No to Corporate Neoconservatism, No to Paleo-Libertarian Anarchism, Yes to Augustinian Realism

This week I’ve counted down the PJ columnists who I turn to first to understand foreign policy: Michael Ledeen on Iran, Andrew C. McCarthy on Islamism, Barry Rubin on the Middle East, and Claudia Rosett on the United Nations. I was prompted to engage in this intellectual autobiography by a prominent news story at the beginning of the week, the alleged “civil war” in the Republican Party over foreign policy, symbolized by the harsh words exchanged between establishment East Coast neoconservative Chris Christie and paleo-libertarian grass roots favorite Senator Rand Paul. The way the mainstream narrative frames the fight on the Right is between “interventionists” continuing on the George W. Bush tradition of seeking to democratize the Muslim world, and the “non-interventionists” who tend to agree with many progressive democrats that the root cause of terrorism is that we’ve made Muslims rightfully angry at us by being biased toward Israel and perpetually intervening.

For the Neo-Cons it’s the opposite analysis: terrorism happens because we haven’t intervened enough! John McCain has met with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Prominent neoconservatives assert that the path to a more peaceful world is for democracy to run it’s course — they agree with Obama’s delusion that the Muslim Brotherhood will “moderate” if it comes to power.

Neo-cons vs Paleo-cons.

This fight has been a long time coming, but they’re not the only options available to those who consider themselves “conservatives” or “on the Right” and perhaps members of the Republican Party.

Here’s the problem: on foreign policy especially today’s “Conservative movement” is obsolete. And more importantly, a misnomer — I’ve written about this before and I’m going to keep harping on the point. The “Conservative Movement” is better understood as a political tool of the Anti-Communist movement. Defeating the Soviet Union is what animated William F. Buckley, Jr. and Ronald Reagan. The building of the Conservative Movement was just a means to that end.

The philosophy of Fusionism was developed by ex-Communist Frank Meyer in the pages of National Review in the 1950s. The goal: get national defense conservatives, business conservatives, traditionalist conservatives, libertarian conservatives, and religious conservatives to unite around the common threat of Communism. Over the course of decades this ideological movement grew until it elected politicians, took over the Republican party, elected Ronald Reagan as president, and then successfully implemented the strategies to defeat the Soviet Union, freeing the millions it enslaved and oppressed. Reagan spoke publicly of his debt to Meyer and how he implemented the strategy. But without the unifying threat of the Soviet Union the coalition came apart in 1992. The Chris Christie vs Rand Paul fight of a generation prior was George H. W. Bush vs Ross Perot. The result of that split in the coalition was 8 years of Bill Clinton and a Conservative Movement adrift without a purpose anymore.

Nowadays the three legs of the conservative stool squabble over which is the most important – foreign policy, economics, or social issues. There is no longer a consensus on who the enemy is or how to defeat them.

The foreign policy philosophy and its political coalition that served past generations so well in winning the Cold War is no longer useful. At the heart of both liberal and conservative foreign policy during the Cold War was Mutually Assured Destruction – MAD. We could trust the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons because we knew they didn’t want to commit suicide. The same cannot be said for the Jihadists waging war against us. Political calculations need to change dramatically when dealing with cultures that genuinely do worship death and do celebrate child sacrifice.

The philosophy PJ Media columnist David P. Goldman names in his book How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) as Augustinian Realism recognizes this. The Christie Neo-Cons think terrorists murder us because they don’t have democracy. The Rand Paul paleo-cons think terrorists want to murder us because we have intervened and supported the “apartheid state” Israel. Spengler Augustinian Realists believe in the mold of Machiavelli and Moses that Ledeen elucidates — that mankind’s base nature is evil. The Jihadists will still want to conquer us when they have democracy and our bases out of “their land.”

Augustinian Realists derive their vision from earlier than secular political theory. Goldman names his approach after St. Augustine and it can be summarized very simply: we as a nation need to distinguish between countries that share our values and those that don’t. Both the neoconservatives and the paleo-libertarians refuse to do so. Because their visions are based in secularism they lack the most crucial tool in foreign policy, one Reagan employed against the Soviets: the will to name evil. Augustinian Realists eschew the false dualism of “interventionism” and “non-interventionism”. From an essay Goldman wrote at First Things in 2010 on “The Morality of Self-Interest”:

What we might call “Augustinian realism” is this premise, borne out in the world around us. To the extent that other nations share the American love for the sanctity of the individual, they are likely to succeed. To the extent they reject it, they are likely to fail. Our actions in the world can proceed from American interest—precisely because American interest consists of allying with success and containing failure.

Augustinian realism begins with the observation that civil society precedes the character of a nation. The American state can ally with, cajole, or even crush other states, but it cannot change the character of their civil society, except in a very slow, gradual, and indirect fashion—for example, through the more than 100,000 American Christian missionaries now working overseas. This realism insists that the state should not try to do what it cannot do.

It is not necessary to hold Augustine’s evangelical purpose to grasp the instrumental value of his observation. To take America as the measure of an Augustinian state, moreover, does not necessitate triumphalism, for America cannot take for granted that it will remain the only, or even the most important, instantiation of its own founding idea. Realism, though, requires a gauge by which to separate prospective success from incipient failure.

The Conservative Movement is coming apart, just as the parties are dividing and the government is going bankrupt. Now is the time to reassess these many conflicting philosophies and schools of thought and see what works. Augustinian Realism is just the tip of the iceberg with what Goldman has to offer. I plan to continue to explain more of his concepts along with those of other PJ columnists and important thinkers in the coming weeks. Defeating the Jihadist enemies who threaten America will be a multi-decade, perhaps multi-generational fight and it will require disassembling and reassembling our foreign policy assumptions. I argue that Ledeen, McCarthy, Rubin, Rosett, and Goldman should serve as the beginning of a new foundation for the fight ahead. What other thinkers and which of their ideas will also be crucial in some day electing our generation’s Ronald Reagan who will be able to implement the strategies to bring freedom to those living under Sharia slavery as others once lived under Soviet slavery?

From page 268, the conclusion of David P. Goldman’s How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too):