Keep America first - foreign policy - Editorial

National Review, July 31, 1995

FOR planning to cut foreign aid and criticizing President Clinton's alleged foreign policy, Republicans in Congress have been labeled isolationists. The charge is unfair: the party remains committed to global leadership, a strong defense, and free trade. But it is true that the GOP majority shows little interest in foreign policy. When conservative think tanks hold seminars on foreign policy, Republican congressmen don't come. Foreign-policy issues gain their attention, as NAFTA and GATT did, only when they involve domestic politics. Party leaders have criticized aspects of Clintonism without advocating a coherent alternative. Perhaps most worrisome, it is the freshmen and sophomores, so exemplary in other respects, who most exhibit these tendencies. As a result, the party risks becoming operationally isolationist.

Disengagement from the world would be a policy disaster for America and a political mistake for Republicans. National lawmakers have a duty to attend to foreign affairs -- defending the country from external menace is the first task of the Federal Government and indeed the principal justification for its existence. And while America faces no immediate threat from a great power, that is unlikely to be true for long, both because some threats are already emerging and because the current international climate is historically aberrant. For the United States to retreat from its global responsibilities would make deterioration more likely.

Republican self-interest also demands attention to foreign affairs. A reputation for seriousness on foreign policy has been a major asset for the party in national elections since at least the Seventies. In fairness to the GOP, foreign-policy intellectuals, conservatives included, have provided scant guidance since the Cold War ended. There has been no broad consensus on what American foreign policy should be; debates among them have been too unfocused even to sort them neatly into rival camps. It may be helpful, then, to identify some principles that foreign policy should follow. Above all -- and it's a sad commentary on the confusion of American intellectuals that this should have to be stated explicitly -- U.S. foreign policy must seek prudently to advance American interests abroad; the U.S. military is not a corps of armed social workers.

America's most important national interest is the maintenance of its position as the world's sole superpower. Only a hegemonic power is able to guarantee peace, stability, and freedom of commerce among major powers, and no country other than America can do the job. America must therefore remain the dominant partner in a strong Atlantic Alliance, as Lady Thatcher and Peter Rodman explain in this issue. The emergence of an anti-American, protectionist European Union poses the main threat to that alliance. It is a threat to which American foreign-policy elites have been peculiarly blind, although America's traditional encouragement of ever-tighter European integration has recently been questioned by some of the shrewder establishment voices, such as Henry Kissinger and Foreign Affairs. While our power to affect intra-European debates is limited, we can take steps to promote a renewed commitment to transatlanticism. Specifically, we should push for a North Atlantic Free Trade Area comprising the U.S., Canada, the EU, and Central Europe; reinvigorate NATO and enlarge it to include Central Europe; keep an eye on Russian revanchist tendencies; and stop gratuitously snubbing our traditional allies in Europe.

We can lower the likelihood that we will need to intervene abroad by maintaining regional balances of power (where possible, that is: no balance of power can exist in Europe without a substantial American presence). That task will in coming years be especially pressing, and difficult, in Asia, where India, China, Russia, and Japan -- not to mention lesser neighbors -- can be expected to jostle one another.

Preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons is widely recognized as an important American interest. Less widely acknowledged is the futility of pursuing it in an international atmosphere of pervasive insecurity. Security guarantees, backed by a willingness to use force, are the indispensable underpinning of any regime of non-proliferation.

Last and most important, no foreign policy can be credible without a strong defense. Military strength takes on added importance when foreign policy has been as feckless as ours has been recently: Clinton's North Korea policy, for instance, has made strategic defense all the more imperative.

Taken together, these recommendations amount to a foreign-policy agenda that rejects both President Clinton's multilateralism and Pat Buchanan's neo-isolationism in favor of assertive leadership to Keep America First. They do not, of course, supply the appropriate course of action in every case. Foreign policy cannot be prescribed in advance in any detail, for it must always adjust to the circumstances and exigencies of the moment. That is why America still needs statesmen. Republicans won't be able to do the job until they widen their field of vision.