The Soviet Union admits the failure of communism and starts withdrawing troops from its satellites. Poland is governed by union democrats. Czechoslovakia elects as president a playwright with libertarian tendencies. Romanians send their dictator to hell with a chorus of shotgun blasts. It is glorious and beautiful and inspiring and it’s gonna put you out of a job.

Maybe.

For the more astute Cold Warriors had a backup plan, fusing the messianism of Woodrow Wilson with the saber-rattling of John F. Kennedy. Using the talismanic language of “democracy,” they propose to spend tax dollars sticking Uncle Sam’s nose into the political affairs of Chile, Nicaragua, Angola, and a host of obscure African and Asian countries that the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t give a damn about. No emirate is too small or too remote to escape the meddling of these crusading PhDs, who are more fervent than World Federalists and twice as dangerous.

These new Wilsonians are the fulfillment of Senator Richard Russell’s dire prophecy: “If it is easy for us to go anywhere and do anything, we will always be going someplace and doing something.”

Opposed to these globaloney mountebanks is the common sense of the American people, who still cherish the isolationist wisdom of the Founders. The problem is, the people are unorganized. They have no voice in the chambers of state; their spokesmen do not parry with Secretary of State Baker or Lord Kissinger on the David Brinkley Show.

The rock band The Who once sang, “Let’s get together before we get much older,” and boy, were they ever right. It’s high time to get together and revive—in spirit if not in name—America First.

America First was a broad-based coalition of men and women who opposed the drift toward war in 1940 and 1941. Its celebrity leaders were a diverse lot: Oswald Garrison Villard of The Nation, liberal John T. Flynn, General Robert E. Wood of Sears Roebuck, actress Lillian Gish, and populist Burton K. Wheeler. The great aviator Charles Lindbergh expressed the still-relevant creed of America First: “What happens in Europe is of little importance compared with what happens in our own land. It is far more important to have farms without mortgages, workmen with their homes, and young people who can afford families, than it is for us to crusade abroad for freedoms that are tottering in our own country.”

America First was a casualty of Pearl Harbor, and the American republic was a casualty of the war and its aftermath. But the long dark night of the Cold War is about over. In the sunshiny morrow of Eastern European liberation, modern-day Washingtonians, Jeffersonians, and even Hamiltonians (for all his sins, Alexander did ghost-write sections of Washington’s Farewell Address) can recoalesce under a new America First banner.

The signs are auspicious. Young Americans—farmboys in North Dakota, ghetto kids in Watts, heretofore mere fodder for Harvard militarists in their endowed chairs—are no longer willing to die for foreign politicians. A 1988 poll for Rolling Stone magazine found that three-quarters of American youth would not willingly shed blood in a European war. The Rolling Stone reporter saw “skepticism that resembles the public’s isolationism in the days before Pearl Harbor.”

Meanwhile, the Cold War’s expiry has renewed the promise of a broad-based coalition on foreign policy. The lineaments of this alliance were sketched in the mid-60s by economist Murray Rothbard and historian William Appleman Williams.

Behold: a quarter-century later, the American Right is at war with itself. “Paleoconservatives,” defenders of small towns and limited government, have broken with neoconservative Cold Warriors. In books like Robert Nisbet’s The Present Age and magazines like Chronicles, edited by Southern agrarian Thomas Fleming, the paleocons indict the military-industrial complex and eloquently reject the world policeman heresy. Patrick Buchanan, a forceful champion of putting America first, thunders: “It is not the business of the United States to dictate to 150 countries in the world what kind of government they ought to have.”

To distinguish a neocon from a paleocon, ask him what he thinks about the 1940s. Neoconservatives view this decade as the apex of American achievement: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, total warfare, the draft and rationing and public employment and Archibald MacLeish’s propaganda poetry and the two greatest presidents of all time, FDR and Harry Truman. Now that was paradise!

Paleocons, like libertarians, consider the ’40s to be the single worst decade in American history. War and regimentation filled “so many blood-lakes,” in poet Robinson Jeffers’s words, and entrenched the New Deal and delivered us unto Leviathan.

Significantly, decentralists of the left share the paleocon-libertarian assessment. Dorothy Day, Dwight Macdonald, and Paul Goodman, giants of the last generation, were appalled by this senselessly destructive decade. So are their heirs. We are, all of us—decentralists, libertarians, Main Street conservatives—basically on the same side in the America First vs. World Policeman debate. If only we realized it!

Finally, there is a large and articulate reservoir of anti-empire sentiment that is usually overlooked: American writers. From the republic’s birth, the majority of home-grown novelists and poets have been children of 1776. The three titans of the mid-nineteenth century, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, were all “Loco Focos,” or libertarian Democrats. In FDR’s heyday, an impressive roster of Middle American men and women of letters were isolationist, some of them card-carrying America Firsters: Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Robinson Jeffers, Edmund Wilson, Kathleen Norris, John P. Marquand, e.e. cummings, and Robert Lowell, among others.

The rebel American spirit endures, despite the many neutering successes of the NEA. Consider our three best-selling “serious” novelists: Gore Vidal is a patrician republican and die-hard isolationist; Kurt Vonnegut is an iconoclast who wrote America First editorials for the Cornell student newspaper; and Norman Mailer is a self-described “left conservative” whose 1969 New York City mayoralty campaign was based on the principle of secession. Not a liberal internationalist among ’em.

So we’ve got true conservatives, decentralists, libertarians, writers, Main Street Americans...the one missing piece is politicians.

Have no fear. The most comic aspect of the Revolution of 1989 was the breathtaking speed with which communist appartchiks and “legislators” changed their plumage. Overnight, ugly Brezhnevite ducklings sprouted brilliant Jeffersonian feathers. The same will happen here, once the hacks hear vox populi screaming in their ears.

The largely peaceful overthrow of communism in Europe is a godsend—to the formerly subjugated people, yes, but also to us. We have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to restore sanity to U.S. foreign policy. We can stand on the sidelines and watch the empire-lovers—the liberals who gave us Vietnam and the phony conservatives who gave us Iranamok—determine our future. Or we can speak up, with others of like mind, and bring the boys home, dismantle the garrison state, and shrink the federal budget. We can put America First, again, as it should be. If not now, when?