Getting the GOP's Groove Back
How to Bridge the Republican Foreign Policy Divide
By Bret Stephens (Deputy Editorial Page Editor and Foreign Affairs Columnist at The Wall Street Journal)
March/April 2013
It is the healthy habit of partisans on the losing side of a U.S. presidential election to spend some time reflecting on the reasons for their defeat. And it is the grating habit of partisans on the winning side to tell the losers how they might have done better. Most of their advice is self-serving, none of it is solicited, and little of it is ever heeded. Yet still people pile on.
So it has been following Mitt Romney's defeat by President Barack Obama in last November's election. On domestic policy, pundits have instructed Republicans to moderate their positions on social issues and overcome their traditional opposition to higher taxes. On foreign policy, they are telling them to abandon their alleged preference for military solutions over diplomatic ones, as well as their reflexive hostility to multilateral institutions, their Cold War mentality toward Russia, their "denialism" on climate change, their excessive deference to right-wing Israelis, and so on. Much of this advice is based on caricature, and the likelihood of any of it having the slightest impact on the GOP's leadership or rank and file is minimal: the United States does not have a competitive two-party system so that one party can define for the other the terms of reasonable disagreement.
Put aside, then, fantasies about saving the GOP from itself or restoring the statesmanlike ways of George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, or Dwight Eisenhower (all of whom were derided as foreign policy dunces or extremists when they held office). Instead, take note of the more consequential foreign policy debate now taking shape within the heart of the conservative movement itself. This is the debate between small-government and big-military conservatives. Until recently, the two camps had few problems traveling together. Yet faced with the concrete political choices raised by last year's budget sequester -- which made large cuts in nondefense discretionary spending contingent on equally large cuts in the Pentagon's budget -- the coalition has begun to show signs of strain.
On the one side, Republican leaders such as Senator John McCain of Arizona have effectively conceded that higher tax rates are a price worth paying to avoid further defense cuts. On the other, one finds politicians such as Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who, when asked in 2010 about what government programs should get cut, said, "There's not a government program that shouldn't be under scrutiny, and that begins with the Department of Defense." However one may feel about these differences, it is important to understand each side as it understands itself. Then, perhaps, it might be possible to see how the differences can be bridged.
LAND OF LIBERTY -- OR LIBERATORS?
For big-military conservatives, a supremely powerful U.S. military isn't just vital to the national interest; it defines what the United States is. Part of this stance might owe to circumstantial factors, such as a politician's military background or large military constituency. But it is also based on an understanding of the United States as a liberator -- a country that won its own freedom and then, through the possession and application of overwhelming military might, won and defended the freedom of others, from Checkpoint Charlie to the demilitarized zone on the Korean Peninsula.
This is a heroic view of the United States' purpose in the world -- and an expensive one. It implies that if freedom isn't being actively advanced in the world, it risks wobbling to a standstill and even falling down, like a rider peddling a bicycle too slowly. It is also a view that is not unfriendly to at least some parts of a big-government agenda and certainly not to the de facto industrial policy that is the Pentagon's procurement system.
On the other side are those conservatives who, while not deprecating the United States' historic role as a liberator, mainly cherish its domestic tradition of liberty -- above all, liberty from the burdens of excessive federal debt, taxation, regulation, and intrusion. These Republicans are by no means hostile to the military, and most believe it constitutes one of the few truly legitimate functions of government. Still, they tend to view the Pentagon as another overgrown and wasteful government bureaucracy. Some have also drawn the lesson from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that well-meaning attempts to reengineer foreign societies will succumb to the law of unintended consequences just as frequently as well-meaning attempts to use government to improve American society do. Far from being a heroic view of the United States' role, theirs is a more prudential, and perhaps more parochial, one. It also contains a sneaking sympathy for Obama's refrain that the United States needs to do less nation building abroad and more at home, even if these conservatives differ sharply with the president on the matter of means.
The differences between these two groups are ones that most Republicans would gladly paper over for the party's long-term political good. Republicans fear that Obama's ultimate political ambition is to break the back of the modern GOP, and the defense budget is the ultimate wedge issue to do the job. Republican leaders understand this and will do what they can to hold their party together. Small-government conservatives don't want to turn the Republican Party into a rump faction, capable of winning elections at the congressional or state level but locked out of the presidency. And big-military conservatives aren't eager to become an appendage of big-government liberalism, in the way that Blue Dog Democrats were instruments of the Reagan agenda in the 1980s.
Yet the philosophical differences between the two camps run deep -- and may soon run deeper. Ask a big-military conservative to name the gravest long-term threat to U.S. security, and his likely answer will be Iran, or perhaps China. These countries are classic strategic adversaries, for which military calculations inevitably play a large role. By contrast, ask a small-government conservative to name the chief threat, and he will probably say Europe, which has now become a byword among conservatives for everything they fear may yet beset the United States: too much unionization, low employment rates, permanently high taxes, politically entrenched beneficiaries of state largess, ever-rising public debts, and so on.
In the ideal conservative universe, avoiding a European destiny and facing up to the threat of Iran and other states would not be an either-or proposition. As most conservatives see it, supply-side tax cuts spur economic growth, reduce the overall burden of debt, increase federal tax revenues, and thus fund defense budgets adequate for the United States' global strategic requirements. This policy prescription may look like a fantasy, but it has worked before. "Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget -- just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits." That was President John F. Kennedy speaking to the Economic Club of New York in 1962. Following the Kennedy tax cut (enacted in 1964), federal tax receipts roughly doubled over six years and military spending rose by some 25 percent, yet defense spending as a share of GDP rose only modestly and never went above ten percent.
Kennedy's words could have just as easily been spoken by Reagan. The problem for conservatives, however, is that neither Kennedy nor Reagan is president today. In the world as it is, Obama has been handily reelected, Democrats maintain control of the Senate, tax rates are going up on higher incomes, and the Supreme Court has turned back the central legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act. What Republicans might be able to achieve politically remains to be seen, although it will be limited. But it is not too soon for the party to start thinking about how it might resolve some of its internal policy tensions, including on foreign policy.
Henry Kissinger once observed that U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century was characterized by "disastrous oscillations between overcommitment and isolation." The oscillation was especially pronounced for Republicans in the first half of the century -- from President Theodore Roosevelt's Great White Fleet of 1907-9 to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes' Washington Naval Treaty in 1922 and from Senator Robert Taft's isolationism before World War II to Senator Arthur Vandenberg's 1945 conversion to internationalism -- although the internal differences became much less pronounced in the second half. Now that the pendulum appears to be swinging again, Republicans have an interest in seeing that it doesn't do so wildly.
How to do that? Every type of persuasion -- moral, political, policy -- carries with it the temptation of extremes. Contrary to the stereotype, big-military conservatives (along with neoconservatives) do not want to bomb every troublesome country into submission, or rebuild the U.S. armed forces to their 1960s proportions, or resume the Cold War with Russia. Nor is the problem that big-military conservatives somehow fail to appreciate the limits of American power. Of course they appreciate the limits -- but they also understand that the United States is nowhere near reaching them. Even at the height of the Iraq war, U.S. military spending constituted a smaller percentage of GDP (5.1 percent in 2008) than it did during the final full year of the Carter administration (six percent in 1980). The real limits of American power haven't been seriously tested since World War II.
Instead, the problem with big-military conservatives is that they fail to appreciate the limits of American will -- of Washington's capacity to generate broad political support for military endeavors that since 9/11 have proved not only bloody and costly but also exceedingly lengthy. Taking a heroic view of America's purpose, these conservatives are tempted by a heroic view of the American public, emphasizing its willingness to pay any price and bear any burden. Yet there is a wide gap between what the United States can achieve abroad, given unlimited political support, and what Americans want to achieve, as determined by the ebb and flow of the political tides in a democracy innately reluctant to wage war.
Small-government conservatives have their own temptations when it comes to foreign policy. At the far extreme, there is the insipid libertarianism of Ron Paul, the former Texas representative, who has claimed that Marine detachments guarding U.S. embassies count as examples of military overstretch. Paul showed remarkable strength in the last GOP presidential primary and has, in his son Rand Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky, a politically potent heir.
Most small-government conservatives aren't about to jump off the libertarian cliff: they may want to reduce the United States' footprint in the world, at least for the time being, but they don't want to erase it completely. Yet the purism that tends to drive the small-government view of the world also has a way of obscuring its vision. "If we don't take defense spending seriously, it undermines our credibility on other spending issues," Mick Mulvaney, the conservative South Carolina congressman, told Politico in December.
The heart of the United States' spending issue, however, has increasingly little to do with the defense budget (which constituted 19 percent of overall federal outlays in 2012, down from 49 percent in 1962) and increasingly more to do with entitlement programs (62 percent in 2012, up from 31 percent half a century ago). Just as the Obama administration cannot hope to erase the federal deficit by raising taxes on the rich but wants to do so anyway out of a notion of social justice, small-government conservatives cannot hope to contain runaway spending through large cuts to the defense budget. But ideological blinders get in the way.
More broadly, small-government conservatives are too often tempted to treat small government as an end in itself, not as a means to achieve greater opportunity and freedom. They make a fetish of thrift at the expense of prosperity. They fancy that a retreat from the United States' global commitments could save lives without storing trouble. The record of the twentieth century tells a different story. Republicans should not wish to again become the party of such isolationists as Taft and Charles Lindbergh.
I think we all know that it will be mostly political and minimally strategic. Even with the driven members of the Tea Party Caucus pushing for slash and burn, members will move to protect programs and policies that would, if cut, effect their chances at re-election. There is a history of useless equipment development programs living on like zombies even though the military side of the bureaucracy show time and time again that there is no need, or the concept doesn't work.
