Does America Deserve a Foreign Policy?
There are all too many people on the Right who don't really think so
Back in 2001, Henry Kissinger published a book titled Does America Need a Foreign Policy? No doubt he intended it as a trenchant question, but I recall thinking something along the lines of Well, duh! Of course America needed a foreign policy—every country needs one.
But twenty-one years on, I see what Kissinger was driving at.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the US government’s response to it have brought into focus one of the most alarming developments of recent times: the rejection on both the Right and the Left of traditional conceptions of foreign policy and diplomacy. On the Right, that faction usually designated as national conservatism—the natcons for short—has embraced an ideology of isolationism so extreme as to render diplomacy moot. On the Left, cloudy notions of global governance and international norms amount to a flight from reality. Here, however, I will focus on the new isolationism of the natcon Right.
Isolationism has always been a theme in American politics. Traditionally it sprang from a conception of America as an exceptional nation, ordained by Providence to establish and exemplify a new order for the ages. In its early years, when the new nation’s geographical isolation from Europe and Asia was a fact of life, this attitude was natural enough. But even then, economic considerations and geopolitics imposed their reality checks. It turned out that a new order for the ages did not preclude conflict with Britain over Canada or with Mexico over California and the American southwest. America’s exploitation of its vast western frontier was no less imperialistic than Russia’s expansion into the Caucasus and northern Asia; American exceptionalism embodied claims rooted in both morality and Realpolitik.
Though the steamship, the telegraph and the evolution of an integrated global economy gradually undermined America’s comforting sense of isolation, isolationism as such persisted, eventually taking the form of opposition to the temptations of imperialism. The annexation of Hawaii and the Spanish-American War of 1898 had its critics, as did the subsequent American annexation of the Philippines, with its brutal campaign against an insurgency bent on independence.
When war broke out in Europe in 1914, the national impulse was to stand aside from the conflict. America was “too proud to fight,” as President Woodrow Wilson put it. But the imperatives of geopolitics, reinforced by a sense of righteousness to which Wilson himself gave voice, eventually precipitated America into the Great War. The resulting collision of American idealism with European power politics brought disillusion and a renewed commitment to isolationism. With the rise of the totalitarian threat in the 1930s, the tug of war involving idealism, power politics and isolation was replayed, only coming to an end on 7 December 1941. But whether committed to isolation or intervention, Americans were united on one point: Theirs was a great and good nation.
It is the achievement of the natcons to have turned this traditional American conception of isolationism on its head.
Not long ago FNC’s The Five was discussing the Biden Administration’s policy of support for Ukraine. When Greg Gutfeld’s turn came, he summarily dismissed the issue by saying that he believed nothing that anybody was saying about it. Probably he thought that he was being audacious, even courageous, but in fact Gutfeld was letting himself off the hook. For believing nothing about anything is a flight from reality—isolationism in its purest form—isolation detached from analysis—isolationism as an emotional tic. And that is what the natcons advocate.
Natcom isolationism springs from the premise that the United States government and American elites generally are irredeemably false and corrupt. Thus any policy they espouse is similarly false and corrupt—and what is more, America itself is false and corrupt, a force for evil in the modern world. This was the subtext to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, which necessarily implied that the real, existing America wasn’t great at all.
The evidence proffered in support of these allegations begins with Vietnam and proceeds through the Cold War to 9/11 and beyond. The US invasion of Afghanistan was not, therefore, a justified and righteous response to an unprovoked attack on America. It was an act of aggression—because really, after all its meddling in the Mideast, wasn’t the Fall of the Towers just what America deserved?
Now obviously there’s a case to be made that from the Vietnam era down to the present day, there have been repeated failures of American leadership in the area of foreign policy, Joe Biden’s disgraceful skedaddle from Afghanistan being only the latest example. But mistakes and incompetence are not the same thing as evil intent. Nor is the case against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as airtight as the natcons imagine. They may argue for example that Iraq, the Mideast and the world would be better off today if Saddam Hussein had been left in place. I beg to differ.
Set against the tale of woe retailed by the natcons is America’s great achievement in the second half of the twentieth century: the defeat of totalitarianism in war and its containment in the postwar period. It was US entry into World War II that secured the defeat of the Axis powers. It was US engagement that preserved liberal democracy in Western Europe by helping to rebuild its ruined economy and establish a framework for collective defense against the Soviet threat. It was US leadership in NATO that preserved peace in Europe until that threat faltered and vanished.
The world that existed between 1945 and 1990 was not entirely peaceful: Regional wars and brushfire conflicts flared up repeatedly. But the prospect most dreaded, a global war involving the major powers, made infinitely more dangerous due to the existence of nuclear weapons, was staved off. America commitment to NATO and its other alliances around the world established a balance of terror that the Soviet Union never dared to disturb.
Admittedly, the natcon critique of American foreign policy has its points. Vietnam was a fiasco; the occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq were badly mismanaged. But the claim that NATO is essentially a con game, European nations exploiting American goodwill with the connivance of America elites, is little more than a fairy tale. And from it is derived the even more risible claim, used to argue against American support for Ukraine, that NATO is somehow an aggressive alliance whose expansion poses an “existential threat” to Russia.
It is the natcons’ readiness to make excuses for V. Putin’s criminal act of aggression that gives the game away. America is reviled as the focus of evil in the modern world, a predatory power whose every action increases the sum total of human misery—but Putin is a muscular Russian nationalist and champion of traditional Christian values, defending his country against a soulless, materialistic globalism. And when it’s pointed out that Putin is in fact the leader of a ramshackle despotism characterized by brutality, corruption and incompetence, the comeback is always the same: America is worse. Look at Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., etc. And anyway, who cares about Ukraine?
It's not just that America doesn’t need a foreign policy, though the natcon argument implies that a reformed and purified America wouldn’t need one. It’s that America as it is does not deserve a foreign policy. And only by minding its own business, by studiously ignoring the outside world, by renouncing its superpower status, can America recover its soul. That is the natcon position in a nutshell. And it’s bunk.
The United States can no more decouple itself from the outside world than individual human beings can part company with their lights and livers. This country’s prosperity and security depend upon constructive engagement with the outside world; that is, on a foreign policy clear-eyed enough to distinguish friends from adversaries and enemies, and resolute enough to defend the national interest, via diplomacy if possible but by force if necessary. That’s hardly the kind of foreign policy we can expect from people who serve as apologists for V. Putin and Donald J. Trump.
Gregg's arguments here and elsewhere are correct. Nonetheless, many American institutions are broken and in dire need of deep change or replacement. They're overseen by ideologues and gerontocrats insulated from the consequences of their bad ideas.
Classic takes:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/everything-is-broken
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/brokenism-alana-newhouse
"As long as I’m around, America has no need to be made great again. Because, you know, It doesn’t get much greater than this…" A good thought on Thanksgiving eve.
Sometimes it's hard to keep that thought in mind, when reading the news, which seems full of nothing but the worst side of American life: rampant drug use, more mass shootings as the body count seems to go upupup every day, nurses and doctors quitting medicine because of burn-out by overcrowded ERs and epidemics and angry patients insisting on getting treated with quack cures, schools that can't seem to educate kids and kids who don't have any interest in learning, etc. etc. etc.). The avalanche of bad news that never seems to end can be overwhelming. It's good to take a moment to breathe.
We've got a good thing going here in this America of ours -- not a perfect thing, but serviceable, fixable, improvable -- and if good people continue to give it their best efforts, it may continue to be a pretty good place to live and work and grow up and grow old in for a long time to come.