Which US party has taken America closest to Armageddon? The answer is the Democrats under John F. Kennedy in the 1963 Cuban missile crisis. There was a time when Republicans were the level-headed ones. Though seen as amoral by some, statesmen such as Dwight Eisenhower, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, James Baker and George H. W. Bush grasped the world’s complexity and were good at playing it to America’s advantage. They knew the road to hell was paved with good intentions. Reckless idealism was a Democratic trait.
Those roles reversed a long time ago. Democrats grew wary of solving problems by force after the disastrous Vietnam war; and Republicans abandoned ideological modesty after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Ending tyranny in our world,” was George W. Bush’s leitmotif, at the point of a gun if necessary. Six years after Bush left office, instinctive militarism is now the Republican first commandment. Whether it be the civil war in Syria, Libya, Iraq or Afghanistan, force is the answer no matter what the question. What happened to the rich tradition of Republican statesmanship? The question is of pressing relevance in the build-up to the 2016 US presidential election. The media depicts the Republican party as bitterly divided between its isolationist wing, which is supposedly on the rise, and its traditional hawks, who are apparently on the defensive. The latter, led by party elders such as Dick Cheney and John McCain, is squared against the former, led by Rand Paul, the young turk from Kentucky.
In reality, Paul is in a minority of one and he is not an isolationist. All the other presidential hopefuls are straining to make Bush junior look like Kofi Annan. Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, attacks President Barack Obama for failing to use force against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) in Iraq. Sounding tough is clearly prized above consistency, since Perry urges Obama to arm the insurgents in Syria. Exhibiting a similar blindness to the limits of US military action, Marco Rubio, the Senator from Florida, calls for Obama to “systematically uproot the Isil ‘Caliphate’” in Iraq.
As if blundering into three Middle Eastern wars was not enough, Ted Cruz, the Senator from Texas, urges Obama to risk a new one by abandoning nuclear talks with Iran. “We cannot let this misguided diplomatic process drift endlessly while they (Iranians) plot our destruction,” he said last week. For good measure, Cruz sees Israel’s restraint in its war with Hamas, “as one of the great unsung humanitarian missions on the planet”. There are other Republican White House hopefuls and other gung-ho positions. The point is that the hawks retain a near-stranglehold on their party.
To paraphrase Daniel Drezner, a foreign affairs scholar, how did the party of clever foxes turn into a stupid hedgehog? The easy answer is Al Qaida. As the joke goes, the only foreign policy stance an ambitious Republican needs is a noun, a verb and 9/11. But that quip has lost its context. Americans may be frustrated with Obama’s professorial approach to foreign policy and his inability to douse the fires in the Middle East and elsewhere, but they trust his record on terrorism — the only threat that strikes fear in the broader US electorate. There is little appetite to risk showdowns in Ukraine, the South China Sea or the Middle East.
The more accurate answer is that Republican realism is not dead. It is sleeping. And it is showing signs of stirring. This is why Paul — a “non-interventionist” — attracts so much fire from his rivals. Paul is no more an isolationist than Bush senior or Bill Clinton. By urging restraint, he is taking a leaf from Ronald Reagan’s book. Paul’s opponents claim Reagan for themselves. They forget that Reagan only once ordered US boots on to foreign ground — the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in 1984 — and was willing to withdraw peacekeeping US forces from Lebanon after 241 marines were killed in a terrorist attack. He also talked disarmament with the Soviet Union after Mikhail Gorbachev came along. “Reagan was stern, but he wasn’t stupid,” wrote Paul in Politico. “Unlike his more hawkish critics, Reagan was always thoughtful and cautious.”
Can Paul resuscitate the Republican fox? It feels improbable, not least because he has no foreign policy experience. Eisenhower led allied forces in Europe in the Second World War. Nixon had been US vice-president for eight years. Ditto for Bush senior, who had also been head of the Central Intelligence Agency and US envoy to China. These were foreign policy veterans. Reagan was a foreign policy naif. However, he had served two terms as governor of California, America’s largest state. Paul has been a senator for just four years.
Yet, there is something about his dogged insistence on more suppleness and discretion in US relations with the world that shows he grasps the vast gap in the Republican market. Some might argue it is also a quality lacking among Democrats, Obama and Hillary Clinton included. While Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, continues to prevaricate about a White House run, the Republican field is wide open for Paul. His rivals still recycle the tired cliches of Hitler and Munich. Paul, meanwhile, is searching for a vocabulary to fit today’s challenges. While his star continues to rise, there is hope yet for the lost Republican tradition.
— Financial Times
