From the WSJ Opinion Archives
BOOKSHELF
The Right Stuff
As some states see red, others feel blue.
As we head into this year's presidential contest, we're told that the U.S. electoral map remains split down the middle. That may be--but most new political books address the "red" or Republican side, whether in praise or censure. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's "The Right Nation" does a little of both on the way to explaining why conservative ideas resonate so deeply in our society, driving left-liberals around the bend.
Combining statistics, witty anecdotes and useful summaries of the work of other writers, "The Right Nation" is a kind of anthropology of the conservative movement, from 1952 to today. Messrs. Micklethwait and Wooldridge aren't Republican activists but center-right journalists from Britain (they report for The Economist). They are well-disposed toward their subject but detached enough to criticize it. Any blue-state shut-ins curious enough to buy this book will gain insight into how people live in fly-over country and why they think as they do. Conservatives may learn something too.
"The Right Nation" compares the variegated conservative movement to knights who fight under the banner of one king though they wear the liveries of different causes. It helps to remember this divided identity when sitting down to read "America Alone." Its authors, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, are Republican horsemen in Kissingerian colors trying hard to knock neoconservative upstarts out of their saddles.
Messrs. Halper and Clarke charge that neoconservatives have hijacked the administration and taken the U.S. into Iraq to serve the interests of Israel. To register their dissent from Bush policy, they attempt to disconnect neoconservatism from every tradition they hold dear, from realpolitik to "American exceptionalism" to Reaganism.
Mr. Halper, an American, and Mr. Clarke, a Briton, are at pains to say that their critique comes from the right--not from the gray and boring center where "balance of power" realists usually dwell. They say they are better (because less hotheaded) anticommunists than the neocons; better guardians of the moral dimension of American foreign policy; truer Reaganites; and sunnier optimists. Let's stipulate that they are indeed fine Reaganites, America-loving optimists and tough Cold Warriors (both are former diplomats who helped us win that conflict). Downgrading the neoconservatives, however, isn't supportable on the basis of their book. It is full of oversimplifications, convenient shifts in argument and outright inaccuracies.
The authors decline to consider 9/11 a watershed event, putting the nation at war. Because they believe the jihadists of al Qaeda operate largely independent of governments, Messrs. Halper and Clarke would not have mobilized our military against Iraq or other state sponsors of terrorism. Even the U.S.-led ousting of the Taliban government of Afghanistan, which harbored al Qaeda, does not get their full support. Nor do they credit any progress toward democracy by the post-Taliban government of Hamid Karzai.
People of good will can debate which counterterrorism measures are wisest in a post-9/11 world. But to press their case, Messrs. Halper and Clarke flail wildly against the "militarist" neocons, even making the preposterous suggestion that they would rather see U.S. troops occupy certain countries than take nonlethal steps to encourage a democratic evolution.
"America Alone" heavily implies that if men such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had occupied senior posts under Reagan, they would have tried to start a shooting war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. No proof is offered; such innuendo isn't provable, anyway. The authors content themselves with painting the Reagan presidency as one of realist finesse and caution. (They don't mention the furor that President Reagan caused here and abroad by, among other things, ordering the invasion of Grenada.) Reagan mostly ignored the neocons, goes this reasoning, and George W. Bush's failure to follow suit has rendered his administration "authoritarian" and unable to rally our allies in defense of our interests.
Messrs. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, by contrast, mull over the neocons-as-hijackers notion and rightly reject it. They state the obvious: that President Bush, not his advisers, makes the final decisions. The characteristic neocon themes--projecting U.S. power and promoting democracy--appealed to the president, and to the broad red-state mainstream, because they were deemed the best response to a devastating attack on our country. The inveterate neocon suspicion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq yielded "policies that resonated throughout the Right Nation," the authors declare. American Christians, they add, have long valued the U.S. alliance with Israel and see the two democracies' common interests clearly. Indeed, polls indicate even higher support for Israel after 9/11.
The Bush foreign policy's "moralistic edge," say Messrs. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, is no neocon imposition. It has a long pedigree. Conservative America--and 41% of our citizens identify themselves as members of it--leans "toward unilateralism instinctively," but not out of mere "stubbornness." Rather, the "refusal to compromise ties into something slightly nobler," namely the dual strains of idealism and action-oriented pragmatism that "have been at work from the country's Puritan beginnings to John Foster Dulles's invocation of a holy war against communism."
Now that sounds right.
Mr. Kyl is a U.S. senator from Arizona. You can buy "The Right Nation" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
