In the short of it, President Obama’s cancellation of America’s agreements with the Polish and Czech governments was a serious blow to the hopes and aspirations of millions of Europeans. ~Dick Cheney

Cheney’s recent speech at the Center for Security Policy is much what you would expect from him, but that is not what interests me here. What I find interesting is how obsessed Republicans have become in making the missile defense decision into a central part of their foreign policy indictment of Obama. Pence, Romney, Santorum and Pawlenty have all taken a whack at it, leading members of the conservative movement have denounced the move, and it has been one of the favorites in many columnists’ repertoires. You have never seen so many people suddenly discover the necessity of consulting with allies. Of course, these allies are not counseling Washington against rash, foolish actions, but they are instead helping Washington to antagonize another major power and encouraging our government in its own worst instincts. Naturally, the latter appeals to people who cheered on one blunder after another for the last eight years.

So far, the missile defense decision is one of the very few major substantive foreign policy acts Obama has made, and it was clearly the right one as far as relations with Russia, European security and American spending were concerned. Using this as the cudgel with which to batter Obama’s “foreign policy drift” is a sign of how far removed the GOP has become from common sense in this area. Were it limited to Cheney, one could write it off as sour grapes from a failed, old man, but it isn’t. It’s as if the Democrats had fixated on the nuclear deal with India (one of the few genuinely constructive moves the last administration made in regulating proliferation and shoring up relations with India), and then began mouthing Islamabad’s talking points on why this was a disastrous course of action. Had they done so, they would have made it clear that there was absolutely nothing the administration attempted that they would not subject to pathetic, reflexive opposition. As it happens, while there were critics of the deal, it never became a significant part of the list of Bush’s foreign policy errors, much less a leading, central element of the attacks against him.

There is no sense of proportion in Cheney’s remarks on this decision. He refers to an irrelevant interceptor system designed to counter a threat that doesn’t exist in the same breath as the Soviet invasion of Poland, which was ruinous for Poland and one of the great crimes of the last century. Aside from a coincidence in timing, there was and is no connection between the two things and it is pure demagoguery even to mention them together. Cheney speaks of the Czechs and Poles “walking the plank,” which implies execution and destruction, and nothing could be farther from the truth. Washington’s guarantees to central and eastern European NATO allies are as meaningful as they ever were, and this decision does not make the Czech Republic and Poland even slightly more vulnerable to Russia than they were before. As proponents of the missile defense system kept saying ad nauseam, the system posed no real threat to Russia, and they would have us believe that it was not even aimed at antagonizing the Russians. Now that this system will never come into existence, we are supposed to think that Obama has handed over two allied nations to Russia on a plate, when all that it does is return things to the status quo of 2005-06. What is so infuriating about the criticism of the missile defense decision is that it is the criticism actually creates the doubts about Washington’s willingness to fulfill American obligations that the critics are trying to lay at the administration’s door.

Cheney’s speech is useful as an example of how government activists always operate. They propose a scheme that is costly, unnecessary and probably dangerous to the common good, their successors attempt to scale back or modify the wasteful baggage with which they have been saddled, and then allies and members of the previous administration wail about the “abandonment” of this group and the “betrayal” of that one to defend the scheme they concocted, when no one was benefiting from the scheme in the first place and never would have benefited. Indeed, more often than not the scheme will hurt those it is supposed to aid, its costs will be far higher than originally projected, and it will create a number of negative consequences for which the schemers are unprepared and never considered. Where Republicans are concerned, this activism tends to be limited to military schemes and foreign policy boondoggles, but it applies just as well in other areas of policy. The constant ratchet effect this has ensures that no new scheme or proposed spending can ever be eliminated without tremendous effort and expenditure of political capital, and the end result is to make the state larger, more activist and an entity with its own set of interests increasingly divorced from the people it governs.

Looking at some larger questions, I find the missile defense quarrel to be a good example for thinking about the place of dissident conservatives in contemporary debates. Defending Europe from an Iranian threat that doesn’t exist and wouldn’t be directed at them if it did with a system that probably wouldn’t work is the sort of thing that one would think American conservatives would find laughably unnecessary. It is the purest sort of irrelevant government activity that does nothing for the United States, wastes the public’s money, and inflames other nations against us. The system’s relative, albeit still quite limited, popularity in the countries in question feeds off of Old World antagonisms that most Americans neither understand nor care to learn about. For most mainstream conservatives, none of this matters. The decision is “weak” and it is “appeasement,” therefore they oppose it.

There is a quote from George Kennan that is relevant here. Kennan was speaking of popular anticommunists of his day, but he could just as easily have been referring to anti-jihadists during this decade or Republican hawks generally right now:

They distort and exaggerate the dimensions of the problem with which they profess to deal. They confuse internal and external aspects of the communist threat. They insist on portraying as contemporary things that had their actuality years ago [bold mine-DL]….And having thus incorrectly stated the problem, it is no wonder that these people consistently find the wrong answers.

Replace the word communist with jihadist, Russian, Iranian or, God help us, Venezuelan, and you have a succinct description of what ails Republican and mainstream conservative foreign policy thinking. The anachronistic thinking may be the worst thing of all, because it means that they are taking foreign policy positions that have no bearing on the world as it is. People haunted by Saigon and Munich have little to tell us about a world in which Europe is united and communism is moribund. People haunted by Yalta, as the critics of the missile defense decision seem to be, have even less to tell us.

Many of us here at TAC and elsewhere have ended up as “dissident” conservatives often enough because of intense disagreements with mainstream conservatives over foreign policy. Iraq did not so much create ruptures between conservatives as it clarified why those ruptures already existed. Instead of subsiding as Iraq has (temporarily) moved to the periphery of our national debates, these ruptures are perhaps greater than ever. Aside from a general agreement that containing the USSR was desirable and common defense was a legitimate function of government, a great many people in the conservative movement don’t really share that many assumptions about the use of force, international relations and national security. Anyone following these things with any regularity knows this, but it might be useful to be reminded of it again.

Unlike almost every other area of policy under Bush, foreign policy remains one where most mainstream conservatives do not claim that Bush was insufficiently conservative. Despite reasonable arguments that Bush was not a conservative in any important respect, mainstream conservatives have shown no desire to distance themselves from him when he was at his most revolutionary and destructive. This is important to keep in mind, because it tells us that mainstream conservatives did not simply “go along” with Bush’s disastrous foreign policy primarily for reasons of tribal or partisan “team” loyalty. They embraced it and believe to this day that it was essentially correct, even if it was perhaps poorly managed here and there.

Foreign policy is not the only source of intense disagreement, but it tends to be a prominent point of contention because it is of particular importance to many of the dissident conservatives, because it is one area of disagreement where fundamental differences are not tolerated on the right, and because it is the only time when dissident conservative arguments seem to interest non-conservatives. As such, foreign policy has an outsized role in defining dissident conservative arguments, and this is probably most true for my own commentary, which has the perverse effect of letting mainstream conservatives classify us as crypto-leftists whenever it suits them because they have already defined any non-hawkish, non-nationalist, non-hegemonist position as left-wing and therefore absolutely unacceptable. The point here is not to rehearse all the reasons why hawkish, nationalist and hegemonist views are antithetical to a conservative disposition and damaging to all of the things conservatives claim to want to preserve, true as these claims are, but to recognize that there is no persuading such people when many of the fundamental assumptions they hold are diametrically opposed to ours and utterly wrong. There no longer seems any value in making the effort to persuade them.