The National Interest
Spring 2001

The Guns of 17th Street

by Jonathan Clarke

 

. . . Conservative critics who have enjoyed easy pickings with Clinton's mediocre performance now face a more demanding challenge. As with the liberals following Richard Nixon's 1962 defeat in California, conservatives no longer have their favorite Aunt Sally to kick around. Instead they have power. Having for eight years bemoaned the administration's incompetence from the bleachers, they now sit in the coach's booth.

It is already clear that Republicans do not have a coherent game plan. Apart from a generic feeling that an expanded national missile defense is a good idea and that more military spending is needed, there is wide divergence on specifics, including the top-tier questions like China and Russia. At the risk of generalizing, it is possible to discern two major strands of thought. The first is the one whose proponents are now settling into actual jobs: pragmatic, non-ideological "realists", represented by the well-known figures of past Republican administrations whose views found expression in then-candidate George W. Bush's November 2000 speech on "A Distinctly American Internationalism." The second is a Young Turk school of "hegemonists", whose objective is to complete on a global scale what they regard as the American Cold War triumph over the Soviet Union. Both strands are internationalist in orientation and favor a strong global role for the United States. As such they entirely eclipse a third strand, isolationism, which has lost its former salience and whose advocates have now either left the Republican Party or have negligible influence. . . .

With Clintonism now fading into the archives, the book's chief interest lies less in its dissection of the past than in its prescriptions of how the authors will right the deficiencies they discern. Commendably, they do not shy away from the logic of their arguments. They advocate clear and robust options. Nor do they conceal the budgetary implications of their recommendations: a $60 billion to $100 billion increase in annual defense spending. The proposals for increased military appropriations and national missile defense coincide with early Bush administration ideas—although Bush has indicated that he may move less aggressively on the former than many had supposed. Other ideas, particularly in the sphere of regional activism, go beyond the emerging sense of caution. Given that the book contains many trenchant criticisms of earlier Republican policies (Nixon is dismissed for wanting to "coexist" with the Soviet Union; George Bush's post-Desert Storm policy is rejected as "absurd"; Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison's views on force deployment are characterized as "mistaken"), it may engender some fratricidal sparks. It may be that some of its contributors are now anxiously searching the text lest some superheated phrase has cost them hope of preferment. . . .