ast month, the Senate rejected the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty. The U.S. nuclear arsenal that had
deterred Stalin’s empire, the Senate said, must be
regularly tested for reliability and to reduce the
destructive power of these awesome and awful
weapons.
The Senate was right. But to an enraged President,
this was a vindictive vote to rob him of a legacy. He
lashed out. The Senate, Mr. Clinton said, has
embraced a “new isolationism” that seeks to “bury
our heads in the sand behind a wall.” A 4000-word
tirade against the “New Isolationism” by Samuel
Berger quickly followed.
As I have been called, among other names,
America’s leading isolationist, my first thought was
that he was giving me credit for his defeat. But what
we are witnessing here is something more sinister, a
resort by Mr. Clinton to a malicious libel to
intimidate and silence any who would interfere with
his globalist agenda.
And as one who supported every great foreign
policy initiative from Kennedy to Reagan, I reject
the isolationist label, especially when made by those
whose spent their youthful careers marching against
the Cold War policies that brought us victory.
America has never been an isolationist nation. “No
president or national party in the entire history of the
United States...ever advocated isolating the United
States from the rest of the world,” writes historian
Wayne Cole. Historian Walter McDougall calls the
term isolationist “but a dirty word that
interventionists, especially since Pearl Harbor, hurl
at anyone who questions their policies.”
Why did Mr. Clinton revert to it? To divert
attention from his lost opportunity to shape a foreign
policy that might endure in our post-Cold War
world. Where Truman and Acheson succeeded,
Clinton, like Wilson, has failed.
His first attempt at interventionism and
nation-building was the bloody debacle in Somalia.
His embargo of Haiti and invasion proved ruinous
to the people of that impoverished island, with no
appreciable benefit to our Haitian neighbors or their
quality of life. To divert attention from a personal
scandal, the President fired missiles at a poison gas
factory in Sudan. It now appears to have been an
innocent pharmaceutical plant. Perhaps Mr. Clinton,
who was apologizing for yet another of his
predecessors’ foreign policy sins, might wish to
apologize for one of his own.
Consider our relationship with Russia. Ten years
ago, Ronald Reagan was being toasted in Moscow.
Today, the prevailing wind is anti-Americanism.
Not our fault, the Clintonites say. But who broke
America’s word to the Russians that if they
withdrew the Red Army from Eastern Europe, we
would not move NATO an inch closer to their
frontiers?
And what reaction do we expect when we collude
with two former Soviet republics, Georgia and
Azerbaijan, to build a pipeline to cut Russia out of
the oil of the Caspian and ship it to her ancient
enemy, Turkey? When enraged Russian generals
charge us with meddling in the Caucasus, do they
not have a point?
That photo of the President in Istanbul, smiling
broadly as the oil treaty was toasted, while his
Energy Secretary crowed about our “victory,” was
a provocation. Be assured: Russian nationalists are
surely even now plotting to overturn Mr. Clinton’s
“victory.” Mr. Clinton’s successes have been in
Northern Ireland and the Middle East, where
America assumed the role of peacemaker, rather
than military interventionist. That is the role the
greatest nation on earth should play, one ordained
in the Sermon on the Mount.
But our Republican elites are even more bellicose.
It was his own Republicans who berated President
Bush for not marching on Baghdad and establishing
a “MacArthur Regency,” Republicans who urged
air strikes on the North Korean nuclear facilities,
thus risking a second Korean War. It was
Republicans who denounced Clinton for not
sending 200,000 U.S. troops into Belgrade. And it
was a Republican Governor of Texas who
complained that our war on Serbia was not being
prosecuted “ferociously” enough. And it is
Republicans who seem to lust most ardently for a
new Cold War. In President Bush’s final year in
office, a startling document surfaced in the
Pentagon, detailing a plan to send 6 carrier battle
groups and 24 NATO divisions to rescue Lithuania,
should Moscow recolonize the republic. This
prescription for war with Russia was crafted in the
shop of one Paul Wolfowitz. It is not reassuring to
see the selfsame Mr. Wolfowitz, one of Governor
Bush’s “Vulcans,” emerging as an early favorite to
be Secretary of State.
Perhaps the defining foreign policy moment of the
Clinton presidency was his unconstitutional war on
Serbia. The cause of that war was Madeline
Albright’s rage that Serbia would not sign a
Rambouillet accord that called for the removal of all
its troops from Kosovo, and permission for NATO
troops to tramp through their country. No American
would have accepted that ultimatum. And when war
came, it was accompanied by the usual bodyguard
of lies.
We were told we were fighting to prevent the ethnic
cleansing of Albanians. Before NATO’s air strikes,
90,000 had fled. But after NATO’s peace,
180,000 Serbs have been driven from their homes,
as Christian shrines, monasteries, and churches
have been desecrated. We were told we were
fighting to prevent another Auschwitz, that
Milosevic’s mad killers were butchering tens of
thousands, perhaps a hundred thousand people,
suggested our Secretary of Defense.
A few weeks ago, a Spanish doctor in search of
mass graves had found 187 bodies, and the death
toll of Albanians was estimated at 2500. Is it
possible Milosevic gave orders for the mass murder
of civilians, but in 80 days his soldiers were only
able to kill this tiny fraction of a defenseless
population of 1.5 million? Twenty-five hundred
dead is a terrible tragedy; Auschwitz it is not.
Having smashed Serbia, it is now U.S. policy to
deny fuel to the Serb people, so they can suffer in
the brutal Balkan winter. This immoral policy
shames us as a people. What are we doing putting
old men, women, and children under a sentence of
death for being unable to what NATO itself could
not do—overthrow Milosevic?
Under the Christian conditions for a just war, the
targeting of innocent civilians is forbidden. But who
is suffering, who is dying from the sanctions we
impose on Serbia and Iraq? We read of tens of
thousands of deaths among Iraqi children. Is it
moral to cause their deaths because these toddlers
refused to rise up and oust Saddam, which the
mighty Army of Desert Storm was itself reluctant to
do? America is a good country; she does not make
war on children.
We need a new foreign policy rooted neither in the
Wilsonian Utopianism of the Democrat Party nor
the Pax Americana of the Republican think tanks
and little magazines, a policy that reflects the
goodness and greatness of this Republic, but also
an awareness that we were not put on this earth to
lord it over other nations.
The true third way is a New Americanism that puts
America first, but “goes not abroad in search of
monsters to destroy,” that defends America’s
freedom, frontiers, citizens, security, and vital
interests, but harbors no desire to impose our vision
on any other people. As the great scholar Russell
Kirk wrote:
[T]here exists no single best form of
government for the happiness of all
mankind. The most suitable form of
government necessarily depends upon
the historic experience, the customs,
the beliefs, the state of culture, the
ancient laws and the material
circumstances of a people, and all
these things vary from land to land and
age to age.
The blunders other nations make are not ours to
correct. And our moralistic policy of imposing
sanctions on tiny tyrannies like Haiti and Myanamar,
while we make no demands of the mighty Middle
Kingdom, is cowardly and contemptible. When the
elected mayor of our own capital city has to be
virtually deposed in the name of good government,
we should show more patience with foreign friends
who fall short of the exacting standards of
Clintonian democracy.
My friends, a presidential election should offer the
nation a choice of destinies. But on all the great
foreign policy issues—from moving NATO onto
Russia’s front porch, to undeclared wars in the
Balkans, to shoveling out billions in IMF loans and
foreign aid to wastrel regimes—our Republican elite
offers only a bellicose echo. Bush, Gore, Bradley,
and McCain, they are all on one side of this great
debate about America’s destiny; we alone are on
the other.
What would a foreign policy rooted in our history,
the wisdom of our Fathers, and the national interest
look like?
Specifically, while America should restate to the
world its iron resolve that never again will a hostile
power be allowed to overrun our ancestral home,
we will cease to smother Europe. It is time we
ended our reflexive opposition to every new idea
advanced by the nations of Europe to build their
own pillar of Western defense.
It is time to say “yes” to Europe, time to let go, as
doting parents whose children have reached
maturity, must let go. Indeed, let us accelerate the
day of Europe’s reclaiming its full independence, by
setting a date certain for the withdrawal of all U.S.
troops. In 1961, General Eisenhower urged Mr.
Kennedy to withdraw them all then; forty years
later,it is time to follow Ike’s advice.
As we look eastward, we see a Russia smaller than
she was under Peter the Great. In an eyelash, she
lost a world empire, a European empire, an internal
empire. Stalin’s USSR is now fifteen nations. The
collapse of Bolshevism was of extraordinary benefit
to mankind, and we risk the fruits of that victory by
treating Russia as a defeated nation to be ignored or
taken advantage of.
We should inform Moscow that NATO’s red line
will move no further east, that we are bringing home
all U.S. forces from Europe, that while American oil
companies may cut deals in the Caucasus, the
United States has no vital interest there, and no
intention of creating any new anti-Russian alliance in
her back yard. Instead of expanding military
alliances to corral and contain Russia, why have we
not insisted that our European allies expand the
European Union to include Russia? Let us bring
Russia in, rather than drive her out.
As for Chechnya, it is an ugly brutal war, but the
Russians are fighting inside their own territory.
Americans, whose beloved Mr. Lincoln unleashed
General Sherman to deal with his rebellious
provinces, can surely understand the horrors of civil
wars, even as we rightly deplore them.
But no matter our differences with Russia, we must
repair the relationship. None is more crucial. We
could make no greater blunder than to cast aside
the fruits of our Cold War victory by driving an
embittered Russia into the arms of Beijing. But that
is exactly what our Beltway elites seem to be doing.
But just as we respect the legitimate aspirations of
Europe for an equal place in the sun, and Russia’s
right not to have NATO squat on its doorstep,
Europe and Russia must respect our inherent right
to defend ourselves against the ballistic missiles of
rogue states.
As for our policy of “dual containment” of Iran and
Iraq, it is sterile and unsustainable. Like the British,
we are one day going home, and we ought not to
be devising schemes to extend our stay. Unlike
Beijing and Hanoi, Baghdad and Teheran never
killed tens of thousands of American soldiers in
war. But if we can engage China and North
Vietnam, and even North Korea, why can we not
at least talk to Iran and Iraq?
Have we not suffered enough terrorist
atrocities—from the massacre of our Marines, to
Pan Am 103, to the World Trade Center, to the
embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar—to awaken
our elites to the reality that interventionism is the
incubator of terrorism? Or will it take some
cataclysmic act of violence on U.S. soil to finally
awaken our gamesmen to the costs of global
hegemony?
As for China, the most peaceful and powerful
weapon America had to effect change in its policies
is our control of our $8 trillion market. From its
sales to us, China earns a trade surplus of over a
billion dollars every week. But by bringing China
into the WTO, the President threw away our trump
card and turned his trade portfolio over to global
bureaucrats. The next president must get it back.
The China portfolio belongs in the Oval Office, and
we need a return to linkage. Specifically, we should
tell Beijing: If you wish free access to our 270
million consumers, you must stop harassing
Christians, menacing Taiwan, targeting our country,
and you must begin giving our exports the same
tariff treatment we give yours. We do not want a
hot war or a Cold War with China. Nor do we
wish to contain China. She is already contained by
suspicious neighbors, north, south, east and west.
But a China that threatens America’s friends and
tramples on American values cannot expect to be
treated as any kind of partner.
Friends, America today faces a choice of destinies:
Are we to be a republic or an empire? Will we be
the peacemaker of the world, or its policeman, who
goes about night-sticking the trouble-makers of the
world, until we, too, find ourselves in a bloody
brawl we cannot handle. Let us use this transient
moment of American preeminence to encourage
and assist other countries to stand on their own feet
and begin to provide for their own defense.
A century ago, a great populist leader begged
America not to forego her best traditions and annex
the Philippines, an imperial act that would draw
America into three Asian wars. We did not heed his
advice; let us heed it now: “The fruits of imperialism,
be they bitter or sweet,” declared Bryan, “must be
left to the subjects of monarchy. This is one tree of
which citizens of a republic may not partake. It is
the voice of the serpent, not the voice of God,
which bids us eat.”
