Misreading Reagan's Legacy: A Truly Conservative Foreign Policy

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William Kristol and Robert Kagan's vision of a Pax Americana helps further the ever unsettled debate over America's role in the post -Cold War world ("Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," July/August 1996). But in attempting a conservative policy with a "moral clarity," they have offered an approach that is low on strategic clarity, and not very conservative to boot.

Kristol and Kagan are on target when they assert that conservatives need a foreign policy vision to achieve a lasting political realignment; no American political movement worth its name can succeed solely on domestic issues. Critics like us are sympathetic to their overriding purpose: to find an inspirational vision to sustain support for American engagement in world affairs.

Unlike some cheap-hawk conservatives, the authors advocate a much higher defense bill to make America a hegemonic power. They rightly worry that deep cuts in the military are putting the United States on the path to decline, and they understand that it is downright silly to propose, as the Clinton administration has, grand strategies of enlarging the world's democracies and becoming a global peacekeeper without embarking on a military buildup.

THE PERILS OF ESCAPISM

But Kristol and Kagan's vision of American foreign policy is without limits or constraints. It is somewhat confusing to discover that the government that runs too much of America runs too little of the world. It is fine with us if leaders use American power and influence to accomplish traditional foreign policy tasks like deterring aggression, defeating enemy nations, shoring up alliances, and expanding free trade. But we wonder what limits Kristol and Kagan would impose on their global democratic enterprise -- one that ultimately would have the U.S. government engineering the domestic transformation of nations around the globe.

The authors, dodge the central foreign policy question facing America in the post-Cold War era: how to develop an internationalist foreign policy disciplined by a framework for selectivity and discrimination. This has been the central question since the Soviet Union collapsed (along with U.S. containment policy) in 1991. Unless it is answered, America will lack a compass in an ever more complex and unpredictable world. This compass should ensure that the United States engages in neither a crusading activism that mindlessly diffuses vital resources nor an isolationism that eschews important opportunities to shape events. Such selectivity, especially in the case of military engagement, has become even more pressing given the precipitous decline in the military capabilities of America and its principal allies. By pretending that America need not be selective in its engagements, Kristol and Kagan are indulging in pure escapism.

The cure-all that is supposed to obviate the need for making choices is spending a lot more money on defense. Kristol and Kagan believe in "giving military planners enough money to make intelligent choices." But military planners are not the ones who decide important strategic questions, such as whether to expand NATO, intervene in Bosnia, grant most-favored-nation status to China, or buy 20 or 30 more b-2 bombers; the president and Congress are. But how can they make these and other important strategic decisions if, as Kristol and Kagan say, "Setting forth the broad outlines of such a foreign policy is more important for the moment than deciding the best way to handle all the individual issues that have preoccupied U.S. policymakers and analysts"? What is the point of a strategy if it cannot help a policymaker decide these issues? If it does not meet this most basic test, it is empty rhetoric.

Kristol and Kagan correctly assert that defense cuts have gone too far. But a $60 billion to $80 billion annual defense spending increase will not be enough to fund their ambitious strategy of Pax Americana. It would cost $30 billion more a year just to adequately fund Bill Clinton's rather small "Bottom-Up Review" force. That would allow the United States to fight just one major regional conflict and one minor conflict or large peacekeeping mission, while maintaining a skeletal presence to uphold its European and Asian alliance commitments. Add more money for missile defense systems and a modernization program that takes advantage of the military-technological revolution, and you're back in the hole. There would be little or no money left over for the arms buildup needed to support Kristol and Kagan's strategy of slaying the world's monsters. In other words, $60 billion to $80 billion a year or even more would not provide a military so capable that policymakers could avoid hard choices about where power is most needed and most effective.

ALL OR NOTHING

Kristol and Kagan offer a false choice to the American people: either America attempts to remake the world in its own image or it once again seeks the dark cave of isolationism from which the Presidents Roosevelt led it. The American people apparently need a foreign policy crusade around which to rally or they will pull up the drawbridge and leave the world to its own devices.