The Folk Who Live on the Hill

National Interest, The, Winter, 1999 by James Kitfield

WHEN Theodore Roosevelt ushered in the American Century as the nation's youngest president in 1901, he promptly rallied the Republican Party behind his unique brand of foreign affairs activism. In short order, the former Rough Rider and hero of the Spanish-American War put down insurrection in the Philippines, abetted a revolution in Panama that led to U.S. acquisition of the Panama Canal, and won the Nobel Peace Price for mediating the quarrel between Russia and Japan. In 1907 he dispatched the Great White Fleet on a cruise around the world. An America in the "prime of our lusty youth", Roosevelt proclaimed, would "speak softly and carry a big stick" in world affairs.

At the end of the twentieth century, with American power and influence ascendant to a degree unimaginable in Teddy Roosevelt's time, emissaries from a far different Republican Party called a Capitol Hill press conference to allege presidential malfeasance. This time it was not campaign finance irregularities, personal indiscretions or technology transfers that were denounced by Senators Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Craig Thomas (R-Wyo.) and Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho). What irked the three Republicans was, rather, the discovery that the President of the United States had been spending too much money on trips to faraway places like China, Africa and Chile.

When queried about their own official travels, Thomas and Craig exhibited a disdain for the world beyond America's borders that is increasingly echoed in Republican ranks. Both boasted through staff that they had ventured out of the country only twice in the previous two years. This despite the fact that Thomas is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and Craig is a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee with jurisdiction over foreign operations, foreign aid and defense.

The press conference was revealing, too, as political theater. That three Republican senators thought there were political points to be scored by criticizing the travel budget of the leader of the sole remaining superpower says much about the mood of the Republican Party today. Indeed, theirs was but the latest shrug in a string of gestures of indifference made by Republicans, who seem rapidly to be tiring of the burdens that attend America's status as lone superpower. After refusing to support U.S. involvement in the Kosovo conflict, which a number of prominent Republicans dubbed "Mr. Clinton's war", many in the GOP began espousing an anti-interventionist doctrine that would preclude U.S. military action save when a narrowly defined set of vital interests is threatened.

Proposed Republican cuts in next year's foreign affairs budget would abdicate U.S. commitments to the Middle East peace process, slash funding for the National Endowment for Democracy, and abandon a program to dismantle Russian nuclear weapons. Republican leaders have refused to pay back dues to the United Nations for so long that the United States is in danger of losing its vote in the General Assembly, where Republicans had left U.S. interests unrepresented for a year by holding up the nomination of UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke.

Despite the fact that a Republican serves as secretary of defense, congressional indifference to national security matters extends to the Pentagon as well. Uniformed leaders who once counted congressional Republicans as their most reliable boosters were shaken by recent Republican-led efforts to kill the air force's next generation F-22 fighter plane; to pass a tax cut that would have reduced military spending by nearly $600 billion over the next decade; to shutter the army's School of the Americas; and to slash funding for the production of a theater-based missile defense system. Republican leaders have also continually blocked efforts by the Pentagon in recent years to close obsolete military bases and production lines in order to save desperately needed funds. And in a move that echoed one of the most infamous roll calls in history--the 1941 vote in which a majority of congressional Republicans refused to support military conscription--the Republicanled House recently voted 232 to 187 to stop requiring yo ung Americans to register for the draft.

What accounts for this transformation of a party that not so long ago promoted itself as a champion of muscular internationalism? Explanations include the retirement of an aging cadre of internationalists within the party; the ascendance of a generation of Republican lawmakers with minimal interest in foreign and defense matters and an instinctive aversion to big government; an American public largely indifferent to the world around it; and, finally, a deeply held animus toward Bill Clinton. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and long-time Senate Armed Services Committee member, discerns an ominous current in Republican thinking. As McCain noted,

Partly out of dislike and distrust of President Clinton, and an understandable feeling that his foreign policy has been conducted on an ad hoc basis, I am concerned by what I see as a growing isolationism in the Republican Party.... Fewer and fewer members of Congress today have any real interest in national security issues, and they don't appreciate that we live in a less dangerous but far less predictable world.