Utopia, you are standing in it!

The foreign policy of the Old Right of the Republican Party is undergoing a revival through the now retired Congressmen Ron Paul and now his son, Senator Rand Paul. They are the joint heirs of the Old Right of the Republican Party and Senator Robert A. Taft.

In The Republican Road Not Taken: The Foreign-Policy Vision of Robert A. Taft Michael T. Hayes argues that Taft was isolationist, which is opposition to binding commitments by the U.S. that would create new, or expand existing, obligations to foreign nations. Like many Americans of his era – the 1940s and early 1950s – Taft gladly would have:

let the rest of the world go its own way if it would only go without bothering the United States

Taft advocated what he called the policy of the free hand, whereby the United States would avoid entangling alliances and interferences in foreign disputes:

• This policy permitted government leaders the freedom of action to decide in particular cases whether a vital U.S. interest warranted involvement.
• Taft correctly pointed to features of the United Nations that would prevent its serving as a real force for peace and equality under the law.
• He challenged the Truman administration’s assessment of the Soviet military threat against Western Europe.
• He anticipated correctly that a steady rise in defence outlays could lead to a “garrison state” and the erosion of civil liberties.
• Taft was prescient in warning that even well-meaning internationalism would degenerate over time into a form of imperialism that would breed resentment against the United States around the globe, eventually endangering U.S. national security.

In Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy, Ivan Eland argues for an urgent rethinking of America’s national interests:

• America’s natural geo-strategic position places it at a natural advantage, rendering unnecessary a forward defence posture.
• A non-interventionist foreign policy would mean lower defence budgets.
• An America less willing to get involved in complex overseas disputes unrelated to its vital interests would also be less likely to make enemies around the world.

Further to the Libertarian Right, in Where the Left goes wrong on Foreign Policy the late Murray Rothbard asked whether:

• The Left is prepared to accept a foreign policy in which the United States government allies itself with no one and retires from the world scene, leaving all international encounters to the private realm of free trade, travel, and cultural and social exchange.
• That is what a policy of genuine non-interventionism and anti-imperialism would mean: a world in which the US government no longer tries to push other people around, on behalf of any cause, anywhere.

One area of agreement between classical liberals and the new left used to be opposition to foreign aid. Foreign aid was a system to subsidise US exports and prop up client states.

Rothbard used a revisionist perspective on foreign policy to argue that:

• Taking the twentieth century as a whole, the single most warlike, most interventionist, most imperialist government has been the United States;
• The main thrust of Soviet foreign policy was to preserve what it already has at home and abroad, not to jeopardise it;
• A conservative Soviet government is capable of dangerous militaristic actions, but these are acts of imperial protectionism, not revolutionary or aggrandisement;
• National communist movements were not monolithic but independent-minded – the wars between china, the USSR and China and Vietnam are examples; and
• There vast differences between the various communist regimes throughout the globe spell the difference between life and death for a large part of their subject populations.

History did not perhaps hold up well on Soviet intentions for Rothbard, and Thomas Schelling and Robert Aumann are better writers on how if you want peace, you must prepare for war, but the Old Right did have a point about the crusader state.

In The Empire Has No Clothes U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed, Eland argued that:

In a post–Cold War world, taking into account only the security of American citizens, their property, and U.S. territory, the benefits of an interventionist foreign policy have declined, and the costs have escalated dramatically.

Americans continue to pay excessive taxes to defend countries that are rich enough to defend themselves or to occupy conquered countries in the world’s backwaters (e.g., Iraq and Afghanistan)…

Their sons and daughters are killed on remote foreign battlefields for reasons even remoter from U.S. vital interests.

Crusader states can stumble into wars that they had no intention of fighting both in terms of scale and length. Remember World War 1 where everyone thought they would be home by Christmas after a negotiated settlement.

Tom Schelling looked at going to war as an emergent process. He argues that what a country does today in a crisis affects what one can be expected to do tomorrow. To quote Schelling:

A government never knows just how committed it is to action until the occasion when its commitment is challenged.

Nations, like people, are continually engaged in demonstrations of resolve, tests of nerve, and explorations for understandings and misunderstandings….

This is why there is a genuine risk of major war not from ‘accidents’ in the military machine but through a diplomatic process of commitment that is itself unpredictable.

Schelling goes on to argue wars to save face are, nonetheless, rational:

It is often argued that ‘face’ is a frivolous asset to preserve, and that it is a sign of immaturity that a government can’t swallow its pride and lose face.

But there is also the more serious kind of ‘face’, the kind that modern jargon is known as a country’s ‘image’, consisting of other countries’ beliefs (their leaders’ beliefs, that is) about how the country can be expected to behave.

It relates not to a country’s ‘worth’ or ‘status’ or even ‘honor’, but to its reputation for action.

If the question is raised whether this kind of ‘face’ is worth fighting over, the answer is that this kind of face is one of few things worth fighting over.

Robert Aumann argues well that the way to peace is like bargaining in a medieval bazaar. Never look too keen, and bargain long and hard. Aumann argues that:

If you are ready for war, you will not need to fight. If you cry ‘peace, peace,’ you will end up fighting… What brings war is that you signal weakness and concessions.