Taft’s Revenge

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

 

It’s always 1933 in American politics: The Left always thinks we are in the Great Depression and in need of a new New Deal, and the hawks always see a seedling Adolf Hitler who must be uprooted or at least pruned. And so it is today.

 

To complete the 1930s scene, right-wing anti-hawks (it would not quite do to call them “doves” and they are not quite “non-interventionists,” even if they sometimes describe themselves that way) today have a stronger voice in the Republican Party than they have since the days of Senator Robert Taft (R., Ohio), the anti-war conservative stalwart who served in the Senate in the critical years of 1939–53. While in the Senate, Taft opposed efforts to help the British and other nations fighting off the Nazis, insisted that there was no vital U.S. interest at play in Europe and that this would not change even if Hitler conquered the entire continent, and believed that the United States, being protected by its oceans and keeping its armies ready at home, could endure and thrive as a kind of fortress state. He was mostly wrong about that, but he was not careless or unthinking.

 

Senator Taft is an important figure for the Old Right and for a certain kind of modern libertarian, and, whether you call it “principle” or call it “fanaticism,” there was a consistent line of thinking that ran through his politics: He opposed entering the war until Pearl Harbor, took a narrow view of U.S. interests during the war, opposed the creation of NATO after the war, opposed the Nuremberg trials, etc., but also was practically alone in the Senate in speaking against the internment of Japanese Americans. “Libertarian McCarthyite” may sound a little weird to the modern ear, but that is what Senator Taft was, and he spoke for a tendency within the Republican Party that was old and established by his time and still endures today.

 

(The Republican Stupidity Constant at work: As Taft’s power increased in Washington, he was occasionally denounced by other Republicans as a “socialist” — the more things change, etc.)

 

I do not think that much, if any, of the current Republican criticism of U.S. efforts to bolster Ukraine against the predation of Vladimir Putin could be called principled opposition — in 2022 Anno Domini, I find it difficult to write the words “principled” and “Republican” in the same sentence without pausing. There are many Republicans experiencing bouts of sudden-onset pacifism. But principled opposition is nonetheless possible, in theory if not on Fox News or in the Ohio primary election. Because this sort of thinking is now a real force in the Republican Party, we ought to try to understand it.

 

And we ought to understand that this school of thought is not without some genuine virtues, even if it is insufficient to the current challenge from Moscow. Its virtues are easy to miss because they are distorted by the usual “All of A or All of B” approach to political questions, a product of the low-rent tribalism that has entirely swallowed our domestic politics and with it our foreign policy, in the manner of a big fish that swallows a smaller fish that has already swallowed an even smaller fish. (The metaphor of Russian matryoshka dolls will not suit my purposes here!) You know how that goes:

 

“The United States has too many troops overseas and too many bases in too many countries around the world, and is much too involved in the affairs of other countries.”

 

“Yes, I agree.”

 

“And, therefore, we have no business telling Putin that he cannot invade Ukraine and enjoy veto power over the foreign policies of Russia’s neighboring countries.”

 

“Well, no, that doesn’t necessarily follow.”

 

“Neocon shill!”

 

Etc.

 

Much of the current effort on the neo-Taftian and effectively — sometimes explicitly — pro-Putin Right is directed at talking down the moral standing of Ukraine, insisting that it is backward, corrupt, and undemocratic. The criticism often is exaggerated — often on behalf of Putin — but it is not wildly off-base, either. On the democracy and corruption fronts, Ukraine is Denmark compared with Russia, but even the friends of Ukraine will admit that is suffers from what is politely termed a “democracy deficit” and that it is plagued by deep and wide corruption — these are, in fact, among the main reasons that Ukraine is not already a member of the European Union or of NATO. But what is at issue here is not the moral standing of Ukraine, any more than the 1991 Gulf War was about the moral standing of the government of Kuwait, which we might have generously characterized as a family business. Imperfect nations have a right to exist, too, and the United States has an interest in the defense of that right. Operation Desert Storm was not a defense of hereditary monarchy — it was a U.S.-led project carried out to secure U.S. interests. The difference between George H. W. Bush and his neo-Taftian critics (Pat Buchanan prominent among them) is that Bush represented a school of thought that defines U.S. interests much more broadly than the anti-hawks would if they were in power. Which they weren’t, and aren’t. But if they are not quite in power today, they are closer to it now than they were in Cold War and immediate post–Cold War era, and closer to it than they have been since the 1930s.

 

Putin’s apologists (and a somewhat smaller number of honest critics) will sometimes say that the United States can hardly complain about Moscow’s taking a proprietary interest in the affairs of nearby states — what is Russia’s position vis-à-vis Ukraine, Belarus, et al., if not the Monroe Doctrine transplanted? Why ought Putin to think any differently about the possibility of NATO forces and matériel in Ukraine than President Kennedy thought about Russian missiles in Cuba? That begs any number of questions. The Soviet Union was an expansionist police state that murdered some tens of millions of people — including, let us never forget, 3.5 million Ukrainians intentionally starved to death for political purposes in the Holodomor. The United States, as noted earlier, has a very large number of troops and bases in countries around the world, but the American troops in Germany and the Republic of Korea differ from the Russian troops in Ukraine (and now we can at least dispense with the fiction that there are no Russian troops yet in Ukraine) in many important ways: For example, the American troops would leave if asked. U.S. foreign policy is often boneheaded and sometimes atrocious, but the United States is a funny kind of imperial power, one that reverses the usual direction of cash flow in imperial relationships, providing aid and investment rather than demanding tribute.

 

U.S. forces in Europe are not an occupying army. But the current crisis must force us to consider that they are a crutch, and to think through what that means. At the recently concluded Munich Security Conference, the Europeans were obviously relieved that with Putin rattling his saber, the United States is once again coming to their rescue — not to the rescue of Ukraine, in all likelihood, but to fortify and reinvigorate the fundamental NATO mission. Ukraine is, as noted, not a NATO member, but it is on track to become a NATO member and already is party to an association agreement with the European Union; abandoning Ukraine to Putin would make a mockery of the idea of collective European self-defense, and it would also bring the Russian forces that currently are on the Ukrainian border to the borders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania — NATO members all. One of the many problems with Putin’s version of the Monroe Doctrine is that his backyard is expanding. The complaints that Putin has about NATO forces in Poland today would only be transferred to the Czech Republic and Germany. It is worth remembering that the original Monroe Doctrine was a hemispheric claim.

 

NATO will always be understood in Moscow as a cat’s-paw for Washington, and not without some reason. But there are particular European interests in play here, too — Putin’s forces in Belarus are as close to Prague as Washington is to Charleston, S.C. Many European leaders, Emmanuel Macron prominent among them, would like to see the European Union build a European army rather than rely on the EU mutual-defense policy — and on American allies they have come to regard as only periodically reliable — to ensure the sovereignty of EU member states. This is part of a broader push for more effective European sovereignty in matters ranging from the military to the digital. The United States should encourage these efforts, which would be more productive than our current non-strategy of bitching about whether this or that NATO member is spending at least 2 percent of GDP on defense. As Washington’s focus shifts from the Western world to the Indo-Pacific and China, building up European defense capabilities independent of NATO would accord with the new geopolitical reality and would help to bring about a situation in which every European conflict is not necessarily an American conflict. It may not satisfy orthodox neo-Taftians, but it is possible to secure U.S. interests in Europe — including our interest in liberating both ourselves and our European allies from their learned helplessness — through addition rather than through subtraction.

 

But that is decades away at best, even if we were to imagine that such a project had been agreed upon by the Europeans, which it hasn’t and may not be. And that leaves us to face the crisis in the here and now. Donald Rumsfeld famously observed: “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish you had at a later time.” That is true for averting wars, too: You conduct diplomacy with the army you have, and with the allies you have, and with the armies and capabilities they have. A forward-looking statesman might look to change some or all of those in his nation’s favor, but we Americans do not have very many of those in our employ just at the moment. And with the neo-Taftian tendency ascendent in the Republican Party (and to a lesser extent in the Democratic Party), it is likely that our alliances will be weaker in the near future — meaning in our short-term confrontation with Russia and our long-term competition with China — than they were during the Cold War. The less our allies can rely on us, the less we can rely on them, and a general retreat on Washington’s part will be mirrored in capitals around the world.

 

President Macron has proposed to host a summit meeting between Biden and Putin to discuss the situation in Ukraine. Biden has agreed, in principle, to attend, as long as Russia does not launch a full-scale invasion — which is what apparently is under way as of this writing. It does not seem to have occurred either to Macron or to Biden that any such meeting must include Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose country is, after all, the one being disintegrated. As Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) observes: “Any Biden-Putin-Macron summit that sidelines 44 million Ukrainians would stink like Yalta.” His advice: “Give Zelensky a seat at the table or don’t go.”

 

Ukraine need not be governed by angels nor situated on the border of the United States to have a legitimate claim on Washington’s attention — as I argued last week, this is a Putin crisis, not a Ukraine crisis: There was no precipitating event in Ukraine that has brought the two countries to the brink of war. Our neo-Taftians may envy Swiss neutrality, but the United States is not Switzerland and cannot conduct itself in the world as though we were. Our national interests encompass many factors that our borders do not. But I fear that we have lost the ability to comprehend our national interests in anything but economic measures — and crude and short-term economic measures at that, as though our real problem with Beijing were jobs in carpet factories. Americans at large, and President Biden in particular, would think differently about what Putin is up to if factory payrolls in Ohio were directly implicated. But they aren’t, and so Washington has no good answer when Americans ask: “What’s in it for us?”

 

Somewhere, Senator Taft is smiling about that.

 

 

Words About Words

 

I know someone who thinks libertarian is effectively a synonym for conspiracy kook. Alas, that does not come out of nowhere.

 

The word libertarian has had several different meanings and connotations in its history.

 

Its first use was philosophical rather than political: as the antonym to necessitarian. Necessitarians were people who believed that human behavior is determined by environment and circumstance, that we do what we do (and think what we think) because it is the only possibility open to us, given a certain set of circumstances; libertarians, in contrast, were partisans of free will. In my 1841 Webster’s, that is the only sense of libertarian included: the political use had not yet arrived. Libertarian was also used in a specifically religious sense at that time, also touching questions of free will.

 

It was a natural evolution from the descriptive philosophical libertarian (man is free to act) to the prescriptive political libertarian (man should be free to act), which appears in the late 19th century, first as a noun and then as an adjective.

 

Our use of the word is complicated by the fact that there are small-l libertarians as well as a capital-L Libertarian Party. Small-l libertarians in the United States have mostly been associated with the Republican Party and, to a lesser extent, the Libertarian Party, though there is a strain of libertarian who feels more at home with the Democrats.

 

The libertarian intellectual David Friedman once commented: “There may be two libertarians who agree with each other on everything, but I am not one of them.” David Friedman, who is associated with the radical “anarcho-capitalist” model of libertarianism, is the son of Milton and Rose Friedman, who are associated with the Republican-leaning kind of libertarianism. There is a lot of diversity within the libertarian family. F. A. Hayek, a hero to many libertarians, rejected the word libertarian in favor of liberal, and Ayn Rand, another hero to a certain kind of libertarian, hated the word libertarian — and the people, too, whom she regarded as morally degenerate, making common cause with “religionists, anarchists, and every intellectual misfit and scum they can find.” Rand’s denunciation reminds me of George Orwell’s similar feelings about his allies on the left: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”

 

I sometimes describe myself as a libertarian, and William F. Buckley Jr. subtitled one of his books “Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist,” though many orthodox libertarians would disclaim him (and me). The closer you look at libertarian, and other words of that kind — liberal, conservative, etc. — the less useful they will seem. Bill Buckley was a conservative, George Will is a conservative, and people keep telling me that Donald Trump is a conservative, and many people who have called themselves conservative for a long time define their politics as opposition to George Will’s most recent column, or Bill Kristol’s, or Jay Nordlinger’s. So it is fair to wonder if conservative actually means anything — which is a separate question from what it should mean. Hayek called himself a liberal, and in Europe the sort of people we call libertarians are called liberals, as they are in some English-language political writing, including in the United States. Some of our newly minted nationalist-populists have picked up liberal in that sense, and they deploy it as a term of abuse for free-trade, market-oriented conservatives. At least they are using the word more or less correctly, so they have that going for them.

 

To make things even more confusing, what American conservatives mean to conserve are the principles of the American founding, which was an exercise in liberalism, albeit 18th-century Anglo-Protestant liberalism. We often append the word classical to liberal so that people will know we are talking about Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson rather than Edward Kennedy and Bernie Sanders. I will use the word liberal by itself when addressing people who will know what I mean, and it is kind of a relief to do so. I’ll use libertarian when liberal would be confusing, even though libertarian is vague, too.

 

A good way to think about libertarianism is as a starting point. “What we value is liberty” is a good place to start, but it doesn’t settle every question. For example, there is a good libertarian case to be made for abortion rights (freedom is served by maximizing women’s bodily autonomy) and a libertarian case against abortion rights (the right to life does not suddenly descend from the heavens at the moment of birth), and libertarianism itself can’t really answer that question, or many others like it. At its worst, libertarianism is an ideology — rigid, stultified, dusty. At its best, it is what George Will calls conservatism: a sensibility. And maybe libertarianism and conservatism in the United States are not quite the same sensibility, but they are near relations, branches of the family tree of liberty.