Wrong from the Beginning

But Buchanan deserves to be taken seriously by Republicans — not just as a political problem, but as a representative of one of the perpetual temptations of conservative thought. Buchanan is the most articulate current expositor of a Republican right that previously peaked before World War II.

Buchanan’s new A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny is a systematic rehabilitation and defense of an “America First” foreign policy that demands the withdrawal of American power and protection from most of the world. The book is compelling reading — for, from his earliest days as a newspaper columnist, Buchanan has always been a first-rate political writer. But, ironically, the verve and lucidity of Buchanan’s prose expose all the more baldly the flaws in his logic, his evidence, and his policy prescriptions.

His main line of argument runs as follows. By piling up open-ended, extravagant, and provocative commitments unrelated to the true interests of the nation, American leaders have “reenacted every folly that brought previous great powers to ruin.” Buchanan cites NATO expansion as a prime example of the “folly of our reigning foreign policy elites.” Borrowing heavily from the arguments in Paul Kennedy’s 1987 The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Buchanan assails as reckless and unsustainable a foreign policy “that commits America to go to war for scores of nations where we have never fought.” He warns that the day of reckoning is approaching, when “American global hegemony is going to be challenged, and our leaders will discover that they lack the resources to make good on all the war guarantees they have handed out so frivolously; and the American people, awakened to what it is their statesmen have committed them to do, will declare themselves unwilling to pay the price of empire.”

We must, Buchanan declares, jettison our outdated Cold War commitments that risk American involvement in major conflicts in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Instead, he advocates a return to isolationism — or, in his preferred designation, the “America First Tradition” — that, he claims, governed American foreign policy from 1776 until 1917.

Buchanan’s claims about twentieth-century history are a deliberate rejection of Republican foreign policy notions — both of the idealism of Ronald Reagan’s cold warriors and the ostensible realism of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Ignoring the recent work of Niall Ferguson and others who attempt a more respectable version of the case against World War I, Buchanan revives Charles Tansill’s old canard that an insidious combination of pro-British sentiment, the interests of Wall Street bankers fearful of Britain’s defaulting on its huge loans, Theodore Roosevelt’s militarism, and Woodrow Wilson’s zealous idealism dragged America into a costly war in defiance of our previous tradition and our national interest.

Buchanan’s historical assumption — that a German victory in World War I would not have been dangerous to the United States — is dubious. Fritz Fischer, Donald Kagan, and other scholars have shown that Germany aspired to use a conquered Europe as a base for world empire.

But Buchanan’s geopolitical assumption is worse than dubious. American security has always depended on a European balance of power, which a German victory would have obliterated. It made strategic sense for America to stay out of European conflicts while Britain operated as the effective balance, ensuring that no continental power achieved a decisive aggregation of power. By 1917, however, Britain could no longer contain German power without the active participation of the United States. As Theodore Roosevelt, whom Buchanan vilifies, recognized more clearly than any statesman of his day, the United States went to war not just to maintain freedom of the seas and make the world safe for democracy, but to prevent the German victory that would topple a balance of power that was in the American national interest.

There is, to be sure, much to criticize about Woodrow Wilson’s obsession with the League of Nations, his inability to compromise, and the peace imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Nevertheless, Wilson was right about one thing: The United States has a compelling interest in sustaining liberal democracy where possible, because stable democracies clash less frequently and fundamentally with each other than do other regimes. The Treaty of Versailles was flawed, but it was not the punitive peace that Buchanan, echoing John Maynard Keynes, portrays. It was certainly less harsh than what the Germans imposed on the defeated Russians with the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918. And its main problem was in the failure of the First World War’s victors to enforce the treaty’s disarmament provisions when they had the power to do so. Had the United States remained engaged in Europe after 1919 the way it did after 1945, we would not have had to fight the Second World War, the destructive conflict whose cost in American blood Buchanan so deplores. Nor would Britain and the United States in desperation have had to rely on Stalin’s help to defeat Hitler, which left East Central Europe prey to Soviet totalitarianism for nearly fifty years. By any rational standard of measure, the “America First” policy that Buchanan champions exponentially increased the cost of World War II.

Yet Buchanan defiantly insists that Franklin Roosevelt foolishly and deceitfully maneuvered the United States into that war. By Buchanan’s analysis (a rehash of the historian A. J. P. Taylor’s revisionist account that Taylor later had the good sense to disavow), “Hitler had not wanted war in the West. But when the West declared war, he overran France to secure his rear before setting out to conquer the East. . . . Hitler saw the World divided into four spheres: Great Britain holding its Empire; Japan, dominant in East Asia; Germany, master of Europe; and America, mistress of the Western Hemisphere.” Buchanan adds:

If there had been a maximum point of peril for America in the war in Europe, it was the summer of 1940, after France had been overrun and England seemed about to be invaded, with the possible scuttling or loss of the British fleet. But after the Royal Air Force won the Battle of Britain, the German invasion threat was history. If Goering’s Luftwaffe could not achieve air supremacy over the Channel, how was it going to achieve it over the Atlantic? If Hitler could not put a soldier in England in the fall of 1940, the notion that he could invade the Western Hemisphere — with no surface ships to engage the United States and British fleets and the U.S. airpower dominant in the west Atlantic — was preposterous.

Buchanan does not believe that “hundreds of thousands of American boys should have been killed in Europe and Asia fighting Hitler and Tojo,” because he does not believe America was threatened by Japan’s bid for Empire in Asia or Nazi Germany’s domination of all of Europe. Thus the United States should have stayed out of the war “that made Europe safe for Stalinism and Asia safe for Maoism.”

Buchanan’s defense of the morally and strategically indefensible is remarkable. The fact is well documented that Hitler not only strove to dominate the entire European continent, but the entire world. He expected that he would eventually fight the United States, when he had the enormous resources of Eurasia at his disposal and when the United States would have no allies to help resist a Nazi onslaught. Wouldn’t a conquered Europe have provided Hitler the strength he needed, at least to intimidate America into not challenging his hegemony everywhere else? And would the United States really have reduced the cost and risk of confrontation by waiting even longer?

Franklin Roosevelt made mistakes, no doubt, particularly in his dealings with Stalin’s Soviet Union. Yet he recognized the truth that others missed at the time — that the United States must enter the war — and he prepared a reluctant American people to do exactly that.

Buchanan is wildly off the mark, too, in his assault on Winston Churchill. The British prime minister envisaged collaboration with the Soviet Union as a tactical arrangement, to last only while the war lasted and for the limited objective of defeating Hitler. Once the entry of the United States into the war made victory over the Nazis certain, Churchill attempted to gear Anglo-American strategy not just to the short-term objective of defeating Hitler, but to the long-term objective of minimizing Soviet influence in the postwar world. Churchill, in certain respects, failed; Buchanan treats him with contempt.

Buchanan’s historical and geopolitical willfulness leads him not just to an indictment of Roosevelt and Churchill, but to a perverse defense of Charles Lindbergh and the long discredited “America First” movement. No one denies that there were intelligent defenders of isolationism before World War II. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, one of the great heroes of the Cold War, came to Congress in January 1941 as an opponent of American intervention, a position he did not abandon until September of 1941. Arthur Vandenberg, Gerald Ford, and many others who were stalwart internationalists after World War II were also isolationists until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. What distinguishes Buchanan from this group is that they all eventually conceded the mistake he still embraces.

Buchanan displays his darkest side by trumpeting as the hero of his cause the aviator Charles Lindbergh rather than the honorable if mistaken Senator Robert A. Taft — for Lindbergh not only opposed American entry into the war, but seemed to admire Hitler, whom he met during a visit to Nazi Germany in 1936. “While I still have many reservations,” Lindbergh observed, “Hitler is undoubtedly a great man, and I believe he has done much for the German people.” He left Germany with “the impression that Hitler must have far more character and vision than I thought existed in the German leader.”

On September 3, 1941, Lindbergh delivered his notorious speech charging Jews with using their influence in Hollywood and the press to precipitate American intervention in World War II. “The leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons that are understandable from their view-point as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons that are not American, wish to involve us in the war,” he said. “We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own best interests, but we must also look to ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.”

Strikingly, Buchanan devotes only two pages and a handful of references to the foreign policies of Ronald Reagan. The Reagan in whose White House Buchanan served may “have been no Wilsonian.” But he was no Buchananite either. Reagan not only proved indefatigable and successful in opposing Soviet totalitarianism, but he also considered the spread of stable constitutional democracy as consistent with American ideals and self-interest. Despite endorsing Jeane Kirkpatrick’s thesis that alliances with right-wing dictators are sometimes necessary for resisting Soviet totalitarianism, Reagan’s administration also pressured America’s authoritarian allies to democratize.

Buchanan’s claim that Reagan’s “foreign policy was crafted to prevail in a long struggle by putting ideological, not military, pressure on Moscow” is preposterous. What about the Reagan military buildup, or the Strategic Defense Initiative, which Margaret Thatcher recently identified as a “vital factor in ending the Cold War”?

Buchanan’s prescriptions for contemporary American foreign policy are every bit as wrong and dangerous as the rendition of twentieth-century history underlying them. Nevertheless, he has done Republicans a service by making his case clearly enough that the party he seems about to abandon can have no illusion about where he stands.

The Republicans, of course, can live happily without Buchanan. They should do so with good conscience. Buchanan has fundamentally repudiated the Republican legacy of Ronald Reagan by his isolationism and his protectionism — to say nothing, for example, of his advocacy of affirmative action and quotas to restrict the number of Asians and Jews at elite universities. If Buchanan does run as a third-party candidate, why shouldn’t Republicans welcome his departure from their ranks?

Robert G. Kaufman is an associate professor in the department of political science at the University of Vermont and the author of a forthcoming biography of Scoop Jackson.