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Are New Republican War Skeptics Really Moving In The Right Direction?

Jim Antle answers my criticisms of recent Republican and conservative critics of the war in Afghanistan: I’d only offer two rejoinders. The first is that any successful political movement is going to include its share of opportunists. In the 1990s, the last time conservative Republicans opposed wars and nation-building exercises in large numbers, you saw […]

Jim Antle answers my criticisms of recent Republican and conservative critics of the war in Afghanistan:

I’d only offer two rejoinders. The first is that any successful political movement is going to include its share of opportunists. In the 1990s, the last time conservative Republicans opposed wars and nation-building exercises in large numbers, you saw a mix of people who were genuinely trying to move the right’s foreign policy in a less interventionist direction (Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, John Hostettler), partisan Republicans who simply disliked “Democrat wars,” GOP members of Congress trying to preserve their legislative power agaisnt a Democratic executive, and hawks who didn’t think Haiti and Kosovo were the best use of our military in light of other threats. That kind of coalition-building is necessary in practical politics.

Second, full-throated non-interventionism is not going to be the majority position among conservative Republicans in the foreseeable future. Reintroducing ideas like costs, unintended consequences, the intractability of various foreign conflicts, and even the level of restraint anticipated by the Powell-Weinberger Doctrine would all be steps in the right direction for conservatives who reject the idea of benevolent global hegemony.

These are sound points. Successful political movements do not require universal agreement on every policy, and the more successful a movement is the more opportunists it is likely to acquire. Such movements also require compromise and an ability to recognize the limited appeal of a purist message. Bringing a large number of Republicans around to being very reluctant to start wars and to use force by having them focus on the long term consequences of such actions would undeniably represent an improvement over the status quo, and it would create an additional obstacle that interventionists would have to overcome when they try to launch a new war.

However, it seems to me that a successful movement, if it is going to be an enduring movement, also requires some shared agenda beyond agreeing on the one policy it opposes. Even if we all agreed that it is now imperative to oppose the war in Afghanistan (and I don’t agree), a tactical alliance with impatient Iran hawks and reflexive opponents of Obama would last only as long as Afghanistan delayed confronting Iran or as long as Obama was still in office. For the sake of argument, let’s say that all non-interventionists cut new “antiwar” Republicans a lot more slack, stop pointing out their flaws, and encourage and support them in the future. Are they in turn going to become less aggressive towards Iran or Russia or whatever their preferred target of vilification happens to be that week? Probably not, because they believe those are the “real” threats we are ignoring while we are preoccupied elsewhere. That strikes me as a bad deal. So I am generally wary of war criticism that says, “We are being distracted from the real threat over there!” In the 1990s, one of the principal “real” threats opponents of Balkan interventions kept citing was Iraq, and within the first two years of a Republican administration the U.S. was invading Iraq. In exchange for a few years of largely ineffective, half-hearted resistance to Balkan adventurism and nation-building, the U.S. plunged into the worst foreign policy debacle of the last generation.

Many of my non-interventionist friends see the new Republican skepticism about nation-building as a bridge that can bring hawkish conservatives more towards our view, but what keeps worrying me is that the same people who now find nation-building wasteful and futile never seem to think that far ahead when it comes to starting wars that ruin whole nations. Instead of a recognition of limits on American power, impatience with nation-building (or even with the most minimal reconstruction efforts) seems just as often to be an unwillingness to take full responsibility for the decision to use force. While this reflects a desire to minimize costs to the U.S., which is a good start, this perversely makes the decision to use force easier and less politically risky, and that in turn tends to make interventions more frequent rather than less. Becoming more conscious of the costs of prolonged wars doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be more reluctance to use force next time. All that it does guarantee is that there will be less patience with any attempted reconstruction afterwards.

Jim was writing his original article on the Tea Party, so it is appropriate to consider the recent forays that Tea Party-aligned politicians and organizations into foreign policy debates. The Tea Party Caucus in the House could conceivably be one of the building blocks of the movement Jim describes, so it was unfortunate that almost half (22) of the 46-member caucus were among the co-sponsors of H.Res. 1553 the other day. (Via Scoblete) As you will remember, this is the resolution expressing support for an Israeli strike on Iran. Many other Republicans not identified with the Tea Party co-sponsored the resolution as well, but self-identified Tea Partiers among House Republicans disproportionately supported this resolution.

Getting out of a perceived quagmire to plunge the nation into a firestorm seems like a very large step in the wrong direction, but this is what Chaffetz would have us do, and many members of the Tea Party Caucus aren’t all that interested in the first part. Opposing the war in Afghanistan while plumping for war with Iran isn’t just an inconsistency or a minor point of disagreement between like-minded people. It reflects a fundamentally distorted understanding of American interests and represents a typical exaggeration of foreign threats. Maybe I’m being unreasonable, but I confess that I don’t see many steps in the right direction when Republicans still claim to see an Iranian threat that doesn’t exist just as they saw an Iraqi threat that didn’t exist.

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