Theodore Roosevelt saw the storm coming.
The former president and soldier, exiled from circles of elite influence after his insurgent campaign in the 1912 election divided Republicans and gave the White House to Woodrow Wilson, urged his Democratic rival in 1914 to declare diplomatic support for Britain and bolster the capacities of the U.S. military. America’s European allies were increasingly nervous about the ambitions of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany. Si vis pacem, para bellum: "if you want peace, prepare for war."
Committed to peace and neutrality, Wilson declined to line up with Britain and France and instead clung to the hope that America could "play a part of impartial mediation." Germany invaded Belgium and France in August of that year. Peace was squandered.
Wilson "eschewed concrete proposals in favor of gauzy language" and thereby "plunged America into endless commitments and a century of war," writes Angelo Codevilla in To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations. For Codevilla, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, the debate between Roosevelt and Wilson represents an "enduring divide" in American foreign policy.
"Internationalists" such as Wilson aligned America’s interests with the world’s but were often not prepared to back up their commitments with diplomacy and force. Roosevelt’s camp, by contrast, focused on America’s national interest and developed the resources necessary to achieve it. In Codevilla’s view, statecraft is the art of defining an acceptable version of peace and tailoring the means available to that end. Few American leaders since Roosevelt have achieved that balance, he argues.
Codevilla appeals to Christian theology and natural law to assert that the pursuit of peace should be government’s top priority, before proceeding to offer his own narrative history of the country’s foreign policy.
George Washington, John Quincy Adams, and Roosevelt are his archetypes for a foreign policy properly aimed at peace and order. Washington famously advised having "as little political connection as possible" to America’s trading partners, and warned that sympathizing with favored nations could ensnare the United States in foreign conflicts and incite domestic strife. Adams "established paradigms of statesmanship that endured to the end of the nineteenth century," Codevilla says. While he believed in ensuring the freedom of the seas, Adams cautioned against intervening in foreign "wars of interest and intrigue." The Monroe Doctrine, authored by Adams when he was secretary of state, epitomized his belief that America would attain peace by staying out of others’ quarrels and preventing foreign nations from interfering in ours.
Roosevelt’s admonition to Wilson that America’s leaders must match a commitment to peace with the military capacity to secure it—avoiding the combination of "the unbridled tongue with the unready hand"—could just as easily be applied to his cousin Franklin. Codevilla notes that FDR failed to provide diplomatic backing to France when Hitler invaded the Rhineland in 1936 and violated the Versailles Treaty. Despite Japan’s seizure of Chinese territory in 1937, he refused to station forces in Guam and the Philippines to deter further escalation. Had FDR pressed a vulnerable Stalin when the United States did finally enter the war, Codevilla suggests, the Communist leader might have relinquished more territory in a post-war settlement.
The Cold War period and beyond is when American foreign policy really begins to go off course for Codevilla. Liberal internationalists, realists, and neoconservatives are all assailed in turn as adherents of Wilsonianism—an inability to match means with ends. Progressive internationalists too often relied on a feckless United Nations to fulfill utopian dreams of world peace, while realists like George Kennan and Henry Kissinger backed half-hearted war efforts in Korea and Vietnam and, at other times, fruitless accommodation with the Soviet Union. By treating the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq as democracy-promotion exercises rather than limited, purposeful wars, neoconservatives sowed more anti-Americanism in the region and failed to convince regimes to crackdown on terrorist groups within their borders. "Wars are to be avoided or to be won quickly" is Codevilla’s mantra.
What is his prescription for restoring a foreign policy that secures peace? Better leadership. America needs statesmen who "cast aside pretenses of shaping mankind" and can distinguish "our business" from "their business." Such leaders would reaffirm America’s unique identity by declaring neutrality toward other nations, but, if threatened by foreign aggressors, wage "war as terribly decisive as we can make it." Building strong missile defenses would earn America respect in negotiations and align means with ends.
While Codevilla’s promotion of armed diplomacy and intensive research on the Founders are commendable, his analysis of American foreign policy since the Cold War has significant shortcomings. He is oddly reticent to discuss the collapse of the Soviet Union. That occurred in large part due to enormous U.S. military expenditures and relentless attempts to contain communism in overseas conflicts—some, like Korea and Vietnam, with deeply unsatisfying results. Codevilla claims that "the American people recoil at the notion of being ‘the world’s policemen,’" but it was it was the long-term American strategy of containment—buttressed by the moral authority derived from the support of regimes friendly to democracy—that ultimately succeeded in defeating the Russians.
As Brookings Institution senior fellow Robert Kagan wrote in an essay for the New Republic last year, the United States constructed a liberal world order and an "unprecedented era of peace and prosperity" in the Cold War period through a "forward-leaning posture" that rarely produced clean victories:
World order maintenance requires operating in the gray areas between victory and defeat. The measure of success is often not how wonderful the end result is, but whether the unsatisfying end result is better or worse than the outcome if there had been no action. To insist on outcomes that always achieve maximum ends at minimal cost is yet another form of escapism.
Codevilla prefers swift, decisive wars or no war at all, but military engagements rarely allow for that outcome. In the Iraq War, for example—whether one agrees with the initial decision to invade or not—it seems unlikely that a rapid pullout after the toppling of Saddam Hussein (an option Codevilla suggests) would have prevented another safe haven for terrorists from developing. It was the surge strategy and American troop presence—again, a police action—that produced a relative degree of peace in Iraq before the ill-timed withdrawal of all U.S. forces in 2011.
The rise of the Islamic State, fueled in part by the chaotic civil war in neighboring Syria, has forced President Obama to dispatch more than 3,000 U.S. troops back to Iraq. Codevilla insists that the Syrian war is "their business" because helping to remove dictator Bashar al-Assad would empower Islamist insurgents. Yet if U.S. officials had adopted a forward presence earlier in the conflict and armed the nationalist rebels battling Assad, as well as left a residual force in Iraq, the Islamic State’s spread might have been stymied.
Contentions aside, Codevilla nonetheless adds another important contribution to the task of crafting a new conservative foreign policy consensus in the wake of the Obama era of retrenchment. Conservative thinkers have long proffered a wealth of domestic policy ideas without the correspondent focus on foreign policy. But Republican leaders can now consult Codevilla’s pursuit of peace and calibration of means and ends, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephen’s "broken windows" doctrine of placing more cops on the beat in global hotspots, and Kagan’s proposal that U.S. officials tend the "fragile democratic garden" of the liberal world order by persistently cutting back the "weeds" of revanchism, authoritarianism, and selfish human nature.
Jeb, Ted, Marco: Take note.