Truly Conservative?
Yglesias says:
The crux of the matter is that while truly conservative foreign policy thought has a long history of wrongness in the United States it’s rarely genuinely held sway on the big issues. Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan all at key moments broke with elements of their conservative base to preserve containment, to initiate détente, to continue with the bilateral arms control process, etc., leaving run-amok rightwingery mostly to fester in third world battlefields rather than on the central point of America’s relationship with Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union.
A lot hangs on that adverbial, since a large part of the argument that some of us have with movement conservatives is whether or not the foreign policy they espouse is “truly conservative.” One important test of whether foreign policy is truly conservative, rather than nominally or conventionally so, is whether it actually achieves conservative ends, or if it is a fundamentally reckless, imprudent, unwise and destructive approach to international relations. I won’t dispute that there has always been a strain within the movement that has believed not simply in strong defense but has degenerated into a reflexive desire for confrontation, and unfortunately I think that this strain is still predominant. Using the appeasement trope is just one sign of the confrontational mode that many on the right mistake for foreign policy thinking, but I fear it may be an integral part of the nationalism that many on the American right have embraced all along, which leads to the identification of the nation with almost every commitment and deployment overseas that the government undertakes that then makes the possibility of negotiation in the context of those foreign deployments unthinkable. If nationalism makes many American conservatives unwilling to resist or oppose these commitments and deployments, I suspect it also makes them extremely hostile to anything that resembles hedging on those commitments or withdrawing from a region, because these can be likened to the “appeasement” of the 1930s.
To return to Lukacs yet again:
They were nationalist rather than patriotic: they put their nationalism above their religion, their nationalism was their religion. Thus American conservatives welcomed (at worst) or were indifferent (at best) to the dangers of excessive American commitments to all kinds of foreign governments or--what was more important--to the flooding of the United States by countless immigrants from the south who would provide cheap labor but whose increasing presence could only exacerbate deep national problems. There were many Catholics among the conservatives; but their publications would criticize popes and bishops when the allocutions of the latter did not coincide with the desiderata of their ideological nationalism.
So it is not at all clear that the confrontational policies over the years of “rollback” or “rogue state rollback” or “pre-emptive war” (i.e., aggressive war) supported by many on the right were, are, “truly conservative,” but they may find their origins in the nationalism that many American conservatives hold. Yglesias would probably say that this is an irrelevant point, but for conservatives that is the real crux of the matter.
Comments
Daniel, excellent post! You are re-articulating a perspective long held by such luminaries as Prof. Lukacs and George F.Kennan. And, needless to say: you are spot on!
The level of self-deception and fantasy afflicting those in the so called conservative movement on a whole host of policy issues, but specifically foreign policy is downright scary, and has its roots in delusion of grandeur that has brought us to the crisis of today.
“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a
king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.” HAMLET
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Rollback is truly a forgotten idea for Republicans.
http://www.gopcatholics.blogspot.com
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Although it bothers me to apply the word ‘conservative” to various shades of
social democratic accommodation to the managerial state, I shall make that verbal
concession here as a
convenience or courtesy. I’m not sure what it means to break from the conservative
movement only over foreign policy because everything in that movement is now of a
piece. The present authorized version of American conservatism
is a quintessentially leftist movement, committed to human rights doctrines at home and
abroad. Would you like that movement better if you could have Michael Ledeen’s agenda
for America without its foreign policy implications? The American conservative
movement is like most other ideologically driven movements. Its foreign policy
represents an extension of what it seeks to do at home, by pushing feminism, Martin
Luther Kingism, and the abomination of ‘democratic capitalism.”
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Dr. Gottfried asks: “Would you like that movement better if you could have Michael Ledeen’s agenda
for America without its foreign policy implications?”
Of course not. I didn’t mean to suggest here that the movement had been or would be acceptable if it would abandon its reckless foreign policy habits. The larger point, which I didn’t develop, is that so much of what is called “conservatism” is, just as you say, nothing of the kind. My use of the word in this context was a concession to convention, but I had hoped to make clear from my remarks about the content of what so many of these “conservatives” believe about foreign policy that there is not much that can be called “truly conservative” in it. Foreign policy often provides the evidence for which political groupings are fundamentally in agreement about the state, human nature and society and which are starkly opposed, so I think it can make for a useful way of distinguishing and contrasting between them. The present follies among Republicans also make up a significant part of our current predicament.
For the record, in case it wasn’t already clear, I want no part of anything to do with the agenda of Michael Ledeen and his confreres in this or any or other part of the world.
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The key point of traditional “conservative” during the “Global War of Containment” with Soviet
Communism was “containment”...letting the Soviet Union fall of it’s own dead weight. Not confrontation.
The “liberal” view was JFK’s “Cold War and Counterrevolution”, which got us involved in a
no-win war in Vietnam. Liberals like to forget that it was JFK who started up the Green Berets. During the Vietnam War, the complaint about the strategy in Vietnam was that the US could not expand the war because it risked confronting Mao’s China, a point which the Soviet Union understood to their great delight. So the US just was stuck “bleeding” to the delight of the Soviet Commi-czars.
The US had the last laugh when the Soviet Union got into it’s own quagmire in Afghanistan,
and it was the Soviet Union’s turn to bleed in a no-win war.
A “conservative” US foreign policy toward the mideast should be assuring a stable, steady supply of oil for the US economy, as a temporary measure until the US economy could be transformed to energy independence, and keeping Europe---especially the Soviet Union---from interfering in Mideast politics. All while keeping a neutral course that would not keep antagonism toward the US in an already volatile mideast cultural and political situation from erupting into outright WAR against us, and endangering our domestic tranquility.
The current “Israel-First” attitude along with the utopian fantasy of transforming the Middle East into a secular, consumerist society and remaking Islam into the equivalent of the Unitarian-Universalist church is NOT “conservative”.
It is part of the fantasy of “free trade” and globalization that has got us into the mess in the Mideast, and we need to get out of it, and return to prudence---or real “conservativism”....
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