Sunday, September 14, 2003

Isolationism and the Iraq War

The national press is currently wrestling with explaining competing foreign policy ideologies, like "neo-conservatism" and "traditional conservatism" and "realism."

Trial & Error has called attention to the phenomenon of "paleo-conservatism", in this case in the person of Paul Craig Roberts.  As T&E points out, some of his polemic against Bush's foreign policy sounds like a hardcore leftwinger, though his ideology is quite conservative.

Understanding the rightwing isolationists is important, because the current foreign policy debate is giving them much broader exposure.  Another example of far-right isolationism appeared in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle, an essay by Robert Higgs.

Like the Roberts piece T&E cites, some of Higgs' article may superficially resemble liberal or "leftist" criticisms of our current foreign policy. But Higgs also demonstrates some of the most negative features of much rightwing isolationism: a deep suspicion of democracy and ordinary voters; an unhealthy confidence in the ability of authoritarian government to dupe the "ignorant" masses; a failure to distinguish between the political meanings of various wars.

I'll be very generous and says that the Higgs essay doesn't exhibit overt anti-Semitism. Although when I saw that the article used the phrase "War Party" with upper-case letters, my eyebrows went up. When the columnist and Reform Party politician Pat Buchanan uses it, it often sounds like a buzzword for "the Jews." And Higgs does present both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal as tools of Israel, so it's hard to avoid the suspicion that he may be susceptible to anti-Semitic influence.

Rightwing isolationism often winds up being roaring unilateralism with a xenophobic streak. Most critics of the Iraq War, on the other hand, are coming from some kind of internationalist and/or pragmatic-realist viewpoint. The fact that they may be on common ground at times with the isolationists is a case of "politics make strange bedfellows" on particular issues. It doesn't imply agreement on broader foreign policy outlook.

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