Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), America’s foremost socialist, raised eyebrows during her recent appearance at the Munich Security Conference with surprisingly hawkish, internationalist statements. The antiwar left heavily criticized AOC for her speech, viewing it as an endorsement of the foreign policy of the Democratic establishment. “AOC sounds almost identical to Hillary Clinton or Madeleine Albright in her defense of NATO, except less articulate and confident,” the journalist Max Blumenthal tweeted, expressing the position of many people on the subject.
On one panel, AOC criticized the Trump administration for not being sufficiently active on the world stage. She charged,
They are looking to withdraw the United States from the entire world so that we can turn into an age of authoritarianisms… where Donald Trump can command the Western Hemisphere and Latin America as his personal sandbox, where Putin can saber-rattle across Europe and try to bully our allies there, and where authoritarians essentially control their own geographic domains.
Of course, there are factual issues with this analysis: Despite the dovish platform that carried Trump back to the White House, the United States has become more aggressive abroad, continuing to provide escalatory assistance to Ukraine in its war with Russia and striking Iran last June (and now, of course, launching a war against Iran last weekend).
Notwithstanding this, AOC seems to think that the antidote to America’s ailments is but more foreign entanglements in the service of combating “authoritarianism” and in the name of a “class-based internationalist perspective” (a term she used in a subsequent appearance in Berlin).
While AOC’s support for foreign policy internationalism may be disappointing to our friends on the antiwar left, she is in many ways just following in the footsteps of earlier progressives.
While the American republic was founded, nurtured, and thrived under the principles of geopolitical nonintervention, it was America’s progressives who abandoned this principle and went abroad to search for monsters to destroy.
The first of these progressive interventions took place against Spain in 1898. William McKinley, remembering the brutality of the Civil War, favored a peaceful resolution to the Cuba crisis. Following the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor by an internal explosion, the progressives got their war. Progressives sold the war to Americans as an ideological crusade against reactionary Spain, and in a pattern that would be repeated by progressives to the present, portrayed it as a war to liberate various peoples in the name of “democracy.”
A decade and a half later, the American people wanted no part of World War I, but a combination of America’s then-Anglophile elite, American business interests tied to the Entente, and pro-British propaganda, aided by the German blunders of unrestricted submarine warfare (although itself no more a violation of neutral rights than Britain’s blockade), and the intercepted Zimmermann telegram in which Germany’s government proposed military ties with Mexico led the United States into the world’s most destructive conflict to date.
Once at war, progressives, from Woodrow Wilson on down, rhetorically turned the war into a crusade to “make the world safe for democracy” (never mind that Germany and Austria had extended the suffrage wider than even Britain), and Wilson promoted his “League of Nations” as a utopian solution to Europe’s problems. “Regime change” in Berlin made things worse; toppling a stable constitutional monarchy led ultimately to the anarchy of Weimar and the totalitarianism of the Nazis.
Witnessing its bitter fruits in the trenches of the Western Front, Americans turned away from progressivism. They realized that they had been duped into fighting a war on England’s behalf and noninterventionist Republicans were swept into power in electoral landslides in 1920, 1924, and 1928. By the time that Democrats retook the Oval Office in 1932, they too had rhetorically embraced noninterventionism.
However, during the Second World War, progressives again worked to involve America in a European war. U.S. opposition to the conflict was fierce (most notably from the bipartisan America First Committee), forcing the Anglophile administration of Franklin Roosevelt to lie when he ran for re-election in 1940 and claimed to keep American troops out of foreign wars.
While Roosevelt attempted to enter the war through things such as aid to Britain and France or escorting allied shipping with “Neutrality Patrols” (named with an Orwellian flair), it was Roosevelt’s oil blockade on Japan (and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor) that would ultimately enable him to bring about his desired outcome. Once at war, Roosevelt foreclosed the possibility of a negotiated peace (the only way to have alleviated the suffering of peoples under German and Japanese occupation sooner) through his demands of “unconditional surrender.”
While justly decrying the totalitarianism of the axis powers, Roosevelt aided Stalin’s Soviet Union, oftentimes at the expense of American interests, and gave half of Europe to Stalin at Yalta. Rather than benefiting the U.S. or American ideals, it only aided the totalitarian systems that Americans opposed. As TAC’s co-founder, Patrick J. Buchanan, wrote:
In 1917 Wilson had gone to war to make the world safe for democracy, and had made the world safe for Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler. In 1941 Roosevelt had gone to war to make Europe and Asia safe for democracy, and had made Europe safe for Stalinism and Asia safe for Maoism.
Harry S. Truman deepened U.S. involvement in the affairs of Europe. While many Americans viewed the best counter to communism as allowing Europe to rebuild and rearm, so as it could defend itself, (with even Robert Taft backing the Marshall Plan for this reason), Truman created NATO instead, which though intended to be temporary, has transformed into a permanent vehicle involving America in the petty grievances of the European continent.
While FDR could at least have been credited for going to Congress to get approval for Lend-Lease, his successor, Harry S. Truman did no such thing in Korea, claiming that American involvement there was merely a “police action.”
The progressive streak of military adventurism was reprised in the Vietnam War. Embodying the managerial spirit of American progressivism at the time, Lyndon Johnson believed that our government could transform Vietnam through a technocratic approach to war, just as he was attempting to transform America. The cost of this folly was 58,000 American lives and a significant blow to American prestige.
The backlash against the Vietnam War caused many of the more hawkish of the Great Society liberals to move towards the right, and by the 1980s, this group had entered the GOP, where they began to purge non-interventionist Republicans. By the time of the second Bush administration, these Wilsonian “neoconservatives” were the dominant force in Republican foreign policy.
These neocons used 9/11 as an excuse to attempt wars of nation-building during the Global War on Terror. With these wars came massive growth in the security state and the creation of new programs of government surveillance that would have shocked earlier generations of Americans.
During the Obama years, these policies were continued, as was the commitment to regime change. Obama’s administration played a major role in the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya, leading to anarchy, terrorism, and slavery, and in the Syrian Civil War, where the Obama administration made common cause with Al Qaeda terrorists against Syria’s secular Assad government.
Seen in this light, AOC’s Munich appearance, rather than representing a breach with the antiwar left, in many ways represents a continuation of over a century-and-a-quarter of American progressive hawkishness.
But why do leftists (including former leftists like the neocons) trend towards supporting wars abroad? While conservatives, since Louis de Bonald, have recognized that “all politics is local” (and only religion is universal), leftism blurs these lines, universalizing politics, and viewing political goods and rights as applying to humanity as a whole, rather than within specific contexts.
An example of this can be seen in the difference between the American and French Revolutions. While the Jacobins (as leftists) saw themselves as fighting primarily for universal “Rights of Man” and were in open hostility to their inherited traditions, America’s patriots saw themselves as going to war to defend and conserve their inherited rights as Englishmen.
Indeed, Americans traditionally saw that intervention abroad poses a threat to our patrimony and way of life. George Washington understood this, warning Americans to avoid “permanent alliances,” as they would “entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice.” John Quincy Adams admonished Americans against going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy,” as it would doom our free government and render America “the dictatress of the world” rather than “the ruler of her own spirit.” The later writers of America’s “Old Right,” such as Garet Garrett and Albert J. Nock made similar arguments against foreign entanglements and in defense of American identity.
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Thus, conservatism is complementary to noninterventionism in a way that leftism is not. While our friends on the antiwar left may be earnest and good allies, ultimately these reasons point to the future of the antiwar movement being on the right.
Relatedly, if American conservatism fails to be noninterventionist and antiwar, it ceases to be conservative. This has happened before. During the George W. Bush years, the right’s foreign adventurism led to the abandonment of fiscal conservatism (with massive increases in federal spending), while the incorporation of neoconservatives into the Republican Party empowered a new conservative elite less committed to social conservatism. This may very well happen again.
It is accordingly in the interests of both American conservatives and the antiwar movement to work together to create a strongly noninterventionist conservative faction. This is entirely doable—indeed it has been done before—and presents the best chance of both conserving the American tradition and keeping the United States out of destructive wars.
