America Needs a Truly Conservative Foreign Policy

Jerry Hendrix

Security, United States

Not isolation—and not imposing our traditions on the world.

It’s been a bad year if you are a conservative. In fact, from a foreign and defense policy perspective, it’s been a bad start for the new millennium. Coming from a traditional understanding of conservatism, a belief that the lessons and traditions of the past have inestimable value and that the world can never be made perfect and that attempts to urge it towards perfection often do more harm than good, then Clinton, Bush II, and Obama foreign and military policies have all failed, if not equally, then at least with similar results.

Clinton engaged in nation building in an attempt to bring about a progressive democratic expansion. Noble, but not conservative, and a failure in light of destabilization in eastern Europe, Africa and North Korean nuclear weapons development. The neoconservative Bush administration followed and, having been saddled with Clinton’s half-measures against terrorism, they attempted to transplant a preplanned democracy in the Middle East while decrying critics of their efforts for having low expectations. Ambitious, but now tragic in hindsight in terms of human lives lost and animus won. Neither Western culture nor democracy found soil suitable for their roots in the fallow Middle East. Obama’s progressive “lead from behind” policy, with its rejection of American exceptionalism and nonadherence to its own red lines, has left instability whereever it has touched and stronger authoritarian rule in the Middle East, Russia and China. This is not unsurprising given the trust that the left has extended to centrally planned governments over time.

All three foreign policies were progressive and all failed. Maybe it’s time to try a classically conservative approach to the world beyond our borders. What would that look like, many might ask? Do you mean isolationism? Do you mean a withdrawal from the world? Of course not. Classic conservatives recognize that the world does exist and that it will and must impact each nation and each must react to those impacts according to established principles and traditions. Certainly the United States, the most powerful nation in the world, in fact the most influential nation that has ever existed, must be prepared to play a leading role, a role that a conservative foreign policy must seek to, well, conserve. How should we go about that?