Politics It Has Always Been About Foreign Policy Movement conservatism’s excommunications have always centered on one set of issues. When Murray Rothbard passed away in January of 1995, William F. Buckley Jr. obituarized him in National Review, excommunicating the libertarian and his followers one final time. “Yes, Murray Rothbard believed in freedom, and yes, David Koresh believed in God,” he remarked acidly.  Rothbard’s sins according to Buckley? He cites Rothbard’s disdain for a joke Buckley made about privatizing lighthouses, and also a scrupulosity that brought him to denounce such beloved figures as “Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and — yes — Newt Gingrich.” Mea culpa! Mea culpa! How dare we critique the great Milton Friedman or Newt Gingrich? But among other denunciations is Buckley’s account of Rothbard rushing out to applaud Nikita Khrushchev on one of his visits to President Dwight Eisenhower, insinuating one last time that Rothbard was in bed with or insufficiently hostile to the communists. Rothbard remembered this differently; he hoped for peace talks between the two world leaders, and was shocked by the militant opposition National Review had to meeting the “butcher of Ukraine.” There’s more than meets the eye to the differences between Buckley and Rothbard, particularly the memory of this episode. Rothbard alleged that the modus operandi of fusionism and especially National Review was to excommunicate the non-interventionist right from the mainstream of American conservatism. Little has changed. It appears that today’s attempted Buckleyite and neoconservative excommunications are less because of bigotry or conspiracism, but more because of foreign policy.  National Review quickly went to bat against the non-interventionists of the Cold War from its founding.  John T. Flynn had been one of the most popular writers opposed to Franklin Roosevelt and leader of the New York chapter of the America First Committee. He had begun as a progressive and turned rightward. He began to denounce communism and socialism in the United States, but he did not fall into lockstep with the post-war Cold Warrior consensus.  Rothbard recounts in his The Betrayal of the American Right that Flynn submitted an article to Buckley, criticizing the militarism of the Cold War as a continuation of the corrupt New Deal system and Roosevelt’s foreign policy. Buckley sent the article back, telling the veteran Old Rightist that he did not comprehend the danger of the Soviet Union adequately; he included a $100 check. Flynn sent the money back. National Review also soon began to enforce an orthodoxy about American-Israeli relations. In an article in the November 1956 edition, defending America against the accusation that segregation would reflect on the nation internationally, Guy Ponce de Leon included a line that caught the eye of the University of Chicago’s Leo Strauss: “Even the Jews, themselves the victims of the most notorious racial discrimination of modern times, did not hesitate to create the first racist state in history.” Strauss sent NR Editor Willmoore Kendall a letter defending the Jewish state as an exemplar of conservative principles, despite its politics at the time being dominated by Labor Zionists. National Review never allowed severe criticism of the state of Israel to grace its pages again. (James Burnham would argue at times that Middle East policy should not be oriented around it, but nobody was able to tell Burnham off.) National Review was a publication not dedicated to the Cold War’s liberal containment, but rather by confrontation and rollback. Often forgotten are James Burnham’s arguments for limited nuclear warfare against Russia. Sam Tanenhaus in his authorized biography of Buckley documents National Review’s faux Pentagon Papers in order to counter anti-Vietnam War sentiment. Buckley and National Review had cooked up their own version of the Pentagon Papers in an attempt to undercut the loss of morale around the war, as well as to suggest the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia. But, of course, the excommunication of the John Birch Society is cited as the shining moment of Buckley’s career. There, we are told, conservatism excised the antisemites and the conspiracy cranks. Never mind that Ludwig von Mises was on the Editorial Board of the Society’s publication, American Opinion, and would defend Welch to Buckley.  The reality is much more revealing of Buckley’s priorities. In 1962, anticipating Barry Goldwater’s eventual presidential run, Buckley, William Rusher (then National Review’s publisher), and Russell Kirk helped the senator from Arizona plan how to handle the popularity of the JBS. They feared that some of Welch’s more outlandish claims—that Eisenhower was a conscious communist agent, for example—and the group’s crusade against Earl Warren’s Supreme Court would rub off poorly on Goldwater. They decided upon a denouncement of Welch and a subsequent letter by Goldwater distancing him from the Society’s leader while not accusing the average Bircher of being a kook. Buckley declared victory (although Goldwater in the end did not). But the number of Birchers would continue to grow, even drawing in Buckley’s own mother. Soon they provoked Buckley once more. By 1965, Welch and the Birchers were claiming that the Vietnam War was a communist plot to distract from an internal subversion by communists in the federal government. While this was a stretch, to say the least, the dissent on the Vietnam issue was unacceptable to Buckley. Aided this time by the former (or “former”) CIA man and senior editor Burnham, Buckley dedicated an issue of National Review to the Bircher question.  Frank Meyer in his column declared that the conspiratorial mind of Welch was “why the patriotic and anti-Communist followers of the Birch Society are now, in the Vietnam crisis, being lined up by its leadership directly in opposition to the interests of the United States and to the struggle against Communism.” Burnham himself, who had held off from the first round of attacks against the John Birch Society, dedicated his column––Third World War––to attacking Welch for his position on Vietnam. The mastermind behind National Review’s foreign policy had never been a fan of Goldwater, always being more of a Rockefeller Republican. But the John Birch Society’s new stand against the Vietnam War (“Get US out!” their publications and billboards cried) bothered Burnham: “Its stand on Vietnam confirms, not for the first time, that any American who seriously wants to contribute to his country’s security and well-being and to oppose Communism will have to stay clear of the JBS.” The issue also featured letters from Goldwater, Sen. John Tower, and Russell Kirk denouncing the Society. National Review’s dedication to the Vietnam War led it to expel the John Birch Society once and for all. Buckley would denounce even his own disciples, like Gary Wills, for opposition to the Vietnam War.  The magazine’s interventionist line was not limited to Vietnam. Later, the Manhattan Twelve—the alliance of Buckley, Burnham, Meyer, and other fusionist hawks—revoked National Review’s support for President Nixon. Their contention was that Nixon had opened talks with Communist China and was thus insufficiently hawkish. (Nixon’s failed price controls would come after the Manhattan Twelve issued their documents.) Skepticism of American involvement with Israel met similar punishment. Buckley’s rambling monograph In Search of Antisemitism would give ground for the media and neoconservatives to attack Pat Buchanan for his criticism of the Israel lobby in the United States. Even if one holds that Buckley did not intend to excommunicate Buchanan, he certainly laid the groundwork for the neoconservatives to finish the job. National Review’s “Unpatriotic Conservatives” condemned those members of the right who were skeptical of the American war in Iraq. At every turn, the fusionist excommunications have been primarily over the issue of foreign policy. Everything else takes the back seat. Buckley declared in 1952 that “we have to accept Big Government for the duration [of the Cold War]—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged . . . except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.” For a man who styled himself a conservative, a libertarian, and an individualist at different moments of his life, he seemed more than willing to sacrifice members of his movement on the altar of confronting the Soviet Union.  Today the story repeats itself. At every turn, the excommunications always demand we excommunicate those who maintain opposition to foreign wars (today, most often Israel’s wars). Dave Smith, the libertarian comedian, is cast out because of his lack of credentials to speak about foreign policy––unlike Douglas Murray, with his bachelors in English and his guided IDF tours. Tucker Carlson, the most vocal and popular of restrainer voices, “platforms” evil people—never mind that he pushes back on them, he doesn’t do it adequately––and so has become an “antisemite.” Some have begun to turn on J.D. Vance for his anti-interventionist views, playing games of guilt by association for his friendship with Carlson to try to get rid of the vice president.  The great excommunicators are out once more to defend the establishment’s hawkish foreign policy. They may pretend it is over bigotry, but every excommunication always focuses upon those who express skepticism of war. It has always been about foreign policy. The post It Has Always Been About Foreign Policy appeared first on The American Conservative.