conservatism, democracy, and foreign policy · influential: t heir lineage goes back to the...

Conservatism, Democracy, and Foreign Policy Required Reading

Fonte, John. “The Suicide of Liberal Democracy?” ................................................................... 3

Nau, Henry. “What is Conservative Internationalism?” ............................................................21

Tarcov, Nathan. “Principle and prudence in foreign policy: the founders’ perspective............ 42

Douthat, Ross. “A Hawk Takes Flight.” .................................................................................... 58

Sovereignty or Submission

Will Americans Rule Themselves

or Be Ruled by Others?

John Fonte

with a Foreword by John O'Sullivan

ENCOUNTER BOOKS NEWYORK · LONDON

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Also by Henry R. Nau

Perspectives 011 International Relations: Power, Institutions and Ideas, 4th edition, CQ Press

Worldviews of Aspiring Pnwers: Domestic Foreign Policy Dehates in China, India, Iran. Japan and Russia,

Oxford University Press, co-editor and contributor

At Home Ahmad: Identity and Pnwer in American Foreign Policy, Cornell University Press

Trade and Security: U.S. Policies at Cross-Purfwses, American Enterprise Institute

The Myth of America's Decline: Leading the World Economy into the 1 YY()s, Oxford University Press

Domestic Trade Politics and the Uruguay Round, Columbia University Press, editor and contributor

Technology Transfer and U.S. Foreign Policy, Praeger

National Politics and International Technology: Nuclear Reactor Development in Western Europe,

Johns Hopkins University Press

Conservative Internationalism

Armed Diplomacy

Under Jefferson, Polk, Truman, and Reagan

HENRY R. NAU

with a new preface by the author

Princeton University Press

Princeton and Oxford

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AMERICA'S DEFENSE DILEMMAS: II

Principle and prudence in foreign policy:

the founders' perspective

NATHAN TARCOV

A political community that

achieved independent existence through armed struggle, the United

States of America is founded on principles that justify and regulate

the use of force. Its policies for developing and employing its capac­

ities to use force have been defended and attacked at home in part

on the basis of those principles. Geopolitical facts and technological

innovations, as well as strategic and tactical imperatives common to

political communities of widely differing principles, may be more important in shaping precisely how force is used and what capaci­

ties to use it are developed. But the distinctive, fundamental politi­

cal principles of a political community are especially important in

shaping why force is used and why the capability to use it is ac­

quired. Why force is used in turn critically influences when, if not

always directly how, it is used. Once force is used war may have its

own logic, but in peacetime the ability to use force has an effect on

events that depends decisively on what ends or principles are un­

derstood to justify and regulate its use.

Appreciating a country's basic political principles does not enable one to predict the particular outcomes of its debates about defense

The original version of this article was prepared for the Kenyon College Public Affairs Conference Center. This is printed here with Kenyon's kind permission.

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5/12/2020 Opinion | A Hawk Takes Flight - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/24/opinion/sunday/john-bolton-hawk-war.html

ROSS DOUTHAT

By Ross Douthat

March 24, 2018

Now that John Bolton has finally ascended from the limbo of the green room to the Valhalla of the White House, we need to settle the firstquestion of his tenure: Is he a “neocon” or a “paleocon”?

I have seen both terms used, the former more promiscuously, to describe Donald Trump’s new national security adviser. But they’re bothmisdescriptions, and explaining why is a useful way of putting Trump’s foreign policy team (and its distinctive dangers) in intellectual andhistorical perspective.

Foreign policy conservatives can be grouped into four broad categories. The first group, the genuine paleocons, are the oldest and leastinfluential: Their lineage goes back to the antiwar conservatism of the 1930s, and to postwar Republicans who regarded our Cold Warbuildup as a big mistake.

The last paleocon to play a crucial role in U.S. politics was the Ohio Republican Robert Taft, who opposed NATO and became a critic of theKorean War. Pat Buchanan tried to revive paleoconservatism in the 1990s; The American Conservative magazine and the Cato Institutecarry the torch in intellectual debates. But the tendency’s only politically significant heir right now is Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.

Except that even Paul, wary of the label, would probably describe himself instead as a realist, linking himself to the tradition of DwightEisenhower, Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush — internationalist, stability-oriented, committed to the Pax Americana but skeptical ofgrand crusades, and open to working out cynical arrangements rather than pushing American power to its limit.

This cynicism explains why realists have found their chief rivals among the neoconservatives, a group best defined as liberal anti-Communists who moved right in the 1970s as the Democratic Party moved left, becoming more hawkish and unilateralist but retaining abasic view that American power should be used for moral purpose, to spread American ideals.

Thus neoconservatives despised the Nixon White House’s realpolitik; they cheered Ronald Reagan’s anti-Communism; they chafed underGeorge H.W. Bush’s realism and backed humanitarian interventions under Democratic presidents; and most famously they regarded theIraq War as a chance to democratize the Middle East. And then when that war went badly, they became the natural scapegoats …

… Even though some of the most disastrous Iraq decisions were made by members of the fourth conservative faction, the pure hawks, thegroup to which John Bolton emphatically belongs. The hawks share the neocons’ aggressiveness and the realists’ wariness of nationbuilding; they also have a touch of paleoconservatism, embracing “America First” without its non-interventionist implications.

A Hawk Takes Flight

President George W. Bush meeting with John R. Bolton in 2006. Stephen Crowley/The New

York Times

https://nyti.ms/2pCXkw558

5/12/2020 Opinion | A Hawk Takes Flight - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/24/opinion/sunday/john-bolton-hawk-war.html

But the hawkish tradition, from Douglas MacArthur down to Dick Cheney (a realist reborn as a hawk post-9/11) and now Bolton, isdistinguished by simplicity: The default response to any challenge should be military escalation, the imposition of America’s will by force— and if one dangerous regime is succeeded by another, you just go in and kill the next round of bad guys, too.

Most Republican administrations have placed hawks, neocons and realists in complex internal alignments. The invasion of Iraq, forinstance, was championed by hawks and neocons with realists in uneasy and soon-disillusioned support; by the end of the Bushpresidency, the hawks had been marginalized and realists like Robert Gates were supervising a neoconservative-hatched strategy, thesurge.

Donald Trump’s vision, though, promised a different combination, mixing a revived paleoconservatism — hence his NATO skepticism, hisright-wing “come home, America” pose — with a realist desire for a Russian détente and a hawkish attitude toward terrorism. Trumpmade his antipathy to neoconservatives obvious, and they returned the sentiment: The most anti-Trump voices on the right belong to thedemocracy promoters of the Bush era.

In Trump year one, the paleocon-ish elements in his circle — Steve Bannon, most prominently — were sidelined by H. R. McMaster andJames Mattis, and Trump ended up with a realist-leaning foreign policy run by businessmen and generals, with Nikki Haley occasionallysounding neoconservative notes at the U.N.

But Trump didn’t get along with McMaster and Rex Tillerson — and he clearly thinks he might like hawks better. So now we have anadministration in which both paleoconservatism and neoconservatism are sidelined, and straight-up hawkishness is institutionallyascendant as it has rarely been in modern presidencies — save in the Peak Cheneyism following 9/11.

Boltonism need not be as disastrous as Cheneyism. If a realist like Cheney can turn into a “1 percent doctrine” hawk, then perhaps Boltoncan transform the other way, and find a strategic prudence that his “let’s fight everyone” punditry conspicuously lacks. Also, Mattis’smilitary form of realism might have a restraining influence over Trump, and Trump’s bluff and bluster might not readily translate intookaying the war-on-all-fronts strategy that Bolton has tended to endorse.

But a foreign policy team managed by hawks, untouched by neoconservative idealism and cut loose from Trump’s paleocon tendencies,seems more likely than not to give us what the hawkish persuasion always wants: more wars, and soon.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter (@DouthatNYT).

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on March 25, 2018, Section SR, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: A Hawk Takes Flight

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