The MAGA Doctrine Page 7
It is impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent [North or South America] without endangering our peace and happiness; nor can anyone believe that our southern brethren, if left to themselves, would adopt it of their own accord. It is equally impossible, therefore, that we should behold such interposition in any form with indifference. If we look to the comparative strength and resources of Spain and those new Governments, and their distance from each other, it must be obvious that she can never subdue them. It is still the true policy of the United States to leave the parties to themselves, in hope that other powers will pursue the same course.
Though the United States itself would proceed to meddle in South American affairs repeatedly, the principle that other world powers should not has stood the test of time, and the United States managed to stay out of world wars for nearly a century after Monroe’s proclamation.
In a further reminder that dealing with other nations in a businesslike fashion can yield better results than warfare, the Monroe Doctrine reached its logical culmination with the peaceful purchase of the Russian territory that is now (oil-rich) Alaska in 1867, not so long ago in the grand historical scheme of things. Some of today’s pundits probably have completely forgotten Russia controlled that region just over 150 years ago and would call for an investigation if they remembered it—yet there were pundits and members of Congress who derided the purchase as (Secretary of State William) Seward’s Folly at the time, thinking the Alaskan wilderness would never even be worth the small amount Seward paid for it—about 120 million in today’s dollars. Russia might control that part of the continent to this day if not for the nineteenth-century push to keep the New World free of the Old.
Arguably the two biggest, most seismic shifts in US foreign policy behavior since the Monroe Doctrine were the shift under Woodrow Wilson toward the United States playing global policeman (at ever-mounting expense to American taxpayers) and Trump, at long last, raising skeptical questions about that role. Hawkish and interventionist foreign policy is one area of tremendous bipartisan support in Congress. The Republican chairman and the Democrat ranking member on the House Foreign Relations Committee are hard to distinguish in their votes when it comes to funding aid abroad or intervening unnecessarily. Though President Trump has not as of this writing completely withdrawn US troops from any of the countries in which they were engaged during the Obama administration, he has moved in that direction in Afghanistan and other arenas and has not deployed troops to any additional theaters—despite the seemingly permanent foreign policy establishment’s endless wish list of places where the United States should intervene, ostensibly to rescue them and all too often merely to throw our weight around without any clear resolution. Our footprint is significantly smaller under Trump in places such as Syria, Afghanistan, and Africa.
Americans don’t shy from fights, even very difficult ones, if they are confident of the moral purpose of the fight and are given some assurance there is a realistic plan for victory. After Vietnam, they became more skeptical, but conservative, patriotic sentiments for three decades thereafter still inclined many Americans to think the more American military interventions, the better. Two decades of inconclusive fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan—and seeing the toll on our friends, relatives, and neighbors in the form of PTSD and lost limbs—has contributed to a change in that attitude among conservatives (even as some Democrats, numbed by a few decades of Clintonite assurances that American troops simply perform “humanitarian interventions” with the blessing of the “international community,” have started sounding like hawks).
There is nothing unpatriotic about staying out of fights that do our nation no good, or ones that have no clear moral purpose. Far from all being “fair in love and war,” one of the most moral principles ever added to the canon of Western thought is the concept of a “just war,” given its most famous formulation by St. Augustine in the early fifth century. He wrote, “But, say they, the wise man will wage just wars . . . for if they were not just he would not wage them, and would therefore be delivered from all wars.” (Rather than revere Augustine for his moral restraint, our era practically bans him as hate speech—Facebook took down one conservative’s post of an Augustine quote saying “all men are hopeless” because they “sin.” Sounds like a valuable reminder to me.)
In contrast to the warrior creeds of some ancient cultures, Augustine, like St. Thomas Aquinas after him, recognized that the goal of all moral military action should be peace. He did not want armies to roam the world looking for territory to seize or subtle social problems to rectify with clumsy weapons.
Compare that deeply moral impulse to worldviews displayed in recent decades by the leaders of either the Democratic Party or, before Trump, the Republican Party. While Trump works to avoid the flare-up of total war with Iran, Mitt Romney, regarded by many of the “Never Trump” establishment Republicans as a voice of moderation and respectability, vowed in the early stages of his failed 2012 presidential campaign to take “military action” against Iran to stop its nuclear program if elected—not merely if a crisis arose, simply if elected. A vote for Romney was in effect a vote for war.
Democrats such as Hillary Clinton offer no real alternative. She backed, among other interventions, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan surge in troops, and, notoriously, the toppling of Qaddafi’s regime in Libya, leading to years of still-ongoing civil war—and horrible though we all agree Qaddafi was, Clinton and Obama are in no position to lecture people on statesmanship and (in Obama’s case) accept a Nobel Peace Prize after bombing a relatively prosperous African nation into a place of terrorist gangs and slave auctions.
There is very little difference when it comes to matters of war-making between the “neoconservative” views of Romney-style Republicans and the “neoliberal” views of Clinton-style Democrats. Both follow in the risky footsteps of Woodrow Wilson, seeing the United States as an almost unerring remaker of a poor and undemocratic world, a giant that can bend the populations of whole nations to its will, for their own good and with little cost. We keep falling into that delusional view of America’s role in the world and paying a terrible price for it.
And they call Donald Trump arrogant?
President Barack Obama and President George W. Bush both long supported the expansion of NATO, allowing small nation-states such as Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia to join. Under diplomatic pressure from the world and even some pressure from his foreign policy team, President Trump finally agreed to Montenegro joining the coalition. Yet his skepticism was publicly known. It is a nation so small that it has only about 2,400 troops and 13 naval vessels, but NATO is treaty-bound to defend any member nation that is under attack.
The possibility of a skirmish between Montenegro and one of its neighbors, including Russia, is all too real. The United States, like all NATO members, would be committed to getting involved militarily against Russia over Montenegro in the event of such a clash—over a nation that most Americans likely can’t find on a map. By contrast, imagine if the United States were attacked by a large world power such as China. God help us if we have to rely on those 2,400 Montenegrin soldiers. Some deals are just bad for the United States, inherently unbalanced. Trump sees that.
In their distinctive ways, both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama embodied the arrogance typical of the foreign policy thinking that preceded Trump, the inheritors of the establishment conservative and establishment liberal traditions, respectively. Each man wanted to improve America’s standing in the world by the criteria of his own philosophy.
Unfortunately, to Bush that meant avenging every wrong occurring in the world, putting America’s stamp on each conflict around the globe as if we could be judge, jury, and all too often executioner for each of the innumerable crimes being committed throughout the world—and hoping along the way that American-style democracy (and American corporate interests) would flourish in the wake of any resulting carnage.
Obama thinks apology is statesmanship, and Bush thinks looking for criminals to fight is. Trump admires strength and tough talk to a degree Obama probably considers uncouth, but he does not believe in using it as indiscriminately as the Bush clan traditionally has.
Trump, unlike virtually every political figure in Washington, is goal-oriented. He is not interested in just signaling his allegiance to some far-distant cause, such as turning the Arab world into modern liberal democracies, great though that would be. He asks himself whether becoming entangled in foreign conflicts, in negotiations or military deployments, will leave America stronger after he’s gone. With too many military quagmires of the past several decades, he knows the answer is either a grim “no” or an endlessly debatable “maybe.” Not good enough. America deserves better—especially the young troops fighting its battles (or worse, fighting other nations’ battles).
It is unconscionable that for decades we’ve expected heroes maimed by American involvement in unresolved conflicts overseas, and the families of those killed in those fights, to accept “We tried” as the best assessment of what was achieved by the fighting. Surveys now show most American soldiers think our recent wars have been unproductive. Maybe they, away from the spin machines of the Washington policy establishment, know what they’re talking about.
Trump did not sound erratic to me in a Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson, shortly after Trump was condemned by many of the usual foreign policy establishment voices—including ones who normally present themselves as advocates of peace—for not attacking Iran over a downed American unmanned drone. He sounded, refreshingly, like a rare politician capable of making commonsense moral judgments, specifically the final judgment about whether to direct retaliatory air power at Iran after hearing from his foreign policy and military advisors:
Before I sent them out, they had to give me everything I wanted to know by seven o’clock. They walked in, they gave me everything but they didn’t tell me how many people would die. How many Iranians—I know a lot of Iranians from New York City, and they’re great people. They’re all great people. We’re all great, right? Iranian or not.
I said, “How many people are going to die?” And they said, “At least 150.” I said, so . . . they shot down an unmanned—not a brand-new exactly thing either, the drone—they shot it down, and we’re going to now kill 150—or many more people, you never know. Once you start doing what we’d do or what they’d do, and nobody does it better than us, you don’t know how many people are going to die.
So I said, “I don’t like that. I don’t like it.” And I stopped it before. We didn’t send them out. You know, there was a little incorrect reporting . . . like we sent them out, and we pulled them.
Trump thoughtfully weighs costs and benefits—moral costs as well as financial ones. Keep in mind that wars are expensive, and the US federal government is already an astonishing $22 trillion in debt. That’s more than the entire US gross domestic product for a year, and Congress shows no interest in cutting spending. How many more wars would the hawks like to add to our tab?
For too long, conservatives not so different in some ways from Trump or from me had an unusual blind spot on the issue of war. In much the same way that liberals treat every domestic program they like as if cost is no object, conservatives of the past, conservatives in the Mitt Romney, Bush, or John McCain mold, have tended to think as if cost is no object once a sufficiently horrible enemy is identified. But cost should be part of our thinking, especially when we can’t fully predict the outcome of a conflict. What sort of regime will replace the one we try to topple? How much blood will be spilled in the process? How long will we be fighting? How long will we be attempting to nation-build after the fighting stops, when we could be building in America?
Recall all those stories you’ve heard about the Pentagon paying $70 for a hammer. That’s not just a side effect of war, as some liberals might like to pretend. It’s the same unavoidable inefficiency that plagues every government agency, whether its mission is domestic or foreign. Whether we conservatives like it or not, all government agencies, even the ones we admire, function a little like socialist countries. Resources get wasted, bureaucracy expands, innovation is rare.
Imagine how that galls a man like Trump who knows that every penny matters—and that every penny government has comes from taxpayers, not any profit-generating activity run by the government itself. Trump hears those stories about $70 hammers and, instead of thinking, “The military is stupid,” the way a Vietnam-era Democrat might, he thinks, “We have to drive a harder bargain. We have to make better deals.” That’s much easier to do in the cool, rational light of peace than in the fog of an unnecessary war.
President Dwight Eisenhower—no hippie but rather a hero of World War II—reduced military spending, and he famously warned the world about the fast-growing power of “the military-industrial complex.” It’s not just an idea paranoid leftists cooked up to bash American pride. That complex is one of many sources of government bloat.
Trump has admirably balanced criticism of some of the reckless military cuts Obama made with praise of the overall goal of cutting the defense budget. He’d like to do it, if he can do so without ever putting Americans in jeopardy as a result. One of the most direct ways to make cuts, of course—a more sweeping way than combing through budgets and bureaucracies—is to reduce the number of wars we’re fighting. He resisted sending more troops and money into the quicksand of the complicated Syrian civil war, and, as he proudly told Carlson in that same interview, he pulled about half our troops out of Afghanistan (after two exhausting decades) and said he would like to remove our troops altogether.
Presidents frequently embrace foreign policy, since the power-hungry can find unlimited power there. Trump has wielded that power sparingly. Trump’s goals are both peace and strength. He knows these things are made harder, not easier, to achieve if we’re at odds simultaneously with Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and some elements in our fickle ally Saudi Arabia. Less conflict is better, not a sign of weakness or inaction.
The press really ought to be grateful we have a president who seems to enjoy lobbing rhetorical bombs on Twitter more than he enjoys ordering men to lob real bombs. Yet the left-leaning press, ostensibly peaceniks, are so knee-jerk in their opposition to Trump, his desire to avoid a war is sufficient to make them support war. I had thought that only Obama had a personality influential enough to make liberals love war, but it appears Trump’s personality has as great an effect on them—except if he’s against it, they’re in favor of it. Obama drones children and gets a Nobel. Trump balks in a very human way at the thought of killing Iranians like the ones he knows back in New York City—Muslim immigrants, mind you!—and the press tries to make him out to be a wimp.
The fickleness of the left is startling. Code Pink used to march on Washington, urging President Bush to end Middle Eastern wars. Where are they now that Trump is trying to do so? Where is Michael Moore? Where are the drunk, washed-up Hollywood stars who screamed, “Make love not war”? Why is the left now so silent when this president calls for less intervention? Why is the left missing in action when this president calls for an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Syria? If you have liberal friends, ask them if they support ending wars only under Democrat administrations.
Most Americans aren’t falling for it, and I
don’t think any of them are sitting at home now regretting that they haven’t been sent off to march into Tehran. The young in particular have seen the toll of protracted warfare on their peers. One of the strange side effects of improvements in battlefield medicine is that there are more wounded and maimed survivors left alive to tell their tales than in many past wars. War leaves lingering and visible effects on American communities, and increasingly, people on both sides of the political spectrum are willing to say there had better be a very, very good reason, not just the usual abstract speeches about democracy and freedom, for wading into more combat.
For the right, the protracted wars begun under Bush are an even bigger change than they have been for the left. The left always had an anti-war faction. The right is still waking up to the fact that the things it truly values—such as community and civility and commerce—get blown to pieces in war along with everything else. So does America’s ability to focus on its own domestic problems. Trump knows his first duty is to this nation, not the ones he may or may not be able to refashion according to our liking overseas. The desire to remake foreign nations on the cheap is as unrealistic as the desire to manage the whole domestic economy through socialism, and we should resist both impulses.
But for many people, including more than a few elderly news editors, the right/left paradigm from the Vietnam War era still dominates. They keep thinking of the left as the lovers of peace even when they’re making war, and they keep thinking that a conservative in the Oval Office means we’re on the brink of a complete breakdown in international relations, perhaps followed by nuclear war. They can’t admit we have one of the most peace-loving presidents in recent American history on our side now.