Can Tom Cotton’s Manifesto for American Strength Unify the Right?

By John Hillen

Thursday, November 10, 2022

 

Senator Tom Cotton is one of the most serious foreign-policy and defense thinkers in Congress. On the Republican side, he and Senator Dan Sullivan, along with a few GOP members of the House such as Representatives Mike Gallagher, Dan Crenshaw, and Jim Banks, are triple threats as public leaders in this space. 

 

First, they are combat veterans and know how to put their periods of service into proper context — without weaponizing or over-relying on the experience (unlike John Kerry). Second, they are thought leaders and have the intellectual horsepower to articulate the provenance of the ideas and the histories behind their Weltanschauung, and to expose the flawed arguments and facile thinking of their opponents. C. S. Lewis might say that their minds are “correctly ordered.” 

 

Third, they formulate and attach themselves to good policies — even when those policies are considered by their own chamber leadership to be perhaps too ambitious or unconventional or sharp-edged. They have the courage to call for what is needed now and not wait for it to be massaged into a legislative compromise in a few years. And yet they are not bomb-throwers in their own caucus. These are practical leaders. I can see some of this generation, Cotton and Gallagher in particular, as instantly effective secretaries of defense.

 

But that would require a Republican in the White House, and it would further require that Republican to have a worldview akin to the one Cotton lays out in the pages of his new book, Only the Strong. Cotton’s book is a manifesto for the Republican Party and America to rediscover a revitalized Reaganism, a posture on the world stage whereby a confident and muscular U.S. is forward-deployed both diplomatically and militarily, yet is not reckless or wasteful in the application of its power. This is an attitude in which America’s national interests and the preservation of our security and prosperity are the explicit rationale for our actions — without apology. At the same time, though, this America leads — which means generating followship — and conducts this most American-oriented foreign policy through and with allies, coalitions, friends, and partners in every part of the globe.

 

There will be a Republican in the White House eventually, but there is no guarantee that a GOP president would think along these lines. Support among Republicans for a forward-leaning American internationalism cannot be taken for granted and may even need to be rebuilt from scratch by compelling leaders, wise policies, and demonstrably good outcomes. As the subtitle reveals, Cotton’s book is about the dangers of leftish ideas to our security, but I would offer that the more important conversation between differing visions in foreign policy these days is between Right and Right. 

 

The book spends the great bulk of its arguments on the dynamics of Democratic foreign-policy leadership and ideas versus those of Republican leaders, but I have some hope that it could serve more subtly to bring the Right together around some commonsense principles and policies. If so, that would be a sotto voce by-product. This intelligent book is very much in the “attack the Left” genre rather than the “unite the Right” category (a very small category). The analysis and history feature a villains’ roll call starting with Woodrow Wilson and Hegel and working up to the catalogue of bad ideas and worse foreign policies of every Democratic president since Kennedy.

 

As Cotton shows, this dynamic — as it played out in the Nixon-vs.-McGovern, Reagan-vs.-Carter, and Bush-vs.-Dukakis matchups, and other episodes in recent foreign-policy history — unveiled deep-seated differences not just in views about America and world affairs but in beliefs about the most fundamental questions of politics and governance. Cotton traces the roots of these Right-vs.-Left debates back to the progressive rejection of the American founding some 120 years ago, through to the “blame America first” Democrats, as Jeane Kirkpatrick branded them, and on to our present time. It is a good but breezy history, told with a partisan edge and without much nuance. Much of the book’s tone is that of the big foreign-policy speech on the second night of the nominating convention.

 

Nonetheless, it is an important story, and Senator Cotton does a service by bringing it back to us — especially given that it is not taught fairly or even much at all these days. The history of the foreign-policy thinking and judgments of multiple generations of Democratic presidents and leaders, rooted, in Cotton’s telling, in a subtle animus or distrust of American power wielded robustly and in our national interest, is much tamped down in official or elite circles. Cotton covers it forcefully, from Vietnam through the ’70s to the Clinton and Obama administrations and into Biden’s term. 

 

No one reading Cotton’s pointed history will be confused as to why Robert Gates, former secretary of defense (including for President Obama), famously wrote that Joe Biden had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

 

This part of the book is largely an accurate account, to my mind, but it is not a balanced one. Cotton gives the Right a pass for its own sins and errors, with a mention here or there of policy mistakes that Republican presidents honestly arrived at. In Cotton’s mind, these misjudgments were made without what he says are the warped fundamentals of progressive and Democratic thinking about American foreign policy and its basis for legitimacy. There is something to that. Bad ideas breed bad policy. The connection is well made, and I found myself wishing he had done the same thing for the intellectual antecedents of wokeism in his chapter on the damage it has caused to the cultural fabric of our fighting forces. 

 

But even partisans should not learn only a GOP-good, Dems-bad history of foreign policy. It dulls the capacity for critical judgment and better policy-making. And it’s not entirely historically accurate. For instance, Cotton admiringly writes of Ronald Reagan and his arguments against the Panama Canal Treaty being pushed by the Carter administration, but he could have also noted that in a famous 1978 Frontline debate on the topic, Reagan argued against William F. Buckley, George Will, and James Burnham (a lineup with enough anti-communist bona fides to make Whittaker Chambers blush), who all favored turning the canal over to the Panamanian government. Reagan was correct in my estimation. (N.b., I told that to WFB one time and he refused to concede that Reagan had gotten the better of him in the debate.) Needless to say, any implication that all the bad ideas were on one side of the aisle and all the good on the other, either then or now, is misleading.

 

So too, the “New Left” and “pampered radicals” are rightly excoriated by Cotton for dodging the draft or avoiding military service during the Vietnam War, but there is nary a mention of the GOP political leaders and heroes who took enthusiastic advantage of the many opportunities to avoid service during that fraught time. Cotton denounces the Democratic Party and the Left in general for their insufficient commitment to military strength, defense spending, and obligations abroad (correctly so), but we should also remember that it was a Republican who cast the one vote in the Senate against the accession of Finland and Sweden into NATO.  

 

The Right has a challenge within its own ranks to making Cotton’s Reaganite/Thatcheresque worldview a framework for governing or policy-making. Pat Buchanan opened an “America First” door in the 1992 campaign that has now translated into an “America Home” set of policies for many on the right. 

 

At one level, that is fine — there is a venerable conservative foreign-policy tradition of being proudly nationalistic but also ultracautious about intervention. Where that view spills into danger for this country and the world is in its purely libertarian form — which counts on two oceans, peaceful land borders, a lack of American meddling abroad, and a small U.S. military to produce a world conducive to American peace and prosperity. That tends not to happen. Cotton quotes Churchill on the need to secure peace through strength: “The narrowing gap between us and our enemies only gives them ‘temptations to a trial of strength.’”

 

There is an honest argument on the right — about what levels of strength best deter our enemies, and about what levels of global involvement best underpin leadership that begets allies and partners. There has always been a spectrum of opinion about where, when, and how we might or might not get involved in foreign conflicts and what resources to expend to what ends. It’s a pros-vs.-cons, risks-vs.-rewards set of decisions in the main.  

 

But today the Right is having a largely different debate. The arguments made now by the anti-interventionist Right — about why we might be involved on the world stage, and how we can act with legitimacy — in many ways echo those of the anti-war Left over the years: (1) America cannot attend to any injustices or ills abroad so long as there are injustices or ills at home, on which our money would be better spent (e.g., we should fix the southern border before doing anything about the Ukrainian one). Reagan, among others, pointed out the illogic even for fiscal conservatives of the guns-vs.-butter arguments. (2) Who are we to be lecturing any other great civilization on right conduct? Other countries have their own legitimate traditions and aspirations. And (3) military action is always imposed on the common man by the elites — dragging Johnny Soldier and America into wars meant to enrich fat cats.

 

These are the arguments you might hear from the right on radio and television or from conservative nationalists and Tulsi Gabbard. They have a different flavor from the venerable noninterventionist tradition of the Taftian sort. Intellectually, Cotton is well positioned to tackle this — but he is not yet a national party leader, so he directs his fire at Democrats and the Left. 

 

The book is unlikely to convince anyone on the left and is not designed to. But it might still serve to unite Republicans. Cotton concludes with several chapters proposing very sensible policy initiatives, especially to address the growing China challenge, around which different parts of the Right could coalesce. Ultimately, all these policies point to the necessity of a greatly enhanced American military and a forward-deployed posture on an increasingly dangerous world stage. That’s the stuff of international leadership, and Cotton has delivered a well-made argument that the return on investment for Americans is more than worth it.