The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Former Republican senator from Missouri, John Danforth, recently wrote, “Since the end of World War II, Republicans have stood firm against Russian designs in Europe.  Now, populists have injected an isolationist element into the party.”  The Economist also observed that “in place of a foreign policy that saw America as a protector of freedom and democracy is a new doctrine of America First that shuns allies (barring Israel) and would give up on the Ukrainians fighting off a Russian invasion even when no American soldiers are at risk . . . Although [Ronald] Reagan remains beatified within the party, the institutions he was aligned with have changed.”  The party now stands for protectionism, isolationism and nativism.

Paul Gigot, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editor, has recently published a critically important challenge to the Republican party on its drift towards a policy of isolationism.  I will quote extensively from this important essay.

• “Progressives—God bless them—believe that the arc of the moral universe is long and bends toward justice, as Barack Obama liked to quote Martin Luther King Jr. Sometimes it does, but not without much human agency. Progressives believe that human nature can be molded like soft clay. Conservatives, on the other hand, believe in—well, we believe in human nature. We know that things can get worse, and they probably will. The essayist Joseph Epstein reviewed a book in the Journal some years ago about pessimism, and the headline summed up a certain conservative disposition: Upbeat pessimism, he called it. The world may get better, but you better not count on it.”
• “With upbeat pessimism in mind, I want to address one of our current troubles, which is urgent but also solvable. That is the decline of America’s defenses—military and political. This weakness has been exposed in sharp relief in the last two years, and it is worse than most Americans know. We face an array of adversaries more formidable than at any time since World War II, and we aren’t prepared for the moment.”

1. “The war in Ukraine has taught us that our defense production lines are inadequate. Our long-range antiship missile stocks would run out in a week in a war over Taiwan. We trail Russia and China on hypersonic weapons.”
2. “The Navy’s attack submarines are the best deterrent we have against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The Navy says it needs 66 hulls, yet only 31 were ‘operationally ready’ this past fiscal year. To satisfy the Navy’s needs, and meet our commitments under the Aukus accords, we would have to build an average of at least 2.3 subs a year. We are building 1.2.”

• “The relevant questions are: How did we get here? And what to do about it?  The answer to the first question is that we forgot the lesson of history. One of my military mentors was Andy Marshall, the legendary Pentagon strategist, who liked to say that peace is best understood as an interlude between wars. Robert Gates issued a similar warning as he retired as defense secretary in 2011 when he said that, when wars end, the U.S. always makes the mistake of drawing down defenses and leaving ourselves vulnerable. We ignored him.  So what do we do about it? The obvious initial answer is to spend more on defense, and soon. But that is the easy part; we know the policy solution. The harder issue is finding the political will to do it, while persuading adversaries that we are credible enough to restore American deterrence. As we have learned in Ukraine and now in the Middle East, U.S. deterrence has faded. And the world’s rogues are on the march.”
• “On this score, my worry is less about the political left than some of our friends on the right. Modern progressives will always put the welfare state above defenses because that is their governing model and ideology. They believe in the restraining power of international treaties and arms control. They believe adversaries will be deterred by America’s forbearance and good example. They will never rebuild our defenses without pressure from the political right. What worries me these days is the lack of unity and resolve on the right. That includes the return of conservative isolationism. The proponents of this view would not identify themselves with that term, but the policies they espouse justify it . . . What is most striking is how much this isolationism of the right resembles the traditional isolationism of the left. Isolationists in the Vietnam era argued that America wasn’t good enough for the world. We were baby killers and imperialists. This is the view of today’s pro-Hamas left . . . But the new isolationists on the right now agree with the left that the U.S. doesn’t deserve to lead the world. They say we are too degraded culturally and too weak fiscally to play the role we did during the Cold War. They say we are too woke and too broke.”

1. “The fiscal objection is simply false. Defense spending is at an historic post-World War II low as a share of the economy. We can afford to spend more on defense even at our present level of national debt. In two years alone the Biden Democrats spent $11.6 trillion on things other than defense. We can make spending choices. Yet the same conservatives who say we can’t spend more on defense because we are broke also say we can’t reform entitlements because it is too difficult. This is political surrender. It is exactly the corner that Barack Obama and the left have wanted to back us into.”
2. “We have also been here before with the military. In the 1970s, after Vietnam, morale and recruiting hit a low point. But an officer corps that included Colin Powell and Jack Keane helped to revive the esprit and the reputation of the armed forces. Within a decade the military of dope and defeat was the military of ‘Top Gun.’ Today the Marines are still meeting their recruiting quotas by resisting identity politics and putting sacrifice and discipline first.”

• “But we are not nation-building in Israel or Ukraine. Israel is trying to preserve itself as a nation. Ukrainians are fighting to preserve their nascent democracy and join the West. It is more than a little ironic that the same people who criticize the intervention in Iraq for seeking to promote democracy now criticize aid to Ukraine because it isn’t a perfect democracy.  As Arthur Herman has pointed out, in Israel and Ukraine we are also defending Western civilization. Israel is an outpost of the West, a descendant of the heritage of Athens and Jerusalem, among neighbors who would destroy it precisely because of that heritage. Ukraine aspires to be the same. In helping them defend themselves, we are defending our founding principles. And we are helping them with weapons, not with American troops.”
• “Which brings me to the politics of isolationism. History shows it is a political loser for whichever party adopts it. In the 1930s the Republicans resisted what they called foreign entanglements. Even as Hitler rose in Germany and the militarists rose in Japan, Sen. Gerald Nye and other Republicans devoted their energy to investigating U.S. weapons makers. They voted for the Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936 and 1937. They even opposed Lend-Lease to Britain.  When the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, Republicans were discredited politically for a decade. It might have been longer if they hadn’t nominated Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.  Democrats suffered a similar fate after they became the party of “come home, America” during and after Vietnam. They slashed aid to South Vietnam in 1975, and Saigon fell within weeks. Democratic hawks became Republican neoconservatives, and Republicans dominated the White House for a generation until the end of the Cold War.  Republicans are inviting a similar fate now if they abandon Ukraine to Russia. Or if they withdraw from NATO. Or if they signal to China that Taiwan is too distant to defend. The disorder that results from that abdication will be blamed on those who refused to deter it—and America will eventually be drawn into conflicts as a result of that disorder.”

Do you want it to be the 1930s, when America watched from afar as dictators began to march? We pretended we were safe, only to be attacked with our guard down. It took four years and 400,000 dead Americans to win World War II. This isn’t yet the 1930s, but they will arrive soon enough on our present course.  Or would you prefer this time to be like the 1970s and 1980s, when the American right, LED BY Ronald Reagan, united behind a mission of rearmament, economic revival and renewed national purpose? When we won the Cold War and ushered in two decades of prosperity.

See John C. Danforth in the Wall Street Journal (26 September 2023); The Economist (28 October 2023), pp. 26-28; and Paul A. Gigot, “The Return of the Isolationist Republicans” in the Wall Street Journal (11 November 2023).