Patrick J. (“Pat”) Buchanan is campaigning again for President. Views allegedly found in a recent book are suddenly being misused to drive him from the race.  Pundits thunder. When it isn’t ABC TV’s Sam Donaldson, it is fellow Presidential  candidate Senator John McCain or Irving Kristol or William Safire. 

The book they say they hate is  A REPUBLIC, NOT AN EMPIRE: RECLAIMING AMERICA’S DESTINY, 437 pages long, with 30 pages of notes and sources. It studies changes in American foreign policy since colonial times. It makes recommendations for a better future policy. 

One argument common to the critics is that the book proves that Buchanan is soft on Hitler and faults the USA  for  waging war against Germany. It also  sends coded anti-Semitic and racist messages. Buchanan denies all charges. He doubts that his critics have read his book. So do I. 

Buchanan's millions of followers will learn much that is useful about American history and foreign policy. For probably  90% of Americans, A REPUBLIC, NOT AN EMPIRE will be a wide ranging, stimulating  and debatable introduction to those interrelated themes. It is not, however, a book for scholars or specialized historians. 

Buchanan sees America’s presidents as pragmatists, trying first one approach, then another to challenges from abroad. Once an initiative is seen to benefit the nation, then it joins  a growing handful of widely supported policies. Thus,  by 1869, America’s political leaders could  choose among elements of four respected American foreign policy “traditions”: 
 

• Exceptionalism, 
• Unilateralism, 
• the Monroe Doctrine 
• and Manifest Destiny. 

By some America is seen as “exceptional,” having a God-given mission to do things both good and great. Others prefer  a second tradition: George Washington’s Unilateralism (or John Adams’s Independence). That is,  Americans should determine their own goals, with minimal foreign influence.  In a third policy, Presidents Monroe and Polk made it clear that no American nation may allow European or other countries to take away its sovereignty. 

The fourth tradition to emerge, Manifest Destiny, carried seeds of future abuse. For it was one thing to reach America’s natural continental boundaries. But Manifest Destiny evolved into a fifth policy, Imperialism, when leaders pushed America’s reach deep into the Pacific and began in 1898 to rule over vast numbers of  peoples against their will. Imperialism’s blunder, according to Pat Buchanan, remains with us even today in

our tendency toward irrational overreach, going farther than national interest, self-defense or military power makes prudent (pp. 140f).

Liberal Internationalism

In Chapters 15 and 16 Buchanan provokes most of his enemies. Here he makes  mental experiments, imagining “what if “ different players or different policies had changed history. If the United States had remained neutral in World War I, would this have shortened the war? If so, there might have been no Hitler and possibly no Stalin.

Pat  Buchanan also asks what if the United States had not been attacked by the Japanese. What if Hitler had not, days later, declared war on the United States?  Under the Kellogg-Briand anti-war treaty, the USA had no legitimate reason for declaring war on anyone except to defend itself from attack. Second, a war needs the support of the American people. Polls of September 1939 found only 13.5 percent willing to go to war even if Britain and France were on the verge of defeat (p.267). In 1941, two months before Pearl Harbor, two-thirds of polled Americans preferred staying out of war to defeating Germany (p. 280). In late October 1941 Americans were 74 to 13 percent against war with Japan (p. 287). 

Buchanan also defends  the America First Movement (AFM). This was formed in September 1940 three months after the fall of France. It dissolved itself within hours after Japan’s attack on Pear Harbor in December 1941. The AFM  advocated peace through military strength. It faulted Roosevelt  for eight years of growing military unpreparedness in the face of growing aggression by Japan, Germany and Italy. 

Buchanan sketches alternative policies by which the United States might conceivably have avoided war with the Kaiser and later with Tojo and Hitler. He clearly hates the political systems we fought.  But  the worst Nazi excesses against the Jews began in 1942, after, not before American entry into the war, he argues. There was insufficient American public support in December 1941 to launch a moral crusade against a Germany which did not directly threaten America. But once Hitler declared war, America had to destroy him. 

A REPUBLIC, NOT AN EMPIRE argues that America must  regain that maximum freedom to act abroad in the national self-interest lost since 1945 through too many treaties and understandings. Absent a Soviet threat to Western Europe, for example, NATO should be dissolved not enlarged.

Pat Buchanan has written a serious book. No one should damn it who has not read it. A fair reading does not detect love of Hitler or hatred of Jews or other races and religions. On these points Buchanan’s critics  are intellectually lazy or dishonest. They owe him an apology. 

-OOO-

for Asheville TRIBUNE

[NOTE: Is it reading too much into the foreign policy of President George W. Bush to surmise that he and Pat Buchanan sometimes sip from the same ideological well spring? TPK 06/24/2001]