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Paperback
Publisher: Regnery Publishing, Inc.
ISBN13: 9780895261595
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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All but predicting the September 11 attacks, Pat Buchanan warns that America is inviting terrorist attacks and conflict by engaging in an interventionist foreign policy that is costly, dangerous, and does not serve our own interests.
Anyone who has caught Pat Buchanan's television appearances, or heard his campaign rhetoric, will be surprised at his relatively evenhanded and thoughtful tone as he writes--often quite persuasively--in favor of the restoration of the political, military, and economic independence that largely drove U.S. foreign policy in the 19th century. At the heart of A Republic, Not an Empire is a well-written history of U.S. foreign policy beginning with the end of the American Revolution, going through the First and Second World Wars, Vietnam, and the end of the cold war, up to the superpower's involvement in the Persian Gulf and the former Yugoslavia. This section is bookended by, essentially, two very long op-ed pieces that lay out Buchanan's view of U.S. foreign policy: American interests should determine all foreign-policy decisions. The twin foreign-policy goals of interventionism and free trade that seem to drive the Clinton administration's foreign policy are, Buchanan argues, the same pursuits "that brought the British Empire to ruin." Empires fall, he reminds us, through war and too many foreign commitments. With the end of the cold war, he suggests, U.S. foreign policy has become chaotic, driven by special interests; the sum of U.S. global commitments has become greater than the country's ability to defend them. In the end, A Republic, Not an Empire proposes, the only country the United States can completely rely on and trust is itself. --Linda Killian
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| A Faux Republic becomes a Faux Empire |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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In the interest of truth in advertising, I admit up front that Pat Buchanan is not one of my favorite news commentators, although I do not fail to listen to everything he has to say. In fact I try to "over-understand" his position because in my view, he has a brilliant but devious mind, that, depending on the going price, can be put to true patriotic use or can be turned into down right embarrassing and ugly demagoguery. That said, no one could deny that like Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan has a brilliantly trained Catholic mind, and is a fine student of American history. As a result, one has to take him seriously and has to read him carefully even when one disagrees with him. And thus one has to read this book if only to see how carefully Mr. Buchanan has read, digested and mined so much of American history. How he uses it and the lens through which he sees it, of course, are entirely different matters.
And while it is difficult to argue with his main thesis that America's empire days are over (...so why don't we just stop trying to act like an empire - and stop trying to police the world?) Yet his prescriptions of how to go about this task of reducing our empire footprint -- by returning to the Monroe Doctrine and annexing Greenland, being prepared to intervene in Canada and Mexico, etc. -- both baffles me and leaves me cold. I may be wrong but I believe that Mr. Buchanan takes his own reading of history much too seriously and much too literally, and thus cannot see the forest for the trees.
In the penultimate chapter, for instance, he does acknowledge that the international system is changing, but by failing to realize how radically it is changing and by failing to factor this into his analysis in any case, he reduces this acknowledgement to an empty slogan. Surely his understanding of history must have convinced him that unlike Great Britain for instance, the U.S. stumbled into its empire status. We were never, and will never be a "true empire." At best we are a reluctant faux empire. Clearly, we have become an empire by default. To pretend otherwise is to miss the point about the fragility of the American nation.
If we must turn to prognostication as Mr. Buchanan has done, then surely he can see as well as anyone else that the most likely scenario of doom for the "American Empire" will have little to do with its foreign policy misadventures. Its demise will occur as a result of an internal implosion due to its fragile domestic situation. And in this regard, we are becoming as much a "faux republic" as we are a "faux empire." Surely the most likely scenario for U.S. demise is that we will go the way of our erstwhile Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union. Over-reaching internationally was the least of its problems and surely will be the least of ours. A much greater problem for the U.S. than its foreign policy problems is the collision course emerging between America's ruling class and everyone else. The way our "so called" democracy has been seriously compromised and rendered moot by those able to manipulate the system "for fun and profit," that coupled with an immigration problem that we have no way of getting our hands around, and our with failure to deal seriously with ever tense racial problems, (both of which will be scapegoated and exploited by the ruling classes) and one does not have to spin far-fetched foreign policy scenarios to write America's obituary as an empire.
Thus Mr. Buchanan is right, but I believe for the wrong reasons: Although he has properly acknowledged that changes in the international system will occur, he has failed both to take the drastic and capricious nature of those changes into account and the fact that the U.S. can no longer affect events in such a rapidly changing world as it once was able to do during earlier parts of its history. Moreover, whatever may still be the U.S. influence on the international scene, "over-reaching internationally" is not the number one threat to the empire. The number one threat and the most likely source of the U.S. demise as a nation will be "under-reaching" domestically. That is to say, in failing to deal with the looming class discrepancies, and with its ever expanding racial and immigration problems. All of these problems, like foreign policy problems, too have a way of being unruly and taking on an unpredictable life of their own.
In summary, I believe that Mr. Buchanan's scenario is much too narrow, fortuitously so, and thus becomes a "too convenient straw man" picture of the future. The future will not be just a straight-line continuation of the history of the past, but promises to be a very different one -- one that will make radical and unpredictable turns from the tidy version of history the author has spun here. However for Buchanan's picture of American history alone (which is every where superb) this is clearly a five star effort.
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| Ten Years Later, Still Timely |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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The book is now almost ten years old, so why bother. After all, a lot internationally has happened during the past decade--9-11, Afghanistan, Iraq--while the author has since contributed a second, updated tome (Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War) with a similar theme. Nonetheless, A Republic, Not an Empire remains a topical work because it roots Buchanan's foreign policy philosophy of "Enlightened Nationalism" in our national experience, a history of which most Americans are only dimly aware. His lengthy historical account remains highly educational, despite the passage of time, to interested but non-scholarly readers.
Agree or not, the Founding Fathers' concept of enlightened nationalism is a credo that only went into eclipse following Europe's collapse during WWII. At that point, a philosophy of globalism became the only realistic strategy for America in the face of a mounting Cold War. As a result of Cold War necessity, the US became actively involved in the affairs of other nations, contrary to the precepts of the older Founding Fathers America First tradition. The trouble is that the Cold War is long over, while a continuing globalism has sucked the republic into an interventionist role the nation cannot possibly fulfill. Worse, such demands are destroying the foundations of the republic as the ill-conceived Patriot Act shows. Hence, the time is ripe to take another look at that older counsel that counts domestic strength as the strongest defense in an unstable world.
Like any opinionated book, there are aspects to gainsay, but the thrust should not be overlooked. In short, the volume's overriding value is to revive an older tradition at a time when foreign policy elites are concocting ever more overseas commitments. I think Buchanan is right-- in fact, the time is ripe for a revival. The last ten years have confirmed the direction of this book. The republic simply cannot survive more debacles rooted in overseas meddling like 9-11 and Iraq. In addition, the economy has been driven into the ground big-time, thanks in large part to international policies that have shifted manufacture overseas. However, there are two aspects of foreign policy determination that I think the author needs to deal with more forthrightly.
First is the question of empire. Despite the book's title, Buchanan can't seem to bring himself to call a spade a spade. But Americans need to know that what has arisen since WWII is an American overseas empire, anchored by 700+ military bases and a series of US-controlled financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank. Whether it's also a "free world" is a separate question, but it is an empire as any number of interventions over the past 60 years demonstrate. By facing up to this, we situate a disengagement more clearly within the anti-imperial tradition Buchanan seeks to vindicate.
Second is the more serious question of how economically workable a return to America-first would be. I'm no economist, but several money-driven facts seem clear. Capital has no nationality. Investments go where they earn the biggest profit regardless of the human damage. According to orthodox theory, as I understand it, this all ultimately works out for the best because of the invisible hand of the marketplace. But that's theory. The fact is that free trade agreements like NAFTA have hollowed out the economy, such that we don't even manufacture our own diapers anymore, while our working people are being driven into low-wage penury. And if we complain, Repubocrat elites tell us globalization represents an irresistible force beyond challenge, and that the only alternative is a dreaded "isolationism"-- a charge, incidentally, the author is at pains to rebut in the book.
But these are basically the same people whose allegiance is to empire-first and the trade agreements that further those aims. Seems to me that reviving an enlightened nationalism would require re-industrializing our economy ahead of such trade agreements, and that such a step, in turn, would require reviving a system of tariffs and an active role for government in directing economic policy. Now, just how feasible and what the consequences of such an overhaul would be is, I think, a paramount question whose time has nevertheless come. Buchanan has shown himself willing to break from the Washington pack and take on fresh thinking. I hope he and others pursue it. As a result of this seminal book, the historical basis for such a re-direction is laid.
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| A Republic, Not an Empire |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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I've never been a fan of Pat Buchanan, but I still tried to read this book with an open mind. I believe history should be written by historians, which Buchanan is not, and he lives up to my reasons for why I believe this to be true. Given the title of the book, it would have been beneficial to define what exactly is a republic and what is an empire. Since Buchanan does not do this, we are at the mercy of his opinions.
I suppose any dummy can regurgitate dates and events, but that doesn't mean one is writing "history." History comes from the summation of the events into a logical thesis supported by facts. This is where Buchanan misses the mark.
The book is a strange amalgam of sections. The first critiques the current (1999) world of American foreign policy. Buchana criticises America for being involved in parts of the world where it has no vital interest. So far so good. He then assumes the role of prophet and projects where America's future wars will be. There are some interesting theories here, and some have more or less actually happened. OK, we're still on the right track.
Then Pat's wheels come off. He recites the panorama of American history, glossing over it that it only vaguely resembles a cohesive argument, to show how America followed a course of Manifest Destiny that promoted the republic, not empire. Huh? Manifest Destiny and Imperialism are easily interchangable terms, and Pat can't seem to figure that out. What are America's natural borders? It would be a cop out to say from sea to shining sea, because given the realities of the times when the borders expanded, there was always a need for collective security, both geopolitical and economic that was at work. America had no natural "right" to expand to the Pacific Ocean and to Alaska and Hawaii, it did so to cement its imperial reign on the continent. We couldn't capture Canada or Mexico, so we had to take what we could.
Once our nation had filled in what we now recognize as our borders, we turned to overseas affairs by fighting Spain and two world wars. Buchanan chastises thos presidents who fail to prepare for war in order to secure the peace. Had he read the Federalist, he would have learned that a true republic distrusts its military as an implement of empire. Again, Pat misses the boat completely.
He naturally concludes the greatness of Reagan, though one could argue running up a deficit to defeat communism did not do our republic any favors. The book concludes with a summary of foreign policy that has American forces occupying eastern Europe though we have no vital interests there. That is not a bad argument. He also predicted the current war in Iraq and poignantly illustrates on page 327 how the destruction of Iraq would force the United States into defending against Iran. Again, I agree with him here.
His main point is that America should focus its energy on those interests that are vital to us. The neoconservative ideology that got us into our current middle eastern imbroglio and the liberal ideology that played to the "peace divident" after the fall of the USSR both receive Buchanan's ire. He follows the America First idea that he traces to George Washington, but over the course of 225 years (and 400 pages of Buchanan's book)has fallen victim to Wall Street power brokers and their lackey bought and paid for politicians such as the Bush-Cheney duo. Pat's book isn't worth but one star, but neither is it worth four or five.
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| Someone who reads history.... |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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A sobering reminder of the original ideals behind America's founding, and how far we've strayed. Writing long before our current GWOT travails, Buchanan was the Cassandra of our time....
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| Well written, eloquent, and insightful |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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The purpose here is to "revisit the history of American foreign policy, its successes, triumphs, and failures". From that we can "expose the myths and identify the true traditions".
Well written, eloquent, and insightful. Although labeled an isolationist, Buchanan would not see us weakened militarily. He delivers a bold history lesson of our presidents and the nations foreign affairs; the domestic policy is all but ignored. He has been proven right on future scenarios, but has been proven wrong by underestimating the U.S.
Buchanan writes: All great empires were crushed because of wars, we are the last remaining superpower and we are headed for destruction. Our military is overextended and we are issuing dangerous guarantees. Through NATO: We are becoming more the defense of the world; other nations rely on us, so they spend less on defense; who will protect us? NATO is becoming more and more a U.S. organization; this is viewed as a take-over. There is a distinction between American expansion (Manifest Destiny) and naked aggression on other soils. Other nations are now joining up against us, who normally would not. If we stayed out of W.W.I, there may have never been a Hitler or a W.W.II. Cause and effect issued in W.W.I, W.W.II, China, Korea, and the Cold War. Not only does Buchanan warn us of foreign wars and occupation, but also the threat to our south--Mexico.
What's the cost of intervention? What did our founding fathers envision for us? What is the right foreign policy for America?
A democracy will eventually fail and a democracy without God will surely fail.
Wish you well
Scott
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