Republic, Not an Empire

Reclaiming America's Destiny

Patrick J. Buchanan

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781621571001
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

All but predicting the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, Buchanan examines and critiques America's recent foreign policy and argues for new policies that consider America's interests first.

PART ONE

AMERICA REACHES FOR GLOBAL HEGEMONY

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CHAPTER 1

How Empires Perish

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no other way of judging the future but by the past.¹

—PATRICK HENRY, 1774

At the opening of the twentieth century there were five great Western empires—the British, French, Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian—and two emerging great powers: Japan and the United States. By century’s end, all the empires had disappeared. How did they perish? By war—all of them.

The Austro-Hungarian empire was crushed in World War I and torn to pieces at Versailles, where Germany was also dismembered. A vengeful Reich then began a second European war. Ruin was total. Japan, believing its empire was being extorted, its place in the sun denied, attacked America and was smashed like no other nation in history. The British and French empires, already bled in the trenches of the Western Front from August 1914 to November 1918, did not long survive Hitler’s war.

Russia’s empire, dismantled by the kaiser in 1918, was restored by Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Driven by traditional Russian imperialism and a new fighting faith, communism, the Soviet empire expanded until its reach was global. Overextended, bankrupt, exhausted by a fifty-year struggle against a U.S.-led West that far surpassed the communist bloc in economic power and technological prowess, it collapsed after a crisis of faith and a loss of will to maintain its rule over subject peoples who had grown to hate it.

America survives as the sole superpower because it stayed out of the slaughter pens until the other great powers had fought themselves near to death and avoided a cataclysmic clash with a nuclear-armed Soviet Russia. In World War I Americans did not go into combat in great numbers until 1918. In World War II America did not cross the Channel until four years after France had fallen and three years after the USSR had begun fighting for its life. We did not go to war against Japan until the Japanese army had been bogged down for four years fighting a no-win war against the most populous nation on earth. U.S. casualties in the two world wars were thus the smallest of the Great Powers, and America in the twentieth century has never known the vast destruction that was visited on Russia, Germany, and Japan—or even on France and England.

Yet, today, America’s leaders are reenacting every folly that brought these great powers to ruin—from arrogance and hubris, to assertions of global hegemony, to imperial overstretch, to trumpeting new “crusades,” to handing out war guarantees to regions and countries where Americans have never fought before.We are piling up the kind of commitments that produced the greatest disasters of the twentieth century.

That is why I have written this book. Not for fifty years have Americans had to think deeply about our foreign policy. It was made for us—by Tojo, Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Ho, and Mao. For fifty years America overcame enemies who either attacked us or declared our destruction to be their highest ambition. “We will bury you!” Khrushchev said.We took him at his word—and buried them. But in the last days of the Cold War, something happened. Soviet propagandist Georgi Arbatov said, “We are going to do the worst thing we can do to you. We are going to take your enemy away from you.” And so they did, and so we have had to face the question asked in the war movies of our youth, “What are you going to do, Joe, when this is all over?”

Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait briefly gave us a new Hitler and George Bush an opportunity to smash Iraq and to declare the building of a New World Order to be America’s next crusade. But the nation did not buy in. After the Gulf War triumph, it turned its back on Bush, giving 37 percent of the vote to a president whose approval, eighteen months earlier, had stood at 91 percent.

As in the 1920s, Americans have tuned out foreign affairs and tuned in the stock market and the scandals. But as the good times of the 1920s ended in the Depression decade and World War II, the twenty-first century will not leave America serene in its preeminence. Already, enemies collude against what they consider an intolerable American hegemony.

There is a fundamental question any foreign policy must answer: What will we fight for? What are the vital interests for which America will sacrifice the blood of its young? With our great enemy gone, the answer is not a simple one. For we Americans disagree on what our vital interests are, what our role in the world should be, and whom we should defend. Without some new foreign peril, America is never going to know again the unity we knew in World War II and the early decades of the Cold War. It may be naive to believe we can ever again have a foreign policy that unites this divided and disputatious people. Nevertheless, we must try, for foreign policy is the shield of the Republic. Blunders here can be as fateful as they were for the other great empires and nations of the twentieth century.

The purpose of this book, then, is to revisit the history of American foreign policy, its successes, triumphs, and failures. From that history, we can expose the myths and identify the true traditions upon which we can build, and the lessons from which we can draw, to offer a foreign policy for the new century that might unite most of us and ensure that America endures as the greatest republic in history. As Patrick Henry said, only the “lamp of experience” can guide our way.

And the need for a course correction is urgent. For, with little discussion or dissent, America has undertaken the most open-ended and extravagant commitments in history. With the expansion of NATO, we have undertaken the defense of Eastern Europe, forever, as well as Central Europe from Norway to Turkey. American troops are, for the first time in history, policing the Balkans. We have undertaken the “dual containment” of Iran and Iraq and the ground and naval defense of the Persian Gulf. These new war guarantees have been added to old Cold War commitments to the security of Israel in a hostile Arab world, to the defense of Korea, Japan, Australia, and the SEATO pact nations of South Asia, not to mention every Latin American member-state of the Rio pact.Voices can even be heard in Washington asserting a “vital U.S. interest” in preventing Russia and Iran from dominating the south Caucasus.

U.S. war guarantees to Poland today, and Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Rumania tomorrow, may seem costless, painless, and popular. But so did England’s guarantee of Belgium’s neutrality in 1839, which dragged Britain into the Great War, cost it hundreds of thousands of dead, and inflicted on the empire a wound from which it would never recover.

Our country is today traveling the same path that was trod by the British Empire—to the same fate. Do we want America to end that way?

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CHAPTER 2

Courting Conflict with Russia

He who wants to defend everything defends nothing, and he who wants to be everyone’s friend has no friends in the end.¹

—FREDERICK THE GREAT

The price of empire is America’s soul and that price is too high.²

—J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT

The Cold War was an exceptional time that called forth exceptional commitments. A nation that had wanted to stay out of World War II had declared by 1950 that an attack on Turkey would be treated as an attack on Tennessee, that the 38th parallel of Korea would be defended as though it were the 49th parallel of the United States. But when the Cold War ended, the Cold War coalition collapsed and traditionalists declared the time had come to dissolve the now-unnecessary alliances and bring the boys home.

Shocked at this outbreak of “isolationism,” internationalists quickly pressed America to seize the moment to begin an era of “benevolent global hegemony.”

THE WOLFOWITZ MEMORANDUM

The Republican establishment was first to advance this vision. Its hand was tipped in early 1992 in a secret Pentagon memorandum leaked to the New York Times. Prepared under the direction of Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz, the forty-six-page memo was described by the Washington Post as a “classified blueprint intended to help ‘set the nation’s direction for the next century....’”³ The document, wrote reporter Barton Gellman, “casts Russia as the gravest potential threat to U.S. vital interests and presumes the United States would spearhead a NATO counterattack if Russia launched an invasion of Lithuania.” That Baltic republic had now become a “U.S. vital interest.”⁴ But how could the United States save Lithuania from Russia? Wrote Gellman:

[The Pentagon] contemplates a major war by land, sea and air in which 24 NATO divisions, 70 fighter squadrons, and six aircraft carrier battle groups would keep the Russian Navy “bottled up in the eastern Baltic,” bomb supply lines in Russia, and use armored formations to expel Russian forces from Lithuania. The authors state that Russia is unlikely to respond with nuclear weapons, but they provide no basis for that assessment.⁵

What made this scenario so astonishing was that only a year earlier George Bush barely protested when Mikhail Gorbachev ordered Spesnatz troops into Vilnius. Just three weeks before the leak, Bush and President Boris Yeltsin had issued a joint declaration that “Russia and the United States do not regard each other as potential adversaries.”⁶

The Wolfowitz memo also envisioned U.S. war guarantees to Eastern Europe and permanent U.S. involvement on every continent. America’s dominance was to remain so great as to deter “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”⁷ Preventing the emergence of rival superpowers was now declared a

dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requir[ing] that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.

These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.⁸

The Pentagon had decided the United States would never permit any nation—Russia, Germany, Japan, China—to rise again even to the status of regional superpower. To maintain global hegemony, the Pentagon anticipated U.S. military intervention for promoting ends far beyond the protection of vital interests. As the Washington Post noted:

While the U.S. cannot become the world’s “policeman,” by assuming responsibility for righting every wrong, we will retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations.⁹

Containment, a defensive strategy, had given way to a breathtakingly ambitious offensive strategy—to “establish and protect a new order.”¹⁰

Reaction was sharp. Ex-Secretary of Defense Harold Brown warned that extending war guarantees to Eastern Europe would provoke Russian nationalism, risking the “same grave danger of nuclear war” that prevented intervention there for forty-five years.¹¹ Senator Joseph Biden ridiculed the memo as a formula for “a Pax Americana.” ¹² Senator Edward Kennedy said the Pentagon plans “appear to be aimed primarily at finding new ways to justify Cold War levels of military spending.”¹³

The Wolfowitz plan seemed to have been laughed off the table. But by the end of the 1990s, crucial elements had been adopted by Congress and President Clinton, and passively accepted by the American people. By 1998 the administration—with Biden and Kennedy’s support—had indeed extended NATO to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic and had offered membership to the Baltic states. Thus, NATO expansion is the first site at which to explore the new fault line in American foreign policy.

THE HEGEMONIST VISION

America’s hegemonists argue the case for NATO expansion by citing justice, history, and the national interest.This, they say, is America’s hour. The Eagle triumphant should spread its protective wings over liberated Eastern Europe to shield it from Russian revanchism and lock it onto a democratic path. To have left Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic outside of NATO, they argue, would have reenacted the betrayal of the Czechs at Munich, of the Poles at Yalta, of the Hungarians in 1956. In the phrase of Vaclav Have...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Preface
• PART ONE - AMERICA REACHES FOR GLOBAL HEGEMONY
• PART TWO - 1789-1823: INDEPENDENCE AND EXPANSION
• PART THREE - 1845-1869: MANIFEST DESTINY
• PART FOUR - 1898-1919: THE TURNING POINT
• PART FIVE - 1921-1941: TRIUMPH OF THE INTERVENTIONISTS
• PART SIX - 1945-1989: TWILIGHT STRUGGLE
• PART SEVEN - A FOREIGN POLICY FOR AMERICA
• NOTES
• Acknowledgments
• INDEX
• Copyright Page