Catholic and Enjoying It!
There are two emotive responses that arise in the heart of a conservative when he considers foreign lands with alien ways:
a) A bored apathy, summed up by Nancy Mitford’s line: “Abroad is bloody, and foreigners are fiends.” This is the instinct on which old-fashioned isolationism relies.
b) An arrogant impulse to take up “the White Man’s Burden” and reshape those unruly foreigners in our image.
The default position of most conservatives is apathy, but it only takes a terrorist attack or some threat to one of the many imperial outposts we planted (of necessity) during the Cold War to move most of us instantly to arrogance. In 1991, and again in 2001, Buchanan and his supporters tried to arrest this natural movement — and failed. That’s no surprise; as it’s typically phrased, position a) invariably sounds like cynical selfishness, and is prone to caricature as short-sighted and finally suicidal. Position b), on the other hand, is easy to dress up in the rhetoric of idealism and inflate with ambitious slogans that appeal to our “can-do” spirit. Gosh darn it, if we can put a man on the moon, we sure can . . . fill in the blank. Build a Great Society on the banks of the Mekong River. Democratize the Dar al-Islam. Turn Somalia into Switzerland.
What we need is to recast our opposition to foreign adventurism in principles that appeal to deeper strains in American culture — for instance, in the humility that is demanded of every Christian. (George W. Bush used such language in the 2000 campaign; the only problem was that he was lying.) Conservatives, even those who haven’t found God, believe in original sin, and that’s one tenet they share with those of us who sing “Amazing Grace.” If instead of casting ourselves as Machiavellian “realists,” or self-serving America-Firsters, we used the language of humility, we might be able to gain some purchase with voters the next time a foreign policy crisis emerges.
Imagine (I can dream, can’t I?) President Rand Paul addressing a joint session of the U.S. Congress, responding to a terrorist attack. He could lay out the suitable measures for increased domestic security, the retaliatory strikes we would undertake against guilty parties, then end with a humble, Christian admission that even we Americans are bound by human limitations, that we cannot reshape thousands of years of culture with a few years of military occupation, and because of that, he will not commit our soldiers and our budget to open-ended attempts to remake other civilizations in our own, imperfect image. Such rhetoric has at least a fighting chance of avoiding another disaster like Iraq; it has the added advantage of being true.
Of course, this will never happen. The Evil Stupid party and Stupid Evil Party are solidly committed to the proposition that every war we undertake is World War II, the Crusades, and the Battle Between St. Michael and the Dragon rolled into one. Any appeals to common sense or just war doctrine will be shouted down as cowardice, American Hatred, and all the usual hysteria will be deployed–till the country final collapses under the sheer unsustainability of Bill Kristol levels of prophetic delusion. We will continue to believe that if force fails, that’s because we used insufficient levels of force.
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