Can the GOP get realist?
Today, I attended an absorbing yet rather downbeat Nixon Center discussion on “the future of the Republican party and its foreign policy.” Almost all the panelists and attendees agreed, with varying degrees of gloominess, that the chances of the GOP reformulating a coherent foreign policy looked bleak. There was lots of first-class brainpower in the room, and we heard lots of sensible denunciations of ideological internationalist crusades, but nobody seemed able to articulate a conceptually lucid, right-wing realist strategy that might have political traction.
Jacob Heilbrunn, senior editor of the National Interest (the Nixon’s Center’s publication) and a TAC contributor, began by saying that Obama, a formidable political opponent, had pushed Republicans into an impossible position on foreign-policy issues by seizing the realist initiative.
Dov Zakheim, vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton and a former official in the Reagan and Bush administrations, tried to be more optimistic. He said that the Republican Party could cultivate a respectable “loyal opposition” center-ground approach, supporting with the Democrats when they supported the national interest and setting them straight when they did not. He agreed, however, that the new administration’s had been “picking off” rational conservative foreign-policy voices from the GOP fold.
Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, focused on the new administration’s mishandled overtures to the East. He excoriated the diplomatic bungling of recent months: Biden’s Israel gaffe; Obama’s snubbing of Russian hospitality; and Hillary Clinton’s “incompetent moralising” towards most of the world. (Simes seemed so outraged at Biden’s folly that he could not bring himself to say his name, referring only to “dis man, der vice president” in his gravelly Russian accent.)
Everybody enjoyed laughing at misguided Democratic do-goodery, and there was a shared sense that Republicans could profit from adopting a realist response whenever the Dems got carried away in their dreamy utopianism. This was the Nixon Center, after all. But nobody seemed certain as to how exactly they might push the party in that direction, or whether, if the party did take such a course, they could sell themselves as realists to the public. It will be very hard – and in the short term impossible — for a party that brought Americans the Bush Doctrine, Iraq, and the wider disaster of the War on Terror to pass themselves off as sober ambassadors of common sense.
Freddy Gray wrote:
“Almost all the panelists and attendees agreed, with varying degrees of gloominess, that the chances of the GOP reformulating a coherent foreign outlook looked bleak.”
Mr. Gray, can we assume that you mean it was agreed that as a practical *political* matter the GOP’s prospects looked bleak? Or do you mean to say that it was agreed that there was some *intellectual* problem in formulating a “coherent foreign outlook”?
And another question concerning your comment that “nobody seemed certain as to how exactly they might push the party in that [realist] direction…”: By any chance did the name Ron Paul come up at all? Or Pat Buchanan? Or Phil Giraldi? Or Leon Hadar?
If not, gee, you gotta wonder about the reading habits of those in the room, no?
I think finding the money to maintain our bloated empire is the “dreamy utopianism”. This delusion definitely crosses party lines.
The way the GOP does this is simple but hard. It has to admit the total idiocy of the past eight years and announce a unified policy that is spelled out in terms that all citizens can understand. That policy needs to be both nationalist and limited, focused on concrete American interests. There shall be no special relationships and no crusades in aid of suffering natives.
This policy succeeds only through ruthless attack on the motives and patriotism of those who would spill American blood for their pet causes and foreign paymasters. It also requires an effective instrument of direct communication with the public.
The Republicans lack the courage and cohesion to do this. And that is the problem.
Tom B,
I think that the first answer is … both: it was agreed that the GOP’s foreign policy posed an intellectual problem and a concomitant practical, political one.
Ron Paul was mentioned as the only Republican presidential candidate who had offered anything like a realistic foreign policy. Buchanan, Giraldi, and Hadar were not.
“Ron Paul was mentioned as the only Republican presidential candidate who had offered anything like a realistic foreign policy.”
Then I imagine the discussion quickly changed to something else. The GOP won’t willingly adopt a non-interventionist position without complete upheavel from within. Too many special interests are satisfied with the American Empire. Unless they start listening to RP a wee bit, they’re doomed and Obama will get a second term.
Amen, Patrick.