LEFTISM ON THE RIGHT

This sentiment may seem peculiar, considering its author and the forum in which it was aired. Yet Schlesinger’s remark echoes a growing chorus in Republican circles. And not just among policy experts: A casual animus against American power colors discussions in the larger conservative community, much as it colored talk among leftists a generation back.

The tendency shows up, for example, in the responses to recent U.S. military operations. Counseling patience with Saddam Hussein in the wake of the 1996 U.S. missile attack against Iraq, Jack Kemp lectured the Clinton administration, “Don’t bomb before breakfast” (prompting Al Gore to warn Republicans not to “blame America first” and the New York Times to report that Kemp “attempted to cast foreign policy in . . . a feminine light”). And on Bosnia, respected military strategist and syndicated columnist Harry Summers condemned the U.S. mission as “imperialism.” He observed that “the United States is doing in Bosnia what we would never permit being done at home.” Washington Times columnist Richard Grenier agreed. He accused U.S. forces in the Balkans of “blatantly intervening in a country’s internal affairs,” while columnist Donald Devine suggested that the United States had ” attempted a de facto coup” in Bosnia.

For those accustomed to fending off the protestations of leftist critics, it comes as some surprise to hear former Reaganites sounding like Noam Chomsky. Indeed, like the Left of a generation ago — and unlike the foreign- policy minimalists of the interwar era, many of them Republican senators — prominent conservatives are prescribing non-intervention in the affairs of others as a means to ensure the United States does no harm to the world They offer reasons as varied as the camps that make up today’s Right.

Though skepticism about American power cuts across many conservative factions, it comes in several stripes. The libertarians’ is the most rooted in coherent beliefs. As Arch Puddington pointed out in a recent issue of Commentary, a central tenet of contemporary libertarianism is the suspicion that activist foreign and defense policies extend the domestic reach of the federal government. Thus, writes Doug Bandow of the libertarian Cato Institute, “The shift from republic to empire abroad sparked a related mutation at home. . . . The Cold War spawned McCarthyism, FBI surveillance of domestic dissidents, peacetime conscription, the sprawling Military- Industrial Complex, the Vietnam imbroglio, and unending executive arrogance.”

Comparing America’s international role to that of a certain mid-century power, Cato’s Ted Galen Carpenter refers to our preferred candidate in recent Bosnian Serb elections as “Washington’s quisling” and writes that “U.S. and NATO meddling in the internal politics of the Bosnian Serb republic has taken the form of actions that make a mockery of any meaningful concept of democracy.” And according to Bandow, our efforts in the Balkans amount to nothing more than “Wilsonian war mongering.”

Conservatives like Jack Kemp, Robert Novak, and Armstrong Williams see merit in the libertarian critique. When not recommending that the Right go easy on Louis Farrakhan, the disciples of supply-side guru Jude Wanniski can be heard urging a similar approach to Saddam Hussein. After all, as Williams put it, “Our hands aren’t totally clean either.”

Coming from libertarians, such stands are nothing new. Decades ago, prominent libertarian Murray Rothbard announced, “I favor immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, denounce U.S. imperialism, advocate Black Power and have just joined the new Peace and Freedom party.” At the time Rothbard wrote, most conservatives dismissed libertarian positions on foreign policy. Today, those views receive a respectful hearing on Capitol Hill.

Perhaps more compelling, though certainly no less dissonant, are objections to an active American role in the world raised by some cultural conservatives. Their critique rests not on contempt for the federal government, but on cultural despair. The United States has become so decadent that, for many on the right, any attempt to export U.S. ideals is morally questionable. According to this view, a minimalist foreign policy cannot restore our status as a “city on a hill” or “New Jerusalem,” but will at least temper America’s tendency to inflict its depredations on others.

Samuel Huntington, perhaps the most accomplished American political scientist of the postwar era, is a leading proponent of this school. Huntington sees contemporary America as wracked, even defined, by moral decay and the impact of multiculturalism. Thus, having ceased to be a truly Western nation, the United States no longer remains fit to preach Western principles to the rest of the world. This conviction, however, has led Huntington and those who agree with him back to the relativism of the multiculturalists they condemn. Denouncing universalism as a form of “imperialism,” he praises ” Asian values” and writes that Western promotion of universal principles is ” false,” “immoral,” and “dangerous.” Indeed, “Western intervention in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multicivilizational world.”

Discontent with the sagging moral fiber of American society — and with the government’s enshrining of counterculture mores in public policy — has led other conservatives to similar conclusions. Perhaps the most articulate spokesman for this line of reasoning is A. J. Bacevich, a frequent contributor to First Things (and also to this magazine). He asked recently, ” To the extent that basic national policies disregard the moral sense of the majority, to the extent that American government no longer embodies the popular will, what are the implications for the United States as a global superpower?” For Bacevich, the implications are clear, even if they “bear an uncomfortable resemblance to conclusions once touted by the Left.” America should heed George McGovern’s summons to come home.

That conservatives should invoke George McGovern and other leftist critics of American power is a stunning development. The Right, after all, spent decades fending off these same critics’ efforts to give U.S. policies a name – – “imperialism” — that was anathema to Americans. Cultural pessimism, however, has led conservatives to recall fondly their former antagonists.

Hence, Walter McDougall, who understands why “Confucians and Muslims laugh at the notion that our ‘decadent’ country should be a model for them,” praises Vietnam critic William Fulbright for his condemnation of American arrogance. For McDougall, a Pulitzer-prize-winning historian and editor of the conservative foreign-policy journal Orbis, everything went wrong with American foreign policy about the time of Teddy Roosevelt, a president who used to rank high in the pantheon of conservative heroes. So too for Harry Summers, who quotes approvingly the 1899 platform of the Anti-Imperialist League, which assailed the evil of permitting the “weak” (Filipinos then, Serbs now) to be subjugated by the “strong” (Americans both then and now).

Finally, foreign-policy activism has been challenged by a group of ” realists” whose rhetoric also owes a debt to the New Left. Their preferred forum is the quarterly National Interest, edited by Owen Harries. Its ” realist” contributors seek to disabuse readers of the notion that U.S. foreign policy rests on a uniquely moral foundation. In doing so, however, many of those who write for the journal promote a certain moral stance of their own — one that derides America’s “adolescent” predispositions.

Though the pages of the National Interest feature a wide variety of opinions, lately long essays bemoaning America’s global “arrogance” and its ” imperial” designs have become common fare. Alan Tonelson, for example, decries the fact that “a remarkable share of our foreign policy still consists of affluent internationalists searching for new opportunities for risking their countrymen’s lives and resources.” He goes on to envision ” hardhats marching outside the United Nations, the State Department, the Washington Post editorial offices . . . carrying signs and chanting, “Hell no, we won’t go!'”

Tonelson’s populist rhetoric puts him at odds with several other contributors to the National Interest whose perspective echoes the lingering European view of the United States as an uncouth upstart. The tendency to see America as an unexceptional and immature power has a long tradition in realist thought. Years ago, no less an American institution than realist George Kennan could be heard comparing American democracy to “one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as [a] room and brain the size of a pin.” With the end of the Cold War, such complaints, muted during decades of East-West conflict, once again are common among realists.

In a passage worthy of Graham Greene, National Interest contributor James Kurth writes,

Insofar as an American high culture even existed, it was lower than its European counterpart in every cultural genre. What might be called the ” American empire style” of art was the always ugly and now discarded abstract expressionism. Its counterpart in architecture was the always banal and now tiresome international style, or modernism.

Kurth’s attack on modernism precedes his assault on “the ideal human type of the American empire.” According to Kurth, this type is characterized by ” self-centeredhess, energy, and aggressiveness.” He adds, “As with the SS officer and the new Soviet man, these are not the qualities of a mature person.” For his part, Schlesinger, opining in the same journal, attributes America’s weaknesses to “the character of the American Constitution.” He then scoffs that “Americans tend not to be much interested in history” and that ” ruthless self-criticism has never been a principal characteristic of the American people.”

Of these critiques, the anti-statist line of the libertarians has enjoyed the most success. Their positions on topics like NATO expansion, foreign aid, and Bosnia appear quite sensible to junior members of Congress who have made deficit reduction a fetish and express little interest in foreign matters. The libertarians’ counsel of restraint, however, stems not from a desire to protect America from corrupting foreign influences, but from the conviction that the U.S. government plays a brutish role in international affairs. That policy advice grounded in such a belief should find a receptive audience in the Republican party signals, to say the least, a strange turn of affairs.

Far more persuasive is the critique put forward by the cultural pessimists. American culture, after all, has coarsened considerably in recent years. Their opposition to entanglement in the affairs of others, however, does not flow inexorably from their diagnosis of cultural decay. True, Hollywood and New York export an incredible amount of garbage: Jerry Springer, Showgirls, pornographic Calvin Klein ads. But this is not Washington’s doing, apart from its role in promoting free trade. Similarly, it remains unclear how America can save itself by turning inward, when, according to the pessimists, America is the very source of the pollution.

As for some cultural pessimists’ view that exporting democracy and political liberty amounts to cultural imperialism, their quarrel often seems to be less with the promotion of democracy than with democracy itself. It’s difficult to take seriously the notion that America should stop promoting its values simply because democratic principles offend the authoritarian sensibilities of some civilizations. Overwhelming evidence suggests that the world hungers for political freedom. According to a recent Freedom House survey, the number of freely elected governments has grown to a record 117. But rather than applaud the triumph of the American creed, conservatives champion the very same “Asian values” that wreak havoc on the Pacific Rim.

The realist critique suffers from a similar flaw. It fails to credit the degree to which American interests and ideals overlap. The promotion of democracy is not mere “social work”; the United States does not advance its principles solely for the benefit of others. Peace, prosperity, and political freedom are also selfinterested aims. For it has long been a truism of international politics that democracies would rather trade than go to war with one another. As democracy advocate Joshua Muravchik has put it, “The more democratic the world becomes, the more likely it is to be both peaceful and friendly to America.” This assertion and the deeds it inspires may strike some as “adolescent” or “arrogant,” but they have served Americans and millions of others around the globe quite well. It’s too bad so many conservatives have made themselves forget this simple fact.

Lawrence E Kaplan is a fellow in strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.