New York Times (Opinion)
By Jacob Heilbrunn
March 10, 2016
There
they go again. The neocons who led the George W. Bush administration
into Iraq are now touting a fresh crusade to save American democracy —
and the Republican Party — from an authoritarian
foe: Donald J. Trump.
Their
campaign began with an impassioned essay in The American Interest last
month by Eliot A. Cohen, a former Bush State Department official, who
depicted Mr. Trump as symptomatic of the
broader “moral rot” of America. Then, in an open letter, more than 100
hundred Republican foreign policy mavens, including neocons such as Mr.
Cohen and Robert Kagan, as well as more traditional Republican foreign
policy figures like the former World Bank
president Robert B. Zoellick, announced they were “united in our
opposition to a Donald Trump presidency.”
Now,
in a last-ditch effort, leading neocon thinkers have established what
they call the National Security Advisory Council to support Senator
Marco Rubio. And many are announcing that if
push comes to shove, they will support Hillary Clinton over Mr. Trump.
Indeed, in the magazine Commentary, the neoconservative historian Max
Boot wrote, somewhat hyperbolically, that Mr. Trump is “the No. 1 threat
to American security” — bigger than the Islamic
State or China.
The
neocons are right that a Trump presidency would likely be a foreign
policy debacle, not least because of his unpredictable personality and
penchant for antagonizing foreign leaders and
publics. But they are wrong in asserting that he is somehow a danger to
the traditional principles of the Republican Party. On the contrary,
Mr. Trump represents a return to the party’s roots. It’s the neocons who
are the interlopers.
The
extent to which the neocons and their moralistic, crusading Wilsonian
mission overtook the Republican foreign policy establishment, beginning
in the 1970s, was so nearly complete that
it can be hard to remember that a much different sensibility had
previously governed the party, one reminiscent of Mr. Trump’s own
positions: wariness about foreign intervention, championing of
protectionist trade policies, a belief in the exercise of unilateral
military power and a suspicion of global elites and institutions.
Consider
the 1919 League of Nations debate, the crucible in which much
Republican foreign policy was forged. In leading the charge against
United States membership in entering the league,
the Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge argued that intervening abroad
would undermine American security: “If you tangle her in the intrigues
of Europe, you will destroy her power for good and endanger her very
existence.”
By
the 1920s, the Republicans took Lodge’s logic a step further. So-called
mossback Republicans supported the punitive Immigration Act of 1924,
which included provisions barring Asians and
restricting African immigrants. The party also backed protectionism: In
June 1930 Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which worsened
the Great Depression and stoked nationalism around the world.
The
party’s embrace of outright isolationism culminated in opposition to
aiding Britain once World War II began in 1939. Liberal Republicans like
Henry Stimson and Frank Knox were drummed
out of the party at the 1940 convention for joining the Roosevelt
administration, the first as secretary of war and the second as
secretary of the Navy. At the same time, The Wall Street Journal
editorial page argued for “realism” toward Hitler, who, it assured
its readers, had “already determined the broad lines of our national
life for at least another generation.”
After
World War II, the right remained suspicious of militarism. It denounced
Harry S. Truman’s sweeping alliances in Europe. In 1950, Herbert Hoover
created a national uproar when he declared
that America had to acknowledge limits to its power. Meanwhile, Senator
John W. Bricker of Ohio proposed constitutional amendments aimed at
destroying the president’s ability to conclude foreign treaties. And in
1951, another Ohio senator, Robert A. Taft,
announced, “The principal purpose of the foreign policy of the United
States is to maintain the liberty of our people.”
One
can hear echoes of this Republican past in Mr. Trump’s own positions.
His animating credo on foreign policy seems to be to farm out the heavy
lifting to other countries whenever possible.
Speaking on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” last August, he made his distaste
for intervention clear: “At some point, we can’t be the policeman of the
world. We have to rebuild our own country." Since then, to the
consternation of the party establishment, he has also
forthrightly denounced the Iraq war, declaring that the Bush
administration’s case for it was based on a “lie.”
The
Trump doctrine, if that term can be employed, is reminiscent of basic
foreign policy realist tenets. In fact, as Thomas Wright of the
Brookings Institution first pointed out in Politico,
Mr. Trump has a “remarkably coherent and consistent worldview.” Mr.
Trump, you could even say, is a spheres-of-influence kind of guy: Europe
should take care of Ukraine, Russia should handle Syria. “When I see
the policy of some of these people in our government,”
he said on MSNBC this month, “we’ll be in the Middle East for another
15 years if we don’t end up losing by that time because our country is
disintegrating.”
At
the same time, he’s rejected the idea of repudiating the Obama
administration’s Iran deal, and says that it’s important to remain
“neutral” in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians
— two points that strike at the heart of Republican neocon orthodoxy.
And he seems to have little use for alliances: He’s demanding that
countries like Germany, Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia pay more for
the United States to defend them. At the same
time, he’s ready to slap high tariffs on Japan and China — something
that could trigger a global depression.
Mr.
Trump’s position can resemble realism on steroids. At bottom, he
doesn’t want America to lead the world; he wants the world to get out of
its way. Even many die-hard realists are unwilling
to follow him: Last Friday his sinister advocacy of torture, which he
has since disavowed, prompted not only neocons but prominent realists
like Andrew J. Bacevich and Richard Betts to sign a
letter called “Defending the Honor of the U.S. Military from Donald Trump” in Foreign Policy.
None
of this seems to antagonize the Republican base, which appears less
ideological on taxes and foreign policy than the party elite. Once
George W. Bush and the neocons led us into Iraq,
it was probably only a matter of time before the neocons were called to
account. Maybe the surprising thing isn’t that the party is starting to
morph back into its original incarnation, but that it took this long.
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