A Republic, Not an Empire:
A Leftist's Defense of Pat Buchanan's Bookby Stephen C. Preston
(originally published in the Stony Brook Press, 10/13/99)Author's Note: I do not endorse Pat Buchanan's views on issues outside the scope of this book. I have read some of his articles, and have found some of his opinions to flatly contradict what is in this book. Many of his positions are offensive to me, and should be offensive to anyone. Yet, I think the debate that the book has ignited is one that should not die soon, and therefore I intend in this article to only discuss Buchanan's views within the book. I think the ideas on foreign policy are valuable enough that they should transcend whatever odious qualities the messenger has.
Pat Buchanan's recent book, "A Republic, Not an Empire", has been one of the most controversial books in recent history, judging from the talk shows and the opinion columns. Well, that's not quite accurate: "controversial" implies opinions on both sides, and there have been very few defenders of the book in most media.
The Presidential candidates have taken their shots at it. Somebody read John McCain a portion of an excerpt of a summary of the part dealing with World War II, and he decided there was "no place in the Republican party" for Buchanan, then complained about other candidates "continuing to appease Buchanan." Buchanan = Hitler, get it?
McCain, of course, has little else to talk about, now that we're not at war with Serbia anymore. Six months ago, it was much easier for him to get attention, by getting on talk shows and crying for war: "Bigger, harder, faster, more!" The talk show hosts, then as now, respond with: "Oh yes, John, yes! Baby, don't stop!"
So What's This Book All About?
The book is a historical justification of Buchanan's foreign policy. Its central premise is that America is "replicating, with alarming exactitude, the course that brought the British Empire to ruin... From arrogance and hubris, to assertion of global hegemony, to imperial overstretch, to trumpeting new 'crusades'..."
The main point is that all of the large empires have fallen through wars: wars which quite often were caused by arrogance and carelessness, and could have been avoided by either side. He ultimately prescribes a list of recommendations, all of which share the primary purpose of avoiding conflict. For example, withdrawing troops from bases all over the world, rewriting mutual defense treaties to remove the obligations of automatic war, and generally taking advantage of diplomacy and negotiation in any situation where the U.S. is not directly threatened with attack.
This has led Buchanan—almost alone among the media elite—to criticize both Bush's policy ("neoconservatism", the embodiment of which might be the Iraq war) and Clinton's policy ("Wilsonian globalism", especially as represented by the Serbian war).
Now in modern America, you can choose your excuse for murder, whether for "love" (as Clinton) or for "money" (as Bush). But if you choose not to murder, the screech of the war hawks is, "Pussy!" (or the more polite euphemism, "Isolationist!").
So Buchanan's book is a defense of what is essentially his antiwar view, with the intention of refuting the "isolationist" charge. His point is that isolationism implies a lack of involvement in foreign affairs; his view (he calls it "nationalism") is that America should engage with foreign countries, while strenuously avoiding conflict. He quotes Charles Beard as saying, "It is not: Shall we Love Europe? ... It is: How can this country avoid war?"
The book is mostly filled with examples from American history of diplomacy that avoided war, as well as the failures of diplomacy that brought war. This makes it an extremely informative book, whose achievement is not just to convey a political attitude, but to awaken debate on topics that have been (and remain) taboo in the mainstream press. It provides a useful antidote to the usual "war-to-war" history, in which periods of peace are typically dull, and skipped over as quickly as possible. Justin Raimondo, of the popular website http://www.antiwar.com, has described it as a "manifesto for the new antiwar movement", despite its flaws (which I'll discuss below).
"Isolationist" America: 1787 - 1898
The beginning of the "American Empire" is generally traced to the Spanish-American war of 1898. Before this, American policy, though expansionist, was not imperialist. The distinction in Buchanan's mind is that expansionist America intended to conquer new land and settle it with Americans, as distinct from conquering new lands and exploiting a currently existing population. In particular, expansionism relied on the fact that the lands to the west were mostly empty; the conquest became imperialism once it subjected a fully-existing population with its own culture and customs to American rule. Of course, the problem here is that the western half of the continent was not empty, and the horrible crimes committed against the native population are not mentioned at all in the book, and the Indians are only referred to as hostile and British-supported.
Buchanan defends the war of 1812, which was started by Madison in an attempt to seize Canada from the British while Britain was occupied fighting Napoleon, as a "just and righteous cause". He justifies Andrew Jackson's actions of war against Spain, in the seizure of Florida. He similarly defends the conquest of Texas and the Southwest from Mexico in Polk's Mexican-American war of 1845-1848 under the doctrine of "Manifest Destiny". His general principle is that "these lands were contiguous, largely empty, easily defensible with a small army, and involved no entanglement with the great powers of Europe". Expansion to fill the entire continent was justified, Buchanan believes, by their benefits to the population.
Yet also, it was justified by the fact that America did not need to fight very hard to obtain these lands. The country had its goals, and accomplished them, sometimes with "duplicitous and ruthless" techniques, but still showing the restraint of a nation that knows it might lose. And still, America's intent even when fighting these wars was not "unconditional surrender", as it might be now. At the end of the Mexican War, for example, even after occupying Mexico City, Polk only claimed the northern portion of land, and paid the government of Mexico several million dollars for it. Thus Buchanan's argument for the distinction with later imperial policy.
But more time is spent on the wars America did not fight. For example, when Americans went to France in 1797 to negotiate an agreement after French seizures of American ships, they were insulted by demands of a bribe before negotiations could begin. When they returned, cries of, "Millions for defense, but not a penny for tribute!" resounded. President Adams authorized the seizure of French ships in retaliation, but soon sent negotiating teams to France, and the crisis was defused before it became the full war that many were demanding. Adams secured peace, even at the cost of his re-election.
The Fruits of Empire: 1898-1918
Buchanan argues that after the wars of conquest, America was a completed nation by 1869, having a (mostly) contiguous land mass, with little remaining "empty" land left on the continent. Thus the decision in 1898 to go to war with Spain, with the purpose of seizing Spain's colonies, was the first step on the road to empire. The first territory the U.S. annexed, to wide approval in the country, was the Phillippines. The Filipinos would soon revolt, and the U.S. quite brutally crushed their rebellion. This was the first step on the road to empire. Although the Filipino rebellion prevented America from also annexing Cuba, and perhaps resulted in the later anti-imperialist opinion of the nation before the world wars, the desire to rule over foreign peoples would recur, and each time become easier for the American republic to rationalize.
When World War I began, the American public had little interest. The British were adamantly trying to get the U.S. involved, with some extremely effective anti-German propaganda. But still, most Americans saw no difference between the aims of Britain and those of Germany. What eventually got the U.S. involved was German violation of American principles of neutrality: The U.S. was loaning money and selling weapons to Britain, profiting from the war and violating its official stance of neutrality. Germany decided to fire on American ships, and the first deaths of Americans led Wilson to declare war.
With the eventual Allied victory, Wilson and the other Allied leaders partitioned Germany, divided the Austro-Hungarian Empire between Britain and France, and ordered Germany to pay full reparations. Buchanan revels in the numerous contradictions between Wilson's liberal idealism (supporting the self-determination of peoples, establishing the League of Nations to fairly handle disputes, etc.) and the deals he agreed to, again and again, for the sake of the British and French Empires. It was not long before Americans became disenchanted with the whole thing, and realized the entire war had been a sham. The Versailles Treaty which ended the war would eventually be blamed for everything that happened later, and the view of the war as a blunder and travesty of justice would continue to this day. In this evaluation, Buchanan's detailed criticisms of the war are hardly controversial.
World War II
The most controversial part of the book is clearly the part dealing with the Second World War. Buchanan's opinion here is that Germany was not a threat to Western Europe in 1939, and if war had not been declared by England and France, Germany would have moved east in its goal to conquer Russia. Had this happened, the Nazis and Bolsheviks would have fought and weakened each other, leaving the victor in no position to attack Western Europe for several years; by this time, England and France could have built up their armaments to make their countries less susceptible to attack. The U.S. could have entered later, or not at all, since Hitler not only had no plans to attack the U.S., but had no capability of doing so either.
This view of the situation, while held by many historians, is rejected by many politicians and political commentators. This makes sense, perhaps: the more one understands history and the multiplicity of interpretations, the less likely one is to pursue a political career, for fear of making matters worse. Thus, only the ignorant do not fear their own power.
To understand Buchanan's interpretation of events, we must understand what Germany's foreign policy goals were. They were not "world domination"; although Hitler surely dreamed of such a thing, he certainly had no plan to achieve it. His immediate goals in the late 1930s were to reverse the Versailles treaty, in order to regain territory from Czechoslovakia and Poland. What must be understood is that the British, on the whole, thought Hitler's plans for regaining German territory were quite reasonable. They regretted the Versailles treaty and wanted it dismantled, believing that the Germans had been cheated. Although they disagreed with Hitler's tactics, they thought his cause was just.
What should also be understood is that while Hitler's genocide of the Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs in Germany was monstrously evil, and perhaps could have been perpetrated by no other individual, his foreign policy was unexceptional among Germans. Any other German leader would have done more or less the same things with neighboring countries. This doesn't make his foreign policy right, but it must also be understood that the Holocaust was not what motivated most people to oppose Hitler; it was rather the foreign policy which virtually all Germans agreed upon. When we argue over whether the United States should have entered the war to save the Jews from the Holocaust, we are creating a debate that never existed. Had Hitler not tried to expand the German frontier, no nation would have been willing to fight for the Jews. Even when the war was eventually declared, it was not at all fought for the Jews. This is morally wrong, but a historical fact, largely undisputed.
Hitler did not expect his invasion of Poland to provoke war with Britain and France, despite their war guarantee to Poland. (They had violated similar treaties before.) Hitler, in fact, was not prepared to fight Britain or France at the time, and Britain and France were not prepared to defend themselves. There was a standoff at the Maginot Line for a year, then after France was conquered, a standoff across the English Channel. By 1940, Britain had won the air force battle with Germany, and the tide was already beginning to turn. Yet, had Britain and France waited until Germany was a direct threat to themselves, they would have had time to rearm, they would have been better able to defend themselves and the countries of Western Europe from the Nazis. Hitler's explicit plan was always to go to war with the Soviet Union, and by the time that war was over, even if he had won, he would have been much weaker, not stronger. Thus he would have been easier to defeat, when the time came.
The question when dealing with World War II is not (at least in Buchanan's book) whether we should have gone to war in 1941, after Hitler declared war on the U.S. Of course, Buchanan says, at that point war should have been fought. But the common point of view among the armchair warmongers is that not only was it right to go to war with Hitler, but we should have done so long before Hitler actually declared war upon us. And it is this which makes the World War II debate relevant today (in case you were wondering): because so many people think we should have known better back in 1939 or earlier, we should have gone to war then. And because they regret our delayed entry, they now advocate war against any small-time authoritarian who might aspire to regional domination, in the hopes of stopping a future Hitler. It is the warmongers who make World War II relevant again and again, by declaring Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and Slobodan Milosevic to all be the equivalent of young Hitlers. And it is because they (and the American public) do not understand the real issues at stake, that they do not question whether a comparison with Hitler is a suitable justification for war. They hear the name "Hitler", and they turn off their critical reasoning skills, and cry, "No more Munich! Down with the dictator! Negotiation is appeasement!" But the better we understand the real situation and the debate that went on, the better able we are to see through this irresponsible bloodlust.
Summary
Although Buchanan's foreign policy stance becomes much less reasonable during the Cold War (he advocates the Korea, Vietnam, and even Grenada wars, and does not understand the contradictions between this advocacy and his ideological positions; perhaps this is his own ego, as a former Nixon/Reagan staffer), his current recommendations are very reasonable.
What I think makes this book so valuable to the war and foreign policy debates is the fact that many of Buchanan's positions stem from nationalism and practicality, yet end up being quite similar to the antiwar and anti-imperialist positions of the left. It has been a long time since any prominent right-winger had a real antiwar message for modern political situations, and I think the antiwar left would be foolish to ignore the large numbers of people who will listen to this message when conservatives say it. The book, if it successfully unites conservatives with the principled and pacifist left, in a new single-issue "America First"-type of antiwar movement, could be, as Raimondo hopes, a real manifesto for antiwar Americans.