Daniel Larison

The Mistaken Decision to De-List the MEK

The GOP Will Likely Remain Hawkish, But It Needs To Be Much Less Aggressive

By Daniel Larison • September 24, 2012, 2:21 PM

Dan Drezner responds to Conor Friedersdorf’s proposal for how the Republican Party could reinvent itself on foreign policy:

So what should the GOP do? I’m not entirely sure, but I do know two things:

1) The Republican Party can’t summarily reject the hawk brand it’s built for more than a half-century;

2) Unless and until the GOP acknowledges that Iraq was a tragedy and a mistake, it will be as enfeebled on foreign policy as the Democratic Party was on this issue for a generation after the Vietnam War went south.

The second point is clearly correct. The Iraq war wrecked the GOP’s credibility on foreign policy and national security. It won’t be able to begin to repair the damage until it leaders recognize the war for the debacle it was, and it will have to make the necessary changes to avoid making similar errors in the future. This is the recommendation I’ve been making for the last six years. It is only the necessary condition for recovering the party’s credibility on these issues, and won’t be enough by itself, but until that happens the party will not regain the trust of a majority of Americans on these issues.

That brings us back to the first point Drezner makes. He’s right that Republicans cannot completely scrap their party’s reputation for hawkishness, but it’s important to distinguish between the hawk “brand” and the impulse to support military action regardless of the circumstances. There needs to be a distinction made between being on guard against security threats and the impulse to demagogue and inflate every threat on earth into an intolerable menace. Republicans would get a lot more traction with an appeal to “peace through strength” if we didn’t all know that this slogan concealed a willingness to wage preventive wars and antagonize other major powers through needless provocation. One doesn’t have to be hyper-aggressive and paranoid to be a Republican hawk broadly defined, but these days that is how most of them appear to everyone else. I don’t think anyone expects that the GOP will cease being hawkish to some degree, but it could do itself and the country a world of good if it abandoned its reflex of maximal hawkishness and aggressiveness at all times.

Posted in foreign policy, politics. Tagged Conor Friedersdorf, Dan Drezner.

8 Responses to The GOP Will Likely Remain Hawkish, But It Needs To Be Much Less Aggressive

Rob in CT says:

September 24, 2012 at 2:59 pm

I grew up in a household that leaned (and still leans) heavily toward the GOP. As a kid, I was taught two key things (or really one thing in two parts):

1) The Republicans were the responsible adults when it comes to foreign policy. Silly liberals who want to save the world will get us in all sorts of trouble; and

2) The Republicans are the responsible adults when it comes to money. Silly liberals will spend other people’s money until there is no more.

The SoCon stuff never played with my parental units (more Tory than US Conservative)… it was and is viewed I think as an acceptable tradeoff to defeat the liberals-who-will-take-our-money-away.

2001-2003 could not have been more devastating to those 2 things I was taught growing up. They were revealed to be utter nonsense.

And the Party hasn’t learned at all. They’ve doubled-down and attempted to re-brand (Tea Party = GOP base), but what they have not done is grapple with their record.

How can they pretend to be fiscally responsible when the solution to any problem is a tax cut? How can they pretend to be adults on foreign policy when the response to any crisis is, at a minimum, chest-beating bluster?

I think the GOP could cash in on the voters’ weariness of military interventions around the world. Marry that to fiscal conservatism (one shorn of the tax cuts pay for themselves fairy), and you have a consistent message. If we must reconsider how much we spend on healthcare or social security, surely we must also reconsider this gig we have as self-appointed World Policeman. Make it consistent and I think it could work. Keep trying to pretend military spending (required to maintain our quasi-Imperial stance) is somehow magically different and people see through it.

Doing this also provides some chance of a Dem crackup (anti-war left vs. other Dems). Right now, those of us disgusted with hyper-interventionist foreign policy can plausibly find a home in the Democratic party via lesser-of-two-evils reasoning. Take that away, and things get interesting.
Clint says:

September 24, 2012 at 3:28 pm

The Tea Party Patriots’ mission is to restore America’s founding principles of Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government and Free Markets.

There’s nothing in Our Mission Statement advocating interventionism or global copism.
charlie says:

September 24, 2012 at 3:48 pm

And I’d break down the hawks into three eras:

1) Eisenhower level hawks, maybe Dulles.

2) Nixon, which was more about expertise than hawkery.

3) The post-reagan period, which, although it encompasses a lot, is more chicken than hawk.

I’d say the defining moment was the bombing in Lebanon.
Uncle Vanya says:

September 24, 2012 at 4:00 pm

Then let the GOP go into the dust bin of history.

Time to reexamine where in the last GOP administration the party went so horribly wrong. I had naively hoped that even as GWB’s right hand men were publicly denouncing and destroying party heretics, in private, at least, they were contemplating their party’s faults. Now I see that I had hoped in vain.
Ken Hoop says:

September 24, 2012 at 5:23 pm

Dan, do you believe Bay Buchanan is counselling Romney to this effect, because it is having no apparent outward effect if she is, which I doubt.
jamie says:

September 24, 2012 at 7:35 pm

There’s nothing in Our Mission Statement advocating interventionism or global copism.

American politics is about what you are willing to vote against, not what you claim to be for. I have yet to see a TP platform that would exclude a candidate for “global copism.” It’s simply too difficult to construct a voting coalition on that basis.
As far as foreign policy is concerned, the wheelhouse is clearly off limits to TP policymaking cadres, because hawkish policies simply won’t cost a politician TP votes.

You simply can’t dictate a pacific foreign policy by controlling spending or “shrinking government.” This wrongheaded idea has been in circulation since World War I or even before, that states will not go to war if the costs are too high. It never works that way, because by definition, wars are fought over issues that are more important than money. If a nuclear Iran is a causus belli to the foreign policy leadership of the US, no amount of tax cutting or spending sequestration will stop us the US from starting a war. A policy of “strong defense” will always trump any prior commitment to a budget.
Sean Scallon says:

September 25, 2012 at 12:03 am

Dan also noticed the circular argument as well being made here as well.

Republican hawkishnes traces back to an influx of Democrats into their party. In the past the GOP had tried maintain a posture of aggressiveness along with searching for a broader peace within the framework of cost conciousness. This began to change in the Reagan Administration(but for understandable reasons give the state of the military at the time) but by the time of the Bush II Administration the messianism which had been a part of Democratic Administrations of the past was now part and parcil of the GOP, as if Wilson had changed parties.

The question is not whether lack of funds prevents warfare. The question us can lack being involved in the affairs of other countries and being on so many bases can reduce the need for U.S. involvement in the world, henceforth a smaller U.S. miltary and thus smaller government.

Why then do Tea Partiers not feel this way? Because doing so would require a U.S. which is no longer a super power, and being nationalists they cannot fathom this and still think costs be damned. They must realize they cannot get what they want uness the miltary/industrial complex is dealt with.
Barry says:

September 25, 2012 at 12:26 pm

Adding on to Jamie’s points – the ‘Tea Party’ didn’t have a problem with any of that until they lost power, took off their Republican Party badges, and pretended innocence.