Donald Trump’s ascendancy in the Republican Party fissured the GOP. Increasingly alienated, the GOP’s neoconservative wing flocks more and more to the Democrats. To anyone who grew up accustomed to viewing Democrats as the peace party, a Democrat presidential candidate celebrating the endorsement of Dick Cheney is mind-bending. But while some in the GOP increasingly reject nation-building and democracy-promotion as pillars of foreign policy, others have sought to bridge the gap between foreign policy restraint and interventionism. Matthew Kroenig and Dan Negrea’s book, We Win, They Lose: Republican Foreign Policy and the New Cold War, represents one such attempt.
The authors posit that a foreign policy synthesis of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump’s visions is best positioned to guide American foreign policy through the “New Cold War,” i.e., our antagonistic relationship with the new “axis of evil.” The chief villain is, of course, China, but also populating the hit list are Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
The central ethos of Kroenig and Negrea’s Reagan-Trump fusion is Reagan’s dictum of “peace through strength.” They identify eight “national interests” that the US government should advance in foreign affairs. Six of these national interests are worth warring over: (1) defense of the homeland; (2) nuclear non-proliferation; (3) defense of allies; (4) avoiding hostile powers’ domination of “important geopolitical regions”; (5) countering “anti-American terrorist groups globally”; and, (6) the security of the “global commons: the high seas, airspace, cyberspace, and outer space.” The remaining two national interests are not worth warring over, but can and should be advanced through American foreign policy in other ways: (7) trade, or as they put it, “advanc[ing] a free and fair global economic system,” which may include using tariffs and other trade restrictions; and (8) democracy promotion.
On this last interest, the authors clearly back away from neoconservatism. They exclude George W. Bush from the “rough bipartisan consensus” on their description of vital US interests, criticizing that his administration “became engulfed in two open-ended nation-building operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.” But one needs an electron microscope to find any restraint in their foreign policy vision. While they brand their vision as a Reagan-Trump fusion, the restraint advocated by many “America First” Trump supporters falls by the wayside. One step away from neoconservatism, then, yields no significant improvement.
In many ways, Kroenig and Negrea’s foreign policy vision is worse, since it portends greater confrontation in precisely those areas that present the greatest danger. At least the George W. Bush and Obama administrations had the courtesy not to provoke nuclear powers, conducting unnecessary wars in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria, instead. (Although it is thanks to Bush that North Korea sought a nuclear weapon).
Rejecting the neoconservative promotion of democracy abroad by war has another hidden cost. Reagan notoriously supported right-wing dictators, including Saddam Hussein even after he used chemical weapons against Iran. Downgrading democracy on the scale of interests almost certainly will perversely result in green lighting the propping up of right-wing dictators, with all the deadly blowback and moral bankruptcy that entails.
Another crucial failure is that Kroenig and Negrea’s kitchen sink of vital interests are so broad and so malleable that they could justify any conflict in the hands of the foreign policy establishment. Every nation and every part of the globe is worth warring over if framed correctly. Applied to 2003, for instance, rather than justifying war with Iraq to promote democracy, the US would invade because Saddam was a threat to our homeland and seeks to control the Middle East, an important region rich with oil.
Additionally, any single “vital” interest could justify war. Two of Kroenig/Negrea’s and the regime’s bête noires, Iran and North Korea, could be invaded solely to advance nuclear non-proliferation. Avoiding hostile powers’ dominations of important regions could most immediately justify warring anywhere in the Middle East and against China or Russia’s attempted domination of Eastern Europe and the South China Sea, respectively. Indeed, the authors expressly define some regions that are inherently important—the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East.
Further belying any limits, the regime seemingly finds Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea behind every global development or action they oppose. Taking this to its absurd logical end, Kroenig and Negrea add virtually every other region to the list of places in which the US must counter the “malign influence” of these axis powers, revealing the elephant hidden in the mousehole of preventing regional domination.
And, as a globe-spanning superpower with hundreds of military bases throughout the world, what region does the foreign policy establishment consider unimportant? They claim “not every conflict is a vital national interest,” but you wouldn’t know it from their eye-watering list of war-worthy regions.
Defense of allies is similarly capacious. Nearly the whole of Europe is an ally through NATO, along with South Korea, Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and dozens of other countries. Some ally somewhere will always ostensibly be threatened by another power. Moreover, allies change from president to president. Thus, the whole world becomes grist for the war-machine’s mill.
Kroenig and Negrea properly locate “defense of the homeland” at the apex of their vital interest hierarchy. But even here, the foreign policy establishment could drive a truck through the loopholes the authors provide. To a neoconservative, it made perfect sense that we invaded Iraq because of 9/11, i.e., in defense of the homeland. All the Bush administration needed to do was fabricate or insinuate connections between al Qaeda, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and WMDs. Similarly, the foreign policy “blob” would consider it “defense of the homeland” to make war in Somalia to seek three terrorist suspects “wanted for questioning” in the 1998 African embassy bombings.
Further, their formulation mushrooms “defense of the homeland” to include “defend[ing] Americans and US forces when they are overseas.” In other words, our hundreds of bases around the globe are treated the same as America proper, notwithstanding that this means unrest in virtually every nation threatens to put our “homeland” at risk. For the authors, it is simply a given that US forces should be abroad, everywhere. They do not even pose the question of whether refusing to put US forces in harm’s way overseas better protects both the homeland and those military personnel. Committing to defending Americans overseas is equally broad and problematic, as World War I attests. One suspects Kroenig and Negrea, like Woodrow Wilson, take it that Americans have a God-given right to travel along with munitions into a war zone.
Kroenig and Negrea’s formulation could justify war with Russia and China thrice over: (1) Ukraine and Taiwan are important allies; (2) China and Russia are nuclear powers that cannot be trusted to manage those arsenals responsibly and are or have assisted other non-nuclear powers on their paths to developing nuclear weapons; and, (3) China and Russia each seek to dominate and spread their influence throughout the entire globe, so we must engage in every region to prevent China and Russia from dominating. This alone should provide three strikes against their scheme. No proper understanding of Americans’ interest should put the world on the perpetual brink of nuclear war, as incessant escalation against Russia and China does daily.
We Win, They Lose also fails to offer guidance on how to reconcile conflicting interests. What happens when defending the homeland conflicts with nuclear non-proliferation, defending allies, or defending a region of importance? This question is crucial, since intervention to serve the latter interests frequently results in blowback, both against US troops and Americans traveling overseas as well as in America proper. Given Kroenig and Negrea’s proclivity for escalation, the reality is that defense of the homeland is treated as inferior to other “vital” interests. Like most interventionists, Kroenig and Negrea would paper over this inconvenient fact with some version of the nostrum that “It’s better to fight them there than here,” but that brings up the all-important question: why must we be at loggerheads at all?
In the end, Kroenig and Negrea’s foreign policy is far more “Frankenstein” than a productive synthesis of Trumpian and Reaganite foreign policy. It is globe-spanning interventionism, but with different branding. It cuts off the most perverse and pernicious neoconservative justifications for war, but without shrinking the array of looming conflicts. Kroenig and Negrea seek to ground US foreign policy in the interests of the American people, but ultimately shackle those interests to the foreign policy establishment’s whims. If Trump-Reagan fusionists take the helm in a second Trump administration, stockpiling canned goods may take on a renewed importance.
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