 The title of my talk tonight is a foreign policy for a republic, and that's a shorthand way of addressing the issue of what kind of foreign policy is appropriate for a constitutional republic based on the principles of limited government and individual rights. And I would argue that it is just as important for the government of such a republic to conduct itself in an appropriate manner internationally as it is for it to conduct itself appropriately in terms of domestic policy. That, unfortunately, I think is a point that eludes many people, even those who say that they are committed to the values of limited government. It even seems to elude some who term themselves libertarians. Give you one example, an encounter I had a few months ago with a staff member on Capitol Hill who described himself as a libertarian conservative, but he proceeded to defend at least in a limited fashion foreign aid. I found that rather curious, and I asked him why. Why would you justify taking American tax dollars and sending them overseas? And he said, well, foreign aid really acts as a cushion for a lot of third world societies. That it takes away some of the pain of the poverty. It gives them an opportunity perhaps to develop to progress economically. And if we don't do that, the degree of disorder in the world is going to increase the likelihood of aggression and perhaps even aggression directed at the United States. And I then responded, would you then support a government directed anti-poverty program here in the United States directed at the inner cities to pacify the populations there, to ease the pain of their suffering, which is often very real. Because if we don't do so, the crime rate is going to go up. And that crime could be directed at us. No one who would call himself a libertarian or even a hyphenated libertarian conservative would advocate such a program. And yet internationally, that kind of policy was deemed quite respectable. We must focus not only on the international consequences of U.S. foreign policy. And we have now had nearly a century of a highly interventionist foreign policy. I think only the two decades between the two world wars were a partial exception to that. But we've seen a rising tide of an activist interventionist U.S. foreign policy that has, I would argue, created at least as many problems in the international system as it has solved. But it's not just the international consequences that are disturbing. We also need to look at the domestic consequences. In that respect, Robert Higgs, with his book Crisis and Leviathan published now a decade ago, really provided some path-breaking analysis. Because the conventional wisdom, I think, almost across the political spectrum was that the growth of government power in the United States was due largely to domestic matters, particularly the explosion of power during the New Deal period to an important extent as well with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Higgs questioned that. He acknowledged that the New Deal was important in terms of the growth of governmental power. But he also said there were two other very important episodes, in some ways perhaps even more important. And that was the mobilization for World War I and the even more comprehensive mobilization for the Second World War. What his analysis showed is that government power increased almost exponentially with the First World War. And although that power then receded once the war ended, there was nevertheless an important residue of power that remained. In other words, the size and scope of government did not retreat to what it had been prior to World War I. The same phenomenon occurs again in World War II to an even more severe extent. This is a point that is now acknowledged, I think, far more than it used to be. David Brinkley in his account of Washington in World War II makes the rather startling admission for a liberal that the great consolidation of federal power occurred not during the New Deal, but during World War II. And he was quite correct. We come up with rather startling examples of how much of a residue of the successive power remained long after the the wars that that gave rise to them were over. I wonder how many people, for example, realize that when President Richard Nixon imposed wage and price controls in 1971, he did so under the authority allegedly granted by the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. That's how it came back to haunt Americans many decades later. We have the income tax withholding provision, which does so much to disguise the total cost of government and the total burden on American taxpayers, this almost painless extraction of wealth from taxpayers. That was a temporary measure adopted during the Second World War. We see the growth of the imperial presidency. It would have astonished constitutional scholars as little as a half century ago to hear the assertion that the military forces of the United States are the personal property of the president to send wherever he wishes, whenever he wishes, for whatever purpose he alone deems appropriate. Again, today that is regarded almost as the conventional wisdom. That is very much a product of our interventionist foreign policy. In my research for the captive press book, I was surprised at the number of ways in which important First Amendment rights were constricted in the name of national security, and I went in with the suspicion that I was going to find a great deal of evidence, but frankly I was astonished at how much I found that a degree of public debate on important defense and foreign policy issues that would have been regarded as routine in America a few decades ago would now be highly controversial and raise questions about whether it would jeopardize national security. That is what we have from the two world wars and the garrison state that grew up to wage the Cold War. That is the heritage of an interventionist foreign policy. There are a lot of people on the political right in particular who contend, well, yes, this may be true. This is really an aberration because of the two world wars and the long Cold War, but now that the Cold War has come to an end, America will gradually drift back toward normality. Well, that's certainly possible. One can hope so, but I must say the early evidence at least is not all that encouraging. If one examines the principal schools of thought in foreign policy, the ones that dominate the debate to this point during the initial years of the post Cold War era, that evidence is not very encouraging at all. Two of those schools of thought are absolutely dreadful in terms of furthering the values of a constitutional republic and one is at least highly imperfect. Let's take a look at the first contender and that is the policy essentially that we're pursuing now, which I have termed the Cold War plus foreign policy. Now, if you ever get involved in debates within the foreign policy community and this is something I really wouldn't wish on my worst enemies, but if you have to do so, what you encounter immediately is a tremendous gap between rhetoric and substance. Most practitioners in the foreign policy community will say that, oh yes, the Cold War coming to an end really transformed international affairs. Everything is different. But when you examine the substance of the policy they advocate, you come up with a very different conclusion. A few weeks ago I had an encounter with a foreign policy expert at a Washington based think tank that shall remain nameless, although it purports to emphasize America's heritage. And this institute insists that it is developing a foreign policy quite different from Cold War policy and really attuned to the world today. I said, all right, fine. Let's get down to specifics. Since I have an interest in America's alliances, what alliances can we jettison? Can we get rid of NATO, for example? After all, this was an alliance created in the late 1940s so that the U.S. could help guard a devastated and demoralized Western Europe from an aggressively expansionist totalitarian power of the Soviet Union. Today the Soviet Union has disintegrated. The member states of the European Union collectively have an economy of about seven and a half trillion dollars a year. The size of the Russian economy is at best about six hundred billion. The European Union has twice the population of the Russian Federation, so I assume the Western Europeans can take care of their own security, right? Oh no, we can't get rid of NATO. Absolutely not. This is the keystone of America's security system. Indeed, NATO is and you will hear this refrain in the news media incessantly more important than ever before. So I decided to move to the other side of the world. All right, how about the alliance with Japan? Japan is the world's number two economic power, certainly capable of building military forces needed for its own defense. Can we get rid of the U.S.-Japan alliance? Oh no, absolutely not. In fact, we don't want the Japanese to play a more active political and military role in world affairs. Who knows where that might lead? I mean, someday they might attack Pearl Harbor again. Absolutely not. The U.S.-Japan alliance, the keystone of our policy in East Asia. All right, how about the U.S.-South Korean alliance? This clearly isn't as important. South Korea faces only one feasible enemy, communist North Korea. And South Korea is a population twice that of the North and an economy by most estimates 18 times the size. So it doesn't have to remain an American security protectorate anymore, right? Absolutely, we don't want to make any disruptive changes there. This also is an important part of our presence in East Asia. Then I thought I had him. I said, all right, ANZUS, the alliance with Australia and New Zealand. Now ANZUS was an alliance that had a rather obscure purpose even in its heyday, if it ever had a heyday. And even with a Soviet fleet prowling the Pacific instead of rusting in port as it is doing today, the threat to Australia and New Zealand was rather far-fetched. Today it's extraordinarily difficult to identify a threat to Australia, and the principal threat to New Zealand would seem to be an influx of penguins from Antarctica. We do not seem to have a justifiable security mission here. Believe it or not, no, we can't get rid of that alliance either. So what we see is that the more the world has changed, the more we need to keep our policy the same. And that extends beyond things like alliances. The Clinton administration insists that we have to keep our foreign aid budget. Absolutely critical to our influence in the world. Now the Republicans, of course, are having none of that. They're not going to tolerate a $13 billion a year foreign aid budget. They've proposed radical cuts that would bring it down to about $11.5 billion a year. But I said this is a Cold War plus foreign policy. It's not just that we're going to keep all the commitments that we acquire during the Cold War. Now we have to take on some new obligations. And we see that in a number of places, but I'm just going to mention, too, the increase of our mission in the Persian Gulf, which is escalating dramatically, and I don't mean just the Persian Gulf War. We have acquired an array of bouncing baby protectorates in that region. And the mission of the United States quite literally is that of the of the stabilizer and protector of that whole area. The other area is Central and Eastern Europe. Not only do we have to maintain NATO in its current incarnation, but we need to enlarge it to take in the countries of Central Europe. And if some of the advocates of expansion have their way, extend NATO into Eastern Europe right up to the doorstep of the Russian Federation. The underlying logic with regard to the Cold War plus foreign policy was expressed perfectly by Senator Richard Luger. He said, and I quote, the United States has an unprecedented opportunity to manage the world. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is the social engineering mentality, international division at work. Now, what's wrong with that? I mean, it's a policy that will defend American interests supposedly. Well, there are a number of adverse consequences. The most obvious one is that it imposes an enormous burden on American taxpayers. The United States spends more on the military than all of the other industrial powers in the world combined. That is a rather startling realization. It costs each and every American more than $1,000 a year to support the military. It costs each Japanese, for example, about $360 each German, about $350. That's one measure of the cost of, quote, global leadership. But that's not the most important objection to this Cold War plus policy. The most important one is that it creates excessive risks. It quite literally puts the United States on the front lines of crisis after crisis around the world. During a visit to Tokyo this past July, where I met with a number of officials with the Japanese Foreign Ministry and Defense Agency, I asked them about three hypothetical situations. So what would Japan expect of the United States if, let's say, a war broke out on the Korean Peninsula again? Or a fight broke out over the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea? Or something very much in the news today? What would they expect if a war broke out between mainland China and Taiwan? Officials answered without hesitation. They would expect the United States to take whatever military action was necessary to repel aggression and restore the peace to the region. Fine. I don't like that, but all right, that's fairly clear. But what would Japanese military forces be doing? The answer was equally clear. Unless an attack occurred on Japan itself, Japanese military forces would not be involved in any way whatsoever in dealing with such crises. It's a little bit difficult to come away from that setting without the feeling that this country was being used. The main competitor to the Cold War Plus foreign policy though is, if anything, even worse. And that is a policy of Wilsonian internationalism. Now this is an approach that has great appeal to many officials in the Clinton administration. UN Ambassador Madeline Albright is certainly one person who is an ardent Wilsonian. To a certain extent, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake and there are others. For Wilsonians, the main objective is to strengthen the United Nations. And they have come up with a variety of proposals to do that, including the creation of a standby UN army to deal with global crises. They want to establish a kind of a trusteeship authority for the UN to deal with so-called failed states like Somalia. They would simply have the United Nations bureaucracy move in, take over the government, and operate the country under an international mandate. Some have suggested, believe it or not, giving the United Nations control over nuclear weapons. Resurfacing of the plan first proposed by financier Bernard Baruch back in the 1940s. And the favorite panacea advocated by Secretary General Butros Galli and many others is to give the UN independent taxing authority to levy very, very small tax. Nothing major at all on things like airline tickets and international financial transfers. As I said, if anything, this is even worse than the Cold War plus foreign policy for a number of reasons. For one thing, it would globalize every conflict. And in particular, it would involve the United States in a bewildering array of conflicts around the world. You would find American troops in more Somalias and Bosnias in the coming years. And if the Cold War plus foreign policy is a form of international social engineering, Wilsonian internationalism is international social engineering run amok. Then we have the third competitor. And this one, I think, has tempted some advocates of limited government, and that is Buchananite nationalism. And I have to admit the approach by Pat Buchanan and some others in this camp is fairly decent if you just look at narrow security issues. He is the only candidate, for instance, who advocates phasing out America's alliances and abolishing foreign aid. No one else has even come close. But Buchananite nationalism comes along with some rather unpleasant ideological baggage. The most obvious one is the commitment to economic nationalism or trade protectionism. It's not just bad economics. A policy of protectionism means automatically a terribly intrusive political state. The government is going to dictate from whom consumers may buy products and at what price. It's a little difficult to square that with the concept of limited government. There's also the hostility to immigration, which I think is particularly offensive for people in this country given the heritage of this country on that issue. And I think that's indicative of a rather nasty undercurrent of xenophobia. So although Buchananite nationalism is not as offensive on balance as the other two schools of thought, it too is not appropriate for the foreign policy of a constitutional republic devoted to liberty. Do we have another alternative? Well, I certainly think we do. But to get to that alternative, we're going to have to really change the dynamics of the foreign policy debate in this country. We have to get beyond the light switch model of American global engagement. The light switch model basically assumes there are only two possible positions, on or off. Either we have Americans dying in snake pits like Somalia and Bosnia, or we have a fortress America in a hermit republic. We want nothing to do with the rest of the world. Well, those are false alternatives. It is important to recognize that there are multiple axes of engagement, different types of engagement, of which the military form is only one. There are also the diplomatic, economic, and cultural axes of engagement. And the last two, I think, are particularly important because they're predominantly non-governmental, which is why I think the would-be architects of American foreign policy are uncomfortable with them. The fundamental reality is that there is no need to have identical positions along each axis of engagement. It is entirely possible to have a very restrained position in terms of military engagement, but to have a very active and creative diplomacy. There's absolutely nothing wrong, for example, in using our good offices to try to bring combatants to the peace table, to end suffering. And we can have full bore, maximum engagement culturally and economically. The major change needs to take place in the military realm. That is where we need to adopt a policy of strategic independence. Strategic independence would mean very simply that the military forces of the United States would be used solely for the defense of the vital security interests of the American people, not to promote democracy or to save failed states or to promote international stability or all the other wonderful goals that policymakers can come up with. In this respect, I think it's very important to make a distinction between what government may rightfully do in the name of the American people and what Americans may do acting in their private individual capacities. The government has a fiduciary responsibility to its citizens. And that means very simply it has no right to risk the lives or treasure of Americans for anything other than the most crucial defense purposes. The lives and fortunes of Americans are not rightfully available for whatever foreign policy whims might suit the political elite. Now, again, individuals may reach a different decision, particularly when there are human rights outrageous taking place in the world. I've had many people come up and say, how can we stand by and watch the carnage that has taken place in the former Yugoslavia? And after I point out that that carnage isn't all that different from the carnage taking place in a lot of other places in the world, except that CNN happens to have its cameras there. I asked them if you feel so strongly about that, why haven't you joined the Bosnian Army? Why haven't you sent money to relief organizations? Why have you not put yourself on the line to deal with this problem? If you feel so strongly about it, please do so and you certainly should have the right to do so. Any legislation to the contrary ought to be rescinded. But you have no right to spend the wealth of your fellow citizens or to put their lives at risk through the actions of the United States government. The foreign policy that is appropriate for a constitutional republic based on liberty was outlined by John Quincy Adams more than 175 years ago. When he said America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy, she is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the defender and vindicator only of her own. That was a good policy then. It is a very good policy indeed an essential policy now. Thank you very much.