Foreign Policy Research Institute A Nation Must Think Before it Acts Conservative Opinions on U.S. Foreign Policy

Conservative Opinions on U.S. Foreign Policy

Since the end of the Cold War, American politics have hinged for the most part on domestic issues, while foreign and national security issues have been, at best, an occasional distraction. Even the recent war over Kosovo failed to electrify public opinion or elicit strong responses from Capitol Hill. What is more, the once familiar political coalitions that characterized the debate over American foreign and defense policies have all but dissolved, with the result that “strange bedfellows” find themselves in agreement on such issues as relations with China, NATO expansion, and how much the nation should spend on defense. So it is that conservative pundit and presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan and liberal House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), for instance, both oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), advocate tougher restrictions on immigration, and denounce the Clinton administration’s accommodation of Beijing. Such apparent paradoxes are not at all new in U.S. diplomatic history, however. President Reagan’s foreign policy itself brought together an odd coalition of supporters, composed of fiscal and cultural conservatives, neoconservatives, Kissingerian realists, and centrists of both parties. To be sure, the cresting Soviet power of the late 1970s was the driving catalyst for that alliance, while the lack of a hegemonic international threat today helps to explain the absence of a strong internationalist consensus. The result has been that a Democratic administration has escaped strong opposition at home despite apparent blunders and reversals of course in foreign policy, while Republicans have been incapable of rallying around alternative conceptions of America’s proper role in the world. In late 1996, for instance, Foreign Affairs published two competing “conservative” foreign and defense policy directions for the Republican Party. The initial article by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, both neoconservatives, argued for an expansive vision of American foreign and defense policy, while the response by Kim Holmes and John Hillen, both conservatives, offered a more modest, yet assertive, position. Since these two articles appeared, the debate within conservative foreign and defense policy circles has, if anything, intensified. The recent events in Kosovo only sharpened the rhetorical battle lines, as conservatives in support of armed intervention against Yugoslavia were either heralded as muscular humanitarians or derided as crusaders, and those opposed either lauded as wise men or ridiculed as isolationists.(n3) Can self-styled conservatives hammer out a coherent foreign policy platform in advance of the presidential election? If so, will it matter?…