Jacob Heilbrunn: End of the Republican Foreign-Policy Establishment
[Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at the National Interest.]
The battles between establishment Republicans and the right are not new. Even a cursory glance at the establishment's past reveals that from the outset of America's rise to global power at the turn of the last century, East Coast Republicans have always enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the GOP itself. Consider the political odyssey of one of the foreign-policy establishment's founding fathers, Henry Stimson. Stimson, who attended Andover, Yale, and Harvard Law School and then served as President William Howard Taft's secretary of war, was a progressive Republican. He tried and failed to win Republican support for the League of Nations, watching disconsolately as his party embraced a not-so-splendid isolationism. In his memoirs, Stimson tartly observed that he "shared the oblivion which overtook most of the younger Eastern Republicans during the early 1920s." That oblivion didn't really end until Franklin D. Roosevelt took office and appointed Stimson secretary of war, and made the stalwart Republican, Frank Knox, secretary of the Navy. So it took a left-wing Democrat -- FDR -- to revive moderate Republicanism. At the 1940 Republican nominating convention, write Leonard and Mark Silk in their book The American Establishment, "the chairman of the Republican National Committee read both men out of the party."...
The internationalists were taken back into the Republican fold with the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, among other things, scorned the idea of radically increasing the military budget. Even Richard Nixon -- considered a right-wing hard-liner at the time -- was in favor of the Marshall Plan and the establishment of the United Nations as a congressman. The isolationist wing of the GOP, which had opposed entry into World War II as well as U.S. membership in NATO, was finished. But it morphed into a new Frankenstein: unilateralism married to nationalism. Put otherwise, suspicion of international institutions as dangerously infringing upon U.S. sovereignty remained, but it was now joined to militarism. The isolationists' place was taken by a bellicose, unilateralist right, led by Sens. Joseph McCarthy and William Knowland, known as "the senator from Formosa" for his fierce pro-Taiwan advocacy. They alleged that traitors in the State Department had lost China and that the Truman administration lacked the gumption to take the fight to the Reds....
The last gasp of the Republican foreign-policy establishment came with George H.W. Bush's administration. To the consternation of many conservatives and neoconservatives, Bush tried to force Israel to back off on building further settlements in the West Bank, cultivated close relations with China even after the Tiananmen Square massacre, refused to continue on to Baghdad during the first Gulf War, and did not intervene in the collapse of Yugoslavia. For these departures from conservative gospel, the right deserted Bush during his failed 1992 reelection campaign against Bill Clinton, who promised swift action in the Balkans and decried the "butchers of Beijing."...
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
The battles between establishment Republicans and the right are not new. Even a cursory glance at the establishment's past reveals that from the outset of America's rise to global power at the turn of the last century, East Coast Republicans have always enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the GOP itself. Consider the political odyssey of one of the foreign-policy establishment's founding fathers, Henry Stimson. Stimson, who attended Andover, Yale, and Harvard Law School and then served as President William Howard Taft's secretary of war, was a progressive Republican. He tried and failed to win Republican support for the League of Nations, watching disconsolately as his party embraced a not-so-splendid isolationism. In his memoirs, Stimson tartly observed that he "shared the oblivion which overtook most of the younger Eastern Republicans during the early 1920s." That oblivion didn't really end until Franklin D. Roosevelt took office and appointed Stimson secretary of war, and made the stalwart Republican, Frank Knox, secretary of the Navy. So it took a left-wing Democrat -- FDR -- to revive moderate Republicanism. At the 1940 Republican nominating convention, write Leonard and Mark Silk in their book The American Establishment, "the chairman of the Republican National Committee read both men out of the party."...
The internationalists were taken back into the Republican fold with the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, among other things, scorned the idea of radically increasing the military budget. Even Richard Nixon -- considered a right-wing hard-liner at the time -- was in favor of the Marshall Plan and the establishment of the United Nations as a congressman. The isolationist wing of the GOP, which had opposed entry into World War II as well as U.S. membership in NATO, was finished. But it morphed into a new Frankenstein: unilateralism married to nationalism. Put otherwise, suspicion of international institutions as dangerously infringing upon U.S. sovereignty remained, but it was now joined to militarism. The isolationists' place was taken by a bellicose, unilateralist right, led by Sens. Joseph McCarthy and William Knowland, known as "the senator from Formosa" for his fierce pro-Taiwan advocacy. They alleged that traitors in the State Department had lost China and that the Truman administration lacked the gumption to take the fight to the Reds....
The last gasp of the Republican foreign-policy establishment came with George H.W. Bush's administration. To the consternation of many conservatives and neoconservatives, Bush tried to force Israel to back off on building further settlements in the West Bank, cultivated close relations with China even after the Tiananmen Square massacre, refused to continue on to Baghdad during the first Gulf War, and did not intervene in the collapse of Yugoslavia. For these departures from conservative gospel, the right deserted Bush during his failed 1992 reelection campaign against Bill Clinton, who promised swift action in the Balkans and decried the "butchers of Beijing."...