America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

For 45 years, conservatives in the debate over U.S. foreign policy knew who they were, largely because they knew whom they opposed: communists of all kinds and liberals who advocated accommodation with the Kremlin or its minions. Now that the cold war is over, an identity crisis has conservatives arguing among themselves with a ferocity they used to reserve for their adversaries on the left.

America's Purpose (ICS Press; $19.95) culls 16 essays from the small (circ. 8,000) but influential quarterly National Interest. It was in that journal two years ago that Francis Fukuyama fretted over the "end of history" and thus provided a slogan for cold warriors' dismay at the waning of the all-defining struggle and the surrender of the essential enemy. Since then, the right has split into isolationist and internationalist camps. In the pages of this slim volume the two sides square off for intellectual combat of a high order.

Harvard professor Nathan Glazer recommends George Washington's warning against foreign entanglements as a motto for the U.S. in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Patrick J. Buchanan contends that the reds were the only bad guys worth fighting; as soon as they are licked, the U.S. should "disengage" from all remaining messes across the oceans. Ted Galen Carpenter advocates "strategic independence . . . free from the dangerous and expensive burdens of obsolete security commitments." Jeane J. Kirkpatrick sees a chance for the U.S. finally to become a "normal country in a normal time," turning inward to deal with its many problems at home.

On the other side of the new schism, Irving Kristol, a founder of neoconservatism (and of National Interest), hears in some voices of the neocon chorus "echoes of the 1930s -- echoes of nativism and xenophobia, indifference (or worse) to Nazism and fascism, broad hints of anti-Semitism." He does not name names, but he clearly has in mind Buchanan, who has created a furor by insinuating that Jews fanned the flames of the gulf war. Kristol believes that in an increasingly interdependent world, "Fortress America" is simply not an option.

Charles Krauthammer agrees, and then some. He favors nothing less than a U.S.-led "universal dominion . . . a unipolar world whose center is a confederated West." While neither he nor any of the other contributors have much good to say about the U.N., Krauthammer welcomes an incipient "new supersovereignty" embodied by cooperative international mechanisms like the Group of Seven industrial democracies. That notion sends Buchanan into fulminations two chapters later.

The editor of both the book and the journal is Owen Harries, whose background tilts him toward the internationalists. An Oxford-educated Welshman who was a professor in Australia and a diplomat in Paris before moving to Washington eight years ago, he admits he is surprised by the "strain of withdrawal" that has emerged among some of his authors.

"American conservatism is a term whose very meaning was shaped and colored by the cold war," says Harries. "Perhaps there's now a problem with the labeling." Actually, there has always been a problem. Labels foster simplistic divisions and artificial alliances. This book may mark the end of at least one brand of ideological monolithism. That's already an improvement on the end of history.