—”Imperialism is absolutely necessary to a people which desires spiritual as well as economic expansion.
—Benito Mussolini

America has survived, the Last and Only Superpower, while so many others have fallen by the wayside, their bones littering the road from empire: Rome, Spain, Portugal, France, Russia, and—closest to ourselves—a once-great Britain, whose tatterdemalion “Commonwealth” is not even a ghost of her Britannic Majesty’s former glory. Are we immune from the decadence that sets in after dreams of empire are realized, or is hubris likely to catch up with us in the coming century? This is the question asked, and answered, in Patrick J. Buchanan’s A Republic, Not an Empire—a tour de force of riveting historical narrative, pyrotechnical polemics, and programmatic clarity that is likely to inspire a whole new generation of conservative noninterventionists.

We have extended guarantees to the Baltic nations, who clamor for NATO membership; the doomed princes of the Gulf, who live in fear of the “Arab street”; the Koreans and the Taiwanese, the Albanians, and the East Timorese— all of which may seem, for the moment, a burden of empire that can be shouldered with relatively little effort. Who, after all, will stand against us? The question may soon be answered, says Buchanan. We feel invincible, now—”But so did [Britain when it guaranteed] Belgium’s neutrality in 1839,” writes Buchanan, a commitment:

which dragged [it] into the Great War, cost it hundreds of thousands of dead, and inflicted on the empire a wound which it would never recover. Our country is today traveling the same path that was trod by the British empire—to the same fate. Do we want America to end that way?

Here is the underlying theme of A Republic, Not an Empire, stated at the outset: We can go the way of our British forebears or chart a new course, one that is uniquely American.

Buchanan performs a public service by calling attention to the evil “Wolfowitz Memorandum,” a remarkable 46-page document, prepared by Bush’s Undersecretary of State Paul Wolfowitz, that envisions the United States as a world empire beyond the dreams of Alexander, dominating the globe and slapping down any who would aspire even to nominal independence. Described in the media as a classified document leaked by anonymous sources, the memo purports to be a foreign policy blueprint for the next century. If so, the 21st century will be a century of endless wars, Wolfowitz having targeted Russia as the biggest threat to American interests and projected a U.S.-Russian confrontation over the expansion of NATO—a principle for which America, Wolfowitz believes, must be ready to go to war, and many should be prepared to die. More than that, our troops must inhabit—even dominate—every continent for the protection of our “vital interests”there. The goal of Wolfowitz’s vision is to prevent the emergence of any regional power as a possible rival to American world hegemony: All must be reduced to the status of small and military impotent states, lest they challenge the imperial dominance of the One and Only Superpower. In short, the United States would virtually annex most of the civilized world—and a great deal of that which is not quite civilized—in an act of hubris so reckless, so contrary to the lessons of history and common sense, that it is positively breathtaking to contemplate. That Wolfowitz, the author of this mad memorandum, is now one of George Dubya’s top foreign-policy advisors, the theoretician and behind-the-scenes policymaker who could well be the next secretary of state, is—or ought to be—a chilling thought.

Buchanan lays out a frightening and all-too-realistic scenario for five future wars. (His portrait of the “Second Balkan War,” which may have been written before the attack on Serbia, reads like a news dispatch hot off the wires. Read as a prediction of things to come, the description of the burgeoning Balkan crisis has the ring of authenticity.) The “Second Korean War” is a reenactment of the earlier conflict, to which nuclear weapons are added; in the “Baltic War,” Russia and Belarus overrun Lithuania and demand that the Baltics remain a “weapons free zone.” “The U.S. President declares, ‘This will not stand,'” avers that “there will be no Munich in the Baltics,” and takes us to the brink of nuclear war —in the name of NATO’s “credibility.” In the Middle East, the “Arab street” explodes, toppling the Saudi princelings and provoking a massive American intervention in Iraq, while the “Second Gulf War” pits the United States and Israel against virtually the entire Arab world in what Buchanan calls “a nightmare scenario.” Most interesting is Buchanan’s “China-Taiwan War,” which has its origins in the shadow of an economic slump that drags the Far East down in a slough of depression. As the People’s Liberation Army quells riots in Hong Kong, “Taiwan declares independence in Jefferson’s own language and asks the United States and the United Nations for recognition. Both refuse.” Taiwan proceeds recklessly to threaten the mainland with nuclear retaliation if Beijing dares even to contemplate an invasion. The Chinese leadership responds by informing the United States and the rest of the world to stay out of the crisis, and blockades the island. The siege of Taiwan is begun. “Should the navy engage Chinese air and naval units in the waters around Taiwan,” asks Buchanan, “or stay out of the war?” His answer may surprise many conservatives: Clearly, Pat Buchanan favors a policy of strict nonintervention. As he puts it:

In none of the wars would any vital U.S. interest be at stake to justify sending a large American army to fight or to risk nuclear war. In each of the wars described above, America is drawn in because of commitments dating to a Cold War that has been over for a decade . . .

As an American nationalist, Buchanan believes that the interests of this country deserve a special place—indeed, the only place—in the affections of American policymakers. He is, above all, an American patriot, deeply in love with the tradition and spirit of a people uniquely averse, from their love of liberty, to the task of empire-building. Yet any assertion of this brand of Americanism is “shouted down as ‘isolationist!'” he complains; “it is time to expose this malevolent myth of ‘isolationism,’ so that our foreign policy debate can proceed on the grounds of what is best for America.” What is best for America—not the multinational corporations, or the United Nations, or the peoples of the world, or even the New World Order. Not any of these, but for America First.

One of Buchanan’s major achievements in this book is to rescue the memory of the old America First Committee from the slanders of the War Party. Citing a particularly egregious example in the speech of Bush Senior on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor—”Isolationists flew escort,” said Bush, “for the very bombers that attacked our men”—Buchanan avers that “President Bush had stood history on its head.” Uttered at the height of Buchanan’s assault on the Bush establishment, this lying canard no doubt enraged Buchanan at the time, and much of the rest of A Republic, Not an Empire is a refutation of this particularly Big Lie.

The “isolationism” of the Founders, Buchanan asserts, is a myth—a useful one for the War Party, but a myth nonetheless. He proceeds to make his point in the next few chapters as he describes the expansion of the United States from a struggling confederation clinging to the Eastern shore to a continental republic on the brink of empire. Buchanan’s account is enthralling, full of historical detail and odd fact. The fateful turn toward empire began with the acquisition of the Philippines and Puerto Rico and the “liberation” of Cuba, Buchanan argues, dramatizing the temper of the times with such fascinating doggerel as the Boston Transcript’^ ode to Commodore George Dewey, the conqueror of Manila:

O Dewey at Manila

That fateful first of May,

When you sank the Spanish squadron

In almost bloodless fray.

And gave your name to deathless fame;

O glorious Dewey, say.

Why didn’t you weigh anchor

And softly sail away?

Americans exulted in the taking of the Philippines, but, as Buchanan shows, it was a fateful decision. Indefensible against the rising peoples of the East, who were nation-building in spite of Western interference, the Philippines, rather than becoming the forward position of an expanding American power in the Orient, became our Achilles’ heel—as the events in the Pacific during World War II would demonstrate.

The bacillus of imperialism, as one critic of the Spanish-American War put it, had infected the American body politic, lodging itself most importantly in the consciousness of the financial and intellectual elites. We had become a mirror image of the Mother Country, against whose depredations we had rebelled—and were now inflicting similar depredations on the conquered peoples of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean isles. No longer our nemesis. Great Britain had become “our exemplar.”

The Anglicization of American foreign policy was completed on a grand scale as the tragedy of World War I unfolded. Buchanan asks: “Why did Woodrow Wilson break with all tradition and lead America into a slaughterhouse that had consumed millions of the best and bravest of Europe’s young, when no vital interest was at risk?” Buchanan points to the Anglophilia rampant among the nation’s elites, citing historian Ralph Raico:

The President and most of his chief subordinates were dyed-in-the-wool Anglophiles. Love of England and all things English was an intrinsic part of their sense of identity. With England threatened, even the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Edward D. White, voiced the impulse to leave for Canada to volunteer for the British armed forces.

While the British propaganda effort in America was massive and effective, it was not just Perfidious Albion that dragged us into a war that marked the beginning of a new barbarism. There was also, Buchanan points out, the all-pervasive influence of the Money Power. The munitions industry, growing fat on the profits of war, was a mighty lobby for intervention, while the New York banks were concerned for the debts owed them by the Allied powers. Without an Allied victory, those loans would never be repaid: The economic future of the nation had been mortgaged and tied to the victory of England and France. Wilson campaigned on the slogan, “He kept us out of war!” Not long after he took the oath of office, the new President—the sanctimonious “man of peace”—took us into the war, and planted the seeds of the next one.

Buchanan’s account of the events leading up to World War II has provoked a storm of controversy which—much to the chagrin of his enemies—catapulted his book onto the best-seller lists. In Buchanan’s view, this mistaken war gave rise to the Soviet Empire and precipitated an unnecessary life-and-death struggle lasting half a century. Hitler was intent on going east, avoiding war with the Western powers and especially the United States. England was out of danger after the Battle of Britain, and the Germans’ failure to cross the Channel signaled that the British were beyond the power of the Nazi armies. Having secured his Western front, Hitler then moved east: His invasion of the Soviet Union would almost certainly have resulted in the two totalitarian powers destroying one another. But it was not to be. The American left, including the Communist Party and its many liberal allies, was determined to save the Soviet Union. As soon as the socialist fatherland was attacked, they went into action, while, on the other side of the barricades, the conservatives and their libertarian brethren began organizing the America First Committee.

Buchanan’s recounting of the story of the Committee covers much of the ground first turned by such historians as Wayne S. Cole and Justus Doenecke, while popularizing and dramatizing the trenchant point made by these pioneering scholars: that the AFC, far from being “a Nazi transmission belt” as its leftist and communist opponents insisted, was the beginning of a movement to take back the old American republic, a rooted American mass-based antiwar program embodying the traditional American aversion to the turmoils and intrigues of Europe. Eight hundred thousand strong, the AFC developed a sophisticated analysis of the world situation that reflected the instincts of the ordinary American, who (in June 1940) opposed the United States’ entry into the war under any circumstances in overwhelming numbers (86 percent). Only five percent wanted us to fight: this, as Buchanan points out, at the nadir of the Allies’ fortunes.

“I will not take us into any European war,” was FDR’s solemn declaration—in retrospect, an outright lie. If we submit this statement to the rigors of Clintonian exactitude, however, we discover that Roosevelt was not lying: He did not take us into a European war directly but rather by the back door, in the Pacific. The President’s war message to Congress in the wake of Pearl Harbor failed even to mention the Germans. Hitler declared war on us a few days later, a blunder that Buchanan understandably calls “monumental.” Yet he does not relate the whole story, if he knows it, which is that Hitler’s declaration of war was a reaction to the fake news of a supposed “Victory Plan,” planted in the media—ironically enough, in the antiwar Chicago Tribune—by British intelligence and describing American plans for an expeditionary force of millions to aid the Allied war effort in Europe. Hitler cited this report in his war message—and so it turns out that the German Führer and the American people alike fell for this ruse, with disastrous consequences for both. (The British also concocted the famous map, cited by Buchanan, in which the Nazis’ “master plan for the Americas” showed the Western Hemisphere divided into five “vassal states.”) Still, the War Party’s best efforts were failing, as Buchanan points out: “By the fall of 1941, the two great combatants were Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Most Americans did not believe their husbands, fathers, or sons should die for either one.”

Buchanan’s riveting account of the long series of provocations, diplomatic blunders, and wrongheaded policies that set us on the road to Pearl Harbor can only be summarized here. The roots of the conflict were in the Philippines and the proclamation (and failure) of the overarching policy of the Open Door in China: Both, says Buchanan, led directly to the events culminating in the war with Japan. The catalyst, however, was the economic embargo declared by FDR after the Japanese seizure of French, British, and Dutch colonies in Indochina and the outlying islands. As Buchanan puts it, Japan, “gripped by the throat,” had the choice either to fight or to perish. It chose to fight, and the rest is history— but history as written by the victors, a self-serving chronicle of self-justification and self-glorification, composed by “court historians” (in the phrase of the revisionist historian Harry Elmer Barnes) to honor the vanity of statesmen and whitewash their crimes.

Against the court historians, Buchanan has raised an alternative view of American history that throws down the gauntlet to the War Party. Particularly interesting is his account of the repressive campaign directed by FDR against the antiwar movement of the early 1940’s, which in hindsight seems very much like that waged by President Richard Nixon on the antiwar movement of the 1960’s.

I will not tarry over my disagreement with Buchanan’s thesis that the waging of the Cold War had an effect on the ultimate fate of the Soviet Union and its satellites, other than to prolong their existence. His interpretation of the Vietnam War, and his view that we could have “won” it, is belied by his own analysis concluding that we should never have become involved in Southeast Asia. He veers close to the revisionist view, however, when he remarks that, in Vietnam, “the New Frontiersmen were pursuing Wilsonism—with guns.” He gives a very abbreviated account (in three paragraphs) of how Ronald Reagan supposedly won the Cold War, while saying nothing about the economic impossibility of socialism; but then, economics is not Buchanan’s strong suit. Aside from his few allusions to trade protectionism—a policy with which I thoroughly disagree, but which is easily separable from his foreign- policy stance—this book is a near-perfect summary of the most important issue of our time: the vital question of war and peace. There are not many visions of what a pro-American, noninterventionist foreign policy would be like, or why it is preferable to the crusading globalism of our bloody-minded rulers. A Republic, Not an Empire is one of them. 

 

[A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny, by Patrick J. Buchanan (Washington, D.C.: Regnery) 437 pp., $29.95]