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A Conservative Realist Foreign Policy for the Twenty-First Century
The first two decades of the twenty-first century began with a conservative Republican administration responding to Islamic terrorist attacks on our homeland by launching a misguided Global War on Terror that attempted to reshape countries in the Middle East, including Afghanistan and Iraq, in America’s image, that was succeeded by a liberal, self-flagellating Obama administration that apologized for our past “sins” and misread the so-called “Arab Spring.” The decades ended with an Iranian-backed Islamic resurgence in the region, an Iranian-backed war against Israel, Houthi terrorists disrupting maritime traffic in and around the Red Sea, and a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan under the liberal Democratic Biden administration. And while America was distracted by these “small” wars and conflicts, both Republican and Democratic administrations, with the notable exception of the Trump administration, continued to engage China even as war clouds gathered in the South China Sea and western Pacific. Meanwhile, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 when Obama was president and in 2022 when Biden was president, and many conservatives have sided with those who seek a Ukrainian victory rather than pursuing a negotiated ceasefire. We are flirting with World War III because the United States, including some conservatives, has abandoned realism in favor of a globalist agenda.
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Foreign policy realism has a rich pedigree in the United States, beginning with George Washington, who as president skillfully kept us out of the wars raging in Europe in the late eighteenth century, and who in his Farewell Address urged his countrymen to provide for a strong national defense, avoid permanent alliances, eschew sentiment in conducting relations with other nations, and look always to our own national interests. It has been when presidents have abandoned realism that our interests have suffered, as before and during the War of 1812, when the Jefferson and Madison administrations underfunded our Navy and nearly committed us to wars against both Great Britain and France simultaneously. The British won early victories and burned the nation’s capital during the War of 1812, but fortunately events on the European continent intervened to save us from our abandonment of realism.
This article is taken from The American Spectator’s fall 2024 print magazine. Subscribe to receive the entire magazine.
The Monroe administration, led by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, returned to realism by reaching détente with Great Britain, acquiring Florida from Spain, promoting Manifest Destiny at home, and formulating the Monroe Doctrine, which informed the European powers that the Western Hemisphere was off-limits to further colonization by them. And it was John Quincy Adams who famously uttered the realist testament that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy” but is “the well-wisher of freedom and liberty to all” and “the champion and vindicator only of her own.” As Angelo Codevilla explained in his last book, America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft From John Quincy Adams, all the succeeding American presidents up to and including Theodore Roosevelt were nationalists and foreign policy realists. But beginning with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, successive American presidents, with the exceptions of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Donald Trump, abandoned realism and conducted “progressive” or “neoconservative” foreign policies that substituted globalism for realist-nationalism.
The globalists, with their newspapers, opinion magazines, and esteemed foreign policy journals like Foreign Affairs, the Economist, the Financial Times, and the New York Times, and international organizations like the World Economic Forum and the United Nations, have attempted to malign Trump and other realist-nationalists as “isolationists” or promoters of autocracy. The globalists focus on “global governance,” climate change, economic interdependence, the equal distribution of wealth, and view narrow national interests as parochial and unworthy of serious consideration when it comes to conducting foreign policy. They view Trump’s “America First” movement as a product of uneducated, unsophisticated, and uncaring isolationists. If America withdraws from the world, they warn, other less benign powers will take its place, resulting in the end of their cherished “rules-based international order.”
Conservative realist-nationalism, however, is not isolationist and does not seek to have America withdraw from the world. On the contrary, conservative realist-nationalists recognize the importance of global geopolitics to U.S. national security. They understand that U.S. national security depends, for example, on the continued geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia: that it is imperative that no one power or alliance of enemy powers achieves effective political control of the key power centers of the Eurasian landmass. Nicholas Spykman, George Kennan, Walter Lippmann, James Burnham, Henry Kissinger, and other American realists understood this. That is why, ever since the end of the Cold War, conservative realists-nationalists have warned against pursuing global policies — like the enlargement of NATO — that would bring China and Russia geopolitically closer than at any time since the early 1950s.
But those conservative realist-nationalists also had a tragic sense of the limits of American power. Conservative realist-nationalists opposed the George W. Bush administration’s efforts to promote democracy throughout the Middle East and beyond. One would have hoped that the tragic history of the twentieth century would have disabused our leaders of the Wilsonian notion that the United States can reshape other nations in our image. Those American leaders and statesmen who abandoned realism lacked what Robert Kaplan calls the “tragic mind” — the sense that things can always be worse than they are; the sense that order, however flawed, is usually better than chaos; the sense that ideas of “right” and “wrong” and “morality” cannot be so readily applied to international politics; the sense that tragedy is the norm in human affairs; the sense that stability and order are fragile things that need nurturing; and the sense that human nature cannot be reshaped by superior power or superior ideas.
The prolific British historian Niall Ferguson shares Kaplan’s sense of the tragic and views the Donald Trump–J.D. Vance foreign policy approach as a “return of realism to the Republican Party” and “a long overdue response to the strategic overreach encouraged in the neoconservative era.” Ferguson believes, for example, that the U.S. should work to end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East so that it can focus resources and attention on China’s threat in the Indo-Pacific. In other words, the center of geopolitical gravity in the early twenty-first century is the Indo-Pacific, and we must prioritize that region in our foreign policy.
Another conservative realist-nationalist, Elbridge Colby, who served as assistant secretary of defense in the Trump administration and who will likely play a major role in a second Trump administration, has been sounding the alarm about China for many years now. Colby understands that China is a much greater threat to U.S. security than Russia, and he further understands that diverting defense resources to Ukraine and elsewhere lessens our ability to deter China from invading or blockading Taiwan. Colby approaches foreign policy with Lippmann-esque realism; he believes an effective foreign policy needs to align commitments with limited resources. That means a realistic prioritizing of security interests — and the threat from China comes first.
James Fanell and Bradley Thayer, in their new book, Embracing China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure, argue that the United States needs a “new national security elite that understands power politics and why the distribution of power is the engine of international politics.” They call for a whole-of-government approach to the China threat — similar to the way we approached the Soviet Union during the Cold War. We need China experts who not only know China’s strengths and weaknesses, but who also understand Chinese tactics and strategic doctrine so that we may design our force structure and strategy to deter China and, if necessary, defeat China if war breaks out.
Art by Bill Wilson
Michael Sobolik, who previously worked for Senator Ted Cruz and is now a senior fellow in Indo-Pacific Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, has written a similar work titled Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance, in which he contends that we can win Cold War II against China by “target[ing] the roots of China’s weaknesses” in the same way the Reagan administration targeted Soviet weaknesses in the 1980s. This same argument was made a few years ago by Toshi Yoshihara and Jack Bianchi of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in a report titled “Seizing On Weakness: Allied Strategy for Competing With China’s Globalizing Military.” Reagan was the consummate conservative realist-nationalist who used economic, psychological, political, and military power to defeat the Soviet empire without war. It was arguably the greatest geopolitical achievement in our nation’s history. But Sobolik, Fanell, Thayer, Colby, Yoshihara, Bianchi, and other realists know that China poses a greater and more multi-dimensional threat than the Soviet Union ever did.
Conservative realist-nationalists do not want war with China — no one in their right mind does. How to defeat our main enemy without war is the great foreign policy challenge of the early twenty-first century. Henry Kissinger argued that the end of Cold War I began with President Nixon’s opening to China and triangular diplomacy, which brilliantly exploited an already growing Sino–Soviet split. Nixon, also a consummate realist, understood that the Vietnam War was draining American resources and dividing our society, and therefore settled for an imperfect end to the war so that he could pursue larger, more important geopolitical gains. Nixon had a “tragic mind.” So, too, did Kissinger. Neither statesman let the ideal of perfection stand in the way of concrete geopolitical achievement. In international politics, the choices are often between two evils. But what must inform such choices is the national interest. Not the interests of “mankind.” Not the interests of the “global community.” Not even the interests of our allies. American interests must come first. That is not isolationist, it is realist.
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