At a moment when America is mired in misery, at home and abroad, his [Nixon’s] sagacious counsel should not be airbrushed out of the history of the GOP. Back in 1973, one of Nixon’s longtime critics, Walter Lippmann, so Switzer observes, praised him for being the great liquidator of American adventures–the war in Vietnam, the Great Society–[that] were “beyond our power.” Nixon was pleased: “wise observation,” he jotted down.

Such wisdom should make a comeback in the GOP. Will it? ~Jacob Heilbrunn

Heilbrunn cites this Tom Switzer op-ed, which discusses these remarks Nixon made forty years ago in Kansas City. Switzer made a good observation:

Instead of looking at the post-Vietnam world through the prism of American exceptionalism, Nixon and Kissinger envisaged it as an emerging multipolar system to be structured and regulated by a balance of power à la 1815 Congress of Vienna, the subject of the latter’s doctoral dissertation.

This is a sensible way to look at things, but it requires the U.S. to act the part of a status quo power instead of encouraging revolutions and fomenting regime change on a regular basis. That is one obstacle to this way of looking at the world gaining adherents in the GOP. Enough Republicans have been mouthing platitudes about universal rights long enough that some of them may even believe it by now. Another is that the Concert of Europe was the coordination of essentially conservative governments that shared a view that any revival of revolutionary liberalism was unacceptable and dangerous to the entire continent. To put it mildly, there is nothing remotely like this consensus among the world’s major powers.

There is clearly reluctance to acknowledge that there are things “beyond our power.” Many Republicans have endorsed the idea that “decline is a choice” without understanding that they are the ones choosing the self-destructive policies that will hasten the decline they fear. A revival of detente-era thinking will also be very difficult in a party that (mostly wrongly) remembers detente as some sort of shameful interlude that all right-thinking people reject.