CONSERVATIVES are quarreling again about American foreign policy — about how forceful it should be and to what extent it should reflect the nation’s values and ideals. But this time, far from remaining the exclusive property of pundits and intellectuals, the debate is also being waged in the political arena. Among Republican presidential aspirants, to be sure, the disagreements have been fairly nuanced. George W. Bush’s advisers are all committed internationalists — as for that matter are candidates Forbes and McCain. The same, however, cannot be said of the GOP’s congressional wing, which, especially in the House, has been grappling over questions presumed to have been settled half a century ago.
According to our most respected editorial pages and numerous other opinion-makers, this distance between the GOP’s executive and legislative factions raises the question: How will the Republican nominee devise a coherent foreign policy stance? The divide between the two wings, after all, has already yielded a schizophrenic critique of the Clinton record, with candidates for the GOP presidential nomination chiding the administration for not employing American power forcefully enough, while a chorus of legislators condemns it on exactly the opposite count.
Senator McCain, for example, has gone so far as to espouse a policy of “rogue state rollback.” Similarly, Gov. Bush’s bid to craft a “distinctly American internationalism” condemns those in his party who would have America retreat into isolation and thereby “abandon our allies and our ideals” and “invite challenges to our power.” As to the congressional Republicans who are the objects of Bush’s rebuke, they have resurrected caustic phrases like “gunpoint democracy,” “imperial bullying,” and “elite interventionism” that were thought to have been banished forever from the GOP’s lexicon. And while such invective is the exception rather than the norm, a consensus appears to have emerged in their ranks: Not only is the United States wielding power promiscuously, but it is doing so at the expense of our vital interests, which it neglects in the name of a “democratic crusade.”
Yet this is hardly the first time Republicans have been split down the middle with respect to the aims of American foreign policy. Indeed, the current debate revives an argument that came close to splintering the Republican party in 1952, when the presidential wing of the party assailed President Truman for being insufficiently bellicose, and the congressional wing criticized him for being excessively so.
As to the first of these, the presidential wing embraced John Foster Dulles’s “policy of boldness,” which denounced as weak and static Truman’s “mere” containment of tyranny, and pledged a “positive” program of rollback and liberation. But Dulles, whom Eisenhower would appoint secretary of state over the protestations of many congressional Republicans, equally disowned those within his own party who he claimed “would turn their backs on all the world’s problems and wrap the United States in some magically impregnable isolation.”
This view was exemplified by Senate majority leader Robert Taft — Mr. Republican, as he was known to the public — and like-minded colleagues who had pilloried the Marshall Plan, ridiculed the establishment of NATO as a needless provocation, and demanded that the United States “withdraw without condition from Korea.” Averring that “we should not commit troops to continental soil,” Taft promoted instead the “development of an all powerful air force” behind which America could rest secure.
Yet far from relishing a confrontation with the Taft wing, Dulles implored Ike to craft the “foreign plank in the Republican platform” so as to “avoid an open battle between the isolationist wing and internationalist wing” of the party. That caution yielded a muddled blueprint that both censured Truman for abandoning “countless human beings to despotism” and touted Taft’s elixir of deterrence through airpower and nuclear weapons. “It looks,” Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson later observed, “as if Taft lost the nomination but won the nominee.”
It was Eisenhower, however, who won the election. With that in mind, Philip Zelikow, who served in the National Security Council under President Bush, advises candidate Bush to follow “the same path in winning the battle of ideas that President Dwight Eisenhower used successfully in the campaign of 1952” — that is, to stress party unity on matters of foreign policy. And Zelikow is not the only one advising Bush to make room for the new minimalists in the name of party unity. In fact, a few months before he enunciated the tenets of his “distinctly American internationalism,” which repudiated the congressional posture, Bush espoused a policy that was largely congruent with it. In a September speech on national defense, he took care to highlight aims he shared with congressional Republicans, among them “an immediate review of our overseas deployments” and “withdrawal from places like Kosovo and Bosnia.”
On matters of foreign policy, however, such nods to party unity have been known to exact a high price: Contradictory pledges made during campaigns all too often become enshrined in contradictory policies. And here, too, the Eisenhower example is instructive.
As policy, for instance, the split-the-difference mantra of deterrence through airpower and nuclear weapons proved ill-suited to many of the challenges America actually confronted — non-deterrable threats such as war in Indochina and revolution in the Third World. (A lesson, perhaps, for those congressmen who tout SDI not merely as a vital addition to our arsenal — which it surely is — but as a means of extricating ourselves from global entanglements.)
Second, and perhaps more important, the gap between the Eisenhower administration’s aggressive hyperbole and the reality of its tentative foreign policy led to the justifiable impression of American hypocrisy — most notably, in the case of the Hungarian uprising.
As shortly became apparent, compromise makes for strategic incoherence when the objects of compromise are irreconcilable creeds like isolationism and internationalism. Rather than look to the Eisenhower era for his model, then, the Republican front-runner might look to the resolution of a still earlier dispute between the GOP’s presidential and congressional wings.
Theodore Roosevelt, too, found his vision of America’s global role hamstrung by Republican obstructionists on Capitol Hill. And so he wielded executive power to send the U.S. fleet around the world, dispatch forces to South America, engineer our acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone, and win a Nobel Prize for brokering peace between Japan and Russia. Rather than allow himself to be constrained by congressional Republicans, TR led them. If there is again to be a coherent Republican foreign policy, our next president would do well to follow his example.
Lawrence F. Kaplan is executive editor of the National Interest.
