THE CRISIS IN BOSNIA has sparked the beginning of a profound debate within the Republican party over the direction of its foreign policy, and not a moment too soon. For the past three years, the party has been drifting toward the edge of its third great transformation in this century. The first came when Theodore Roosevelt’s muscular internationalism gave way after World War I to a search for “normalcy” under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, and then to isolationism under the congressional leadership of Sen. William Borah. The second occurred in the late 1940s, when the threat of Stalin’s Soviet Union convinced party leaders to renounce isolationism and support Harry Truman’s active, expensive, and risk-filled effort to preserve security and stability in Europe. The long era of Republican internationalism that followed began with the election of Eisenhower and reached its peak in the Reagan years.
But since the end of the Bush administration, and the end of the Cold War, many Republicans have been migrating back to the party’s earlier preference for retrenchment and withdrawal. They have demanded a reduction in America’s foreign commitments, insisted that only “vital” interests be defended by American power, and generally sought to replace the global activism of the Reagan-Bush years with a new brand of foreign-policy minimalism.
The dangers of such an approach, both for the nation and for the party, ought to have been obvious to anyone looking back over the events of this violent century. Republican policies in the 1920s and 30s left the country disastrously ill-prepared to defend even its “vital” interests before World War II. By contrast, the strategy of global containment embraced by Republicans during the Cold War proved amazingly successful both in advancing American interests and in assuring a peaceful victory over the Soviet Union. Republican internationalism in the Reagan-Bush era also reaped enormous political rewards. By the early 1990s the American people had come to identify Republicans with a strong, assertive, and successful foreign policy, while Democrats had come to be associated with timidity and withdrawal.
Why Republicans in the 1990s would want to abandon the Reagan-era successes a nd adopt the Democratic recipe for failure is a mystery. Until now, however, Re publican politicians and foreign affairs experts who did not partake in the par ty’s drift toward foreign policy minimalism nevertheless did little to try to a rrest and reverse it. Instead, they simply tried to ignore the dangerous trend. In their opposition to many of the Clinton administration’s foreign policies and in the heat of partisan battle, Republican internationalists in the Reaganire mold considered it unnecessary or even inappropriate to wage the foreign-policy war on two fronts at once, against both the Democratic president and members of their own party. Being in opposition meant never having to say you’re sorry — about the foreign-policy pronouncements of party colleagues. First win back the presidency, the internationalists argued, and then the party could straighten out its foreign policy.
This was always a dangerous strategy, however, for it meant letting the center of the party drift away from the Reaganite foreign-policy principles more suited to a party in control of the White House than one in control of the Capitol. Global leadership is a president’s game, not a congressman’s, and those committed to Republican internationalism should have recognized that life in opposition required greater not lesser efforts to hold the line against the natural tendencies of a Congress-based party.
In the absence of contrary arguments from the internationalist wing of the party, for three years those Republicans who advocated a new “return to normalcy” were able to advance practically unchallenged their view that America should act only in defense of “vital” interests narrowly conceived. And as the past week’s debate over Bosnia has shown, the new minimalism even came to mean a reduced commitment to Europe and NATO, a willingness to let America’s allies fend for themselves, and an unwillingness to pay the costs and accept the risks of leadership of the alliance. While conservative internationalists concentrated their fire on what they considered Clinton’s excesses in Somalia and Haiti, therefore, the party’s minimalists chipped away at the consensus behind all of America’s overseas commitments. In the common effort to destroy Clinton, the internationalists did little damage to the administration but lost significant ground within their own party.
This failure to wage the war of ideas within the Republican party is now exacting its price. The few Republican internationalists bold enough to take a stand on behalf of the troop deployment have advanced arguments that no longer move many Republicans as they might have four or five years ago. Indeed, the growing chasm between the two wings of Republicanism was cast in sharp relief last week as internationalists like Robert Dole, Richard Lugar, Paul Wolfowitz, Brent Scowcroft, and James Schlesinger laid out the reasons why Congress, at this late date, could not just reject President Clinton’s decision to deploy troops in Bosnia. Their apparently simple and narrow argument that, right or wrong, an American president’s commitments had to be met, actually rested on a far broader set of convictions about what America’s interests are and what its proper role in the world ought to be — convictions, however, that may no longer be shared by the Republican party as a whole.
In their testimony before Congress, Wolfowitz, Scowcroft, and Schlesinger argued that the president’s commitment to NATO had to be made good lest American leadership in the alliance be undermined and the alliance itself be irrevocably weakened. They insisted, more generally, that the failure to meet such commitments in Europe could cause a devastating decline in America’s prestige around the world — a decline that, over time, could materially affect American security by inviting a host of challenges from potential competitors and adversaries. And, more broadly still, they argued that a failure to fulfill the president’s commitments in Bosnia could severely hamper America’s ability to defend a world order that, for all its flaws, has been uniquely beneficial to the American economy, uniquely protective of American security, and uniquely conducive to American political ideals.
Unseen but embedded within their arguments was a direct refutation of the view, central to foreign-policy minimalists, that only immediately apparent ” vital” interests are worth defending. Their responses to skeptical senators were redolent of the “lessons of Munich,” the dominant theme of Republican internationalism from Eisenhower through the Reagan-Bush era. Asked if Bosnia was “worth dying for,” Scowcroft responded that this was “no longer the basic question,” since the repudiation of American commitments in Europe could open the United States to innumerable challenges in Europe and elsewhere and could lead to the creation of a truly “terrible world.”
But it is precisely such an understanding of the requirements of power, of th e fragility of the present international order, and of America’s paramount inte rest in preserving that order, that many of their colleagues in the Republican party simply do not grasp. By whatever route, many Republicans and conservative s have arrived at a very different view of the world, one that places far less value on Europe and the NATO allian ce, one that sees in the world not an order that must be upheld but a chaos that must be avoided, and one that conceives of security in terms of oceans and borders rather than as a product of more important, if more nebulous, factors such as national will and international prestige.
And there can be no stronger proof of the potency of this view within Republican ranks than that, even now, it remains unclear whether a resolution supporting the deployment of troops in Bosnia can pass both Republican- controlled houses. Dole and the other Republican internationalists, though they may despise Clinton and would love to see him fail at this critical moment in his presidency, have decided that a no vote in Congress would cost the nation far too dearly. But Dole’s competitors for the presidential nomination (except Richard Lugar), and a large number of his colleagues in the House and Senate, either don’t understand what is at stake or don’t believe it is as important as an assertion of congressional prerogative and a political repudiation of a Democratic president.
This is a measure of the seriousness of the party’s current predicament, a sign of just how far down the road it has traveled toward a third historic transformation in its foreign-policy attitudes. It ought to be a clarion call to Republican internationalists that, regardless of the outcome of congressional votes on Bosnia, the battle for the party’s soul must be waged vigorously now and in the coming months. Contrary to much popular wisdom, what a party stands for in opposition can have a profound effect on its policies once in power. Just ask the Democrats. Twenty years of warning against Vietnams and quagmires, twenty years of using congressional powers to prevent Republican presidents from conducting effective foreign policies, have proven a terrible handicap now that the Democrats themselves have to wield power effectively from the White House. Democratic senators who five years ago voted against the Gulf War now stand up and make the case for sending troops to Bosnia, but their credibility has been damaged almost beyond repair. Republicans should take note. It is no accident that Robert Dole has taken the most courageous and responsible position in this whole affair. He is probably the one Republican who can truly imagine sitting in the White House in 1997.
by Robert Kagan
