Published on The New Republic (_http://www.tnr.com_ (http://www.tnr.com/) )
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How the Tea Party Is Wrecking Republican Foreign Policy
* Barry Gewen
* December 4, 2010 | 12:00 am
Now that the midterm elections are over and voices of the Tea Party will
soon be established in Congress, the movement’s views on foreign policy will
come under closer scrutiny, and the results may prove surprising, not least
to the Tea Partiers themselves. Those views are far from Republican
orthodoxy. On some issues, the Tea Partiers will predictably line up with the
Republican leadership, but on others they may find they have more in common
with Democrats. They may even provide Barack Obama with unexpected support.
Those who think Sarah Palin speaks for the Tea Party on foreign policy haven’
t been paying attention.
It’s hard enough to define Tea Party policies on domestic issues. As Kate
Zernike writes in _Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America_
(http://www.amazon.com/Boiling-Mad-Inside-Party-America/dp/0805093486) , the
movement “meant
different things to different people—even those within the movement could
not always agree on what they wanted.” But the Tea Party is the soul of
rationality and consistency on domestic issues compared to its stand on foreign
policy questions. There is simply no there there. (_Click here_
(http://www.tnr.com/slideshow/world/79519/wikileaks-revelations) to view a
slideshow
of the silliest, scariest, and most NSFW Wikileaks.)
Books on the Tea Partiers, like Zernike’s, barely mention foreign policy,
and most of the media are no better in their coverage. A search of the Web
turns up little more, an occasional blog post or cursory comment, but
nothing of any real substance. Probably the most extensive discussion of the
subject was _written_
(http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/articles/2010-SeptOct/full-ORourke-SO-2010.html)
by P.J. O’Rourke, a humorist. Asked if the Tea
Party had a foreign policy, Dick Armey, who has made himself one of the
movement’s stalwarts, responded, “I don’t think so.” Analysts of the Tea
Party’s foreign policy are therefore working largely in the dark. Still, one
can glimpse occasional flickers of light that permit some extrapolations and
tentative conclusions.
Take two issues where domestic and foreign policy overlap: immigration and
trade. On neither of these questions is the movement in step with
Republican Party orthodoxy. With regard to immigration, Tea Partiers often
exhibit
a hostility that shades into nativism. Remember Sharron Angle’s endorsement
of Phoenix’s hard-line sheriff, Joe Arpaio: every state, she said, should
have a sheriff like Joe Arpaio. Citing a New York Times poll, Zernike notes
that 82 percent of Tea Partiers think illegal immigration is a “very
serious” problem, compared to 60 percent of the general public. Yet the
corporate sector of the Republican Party has always shown sympathy for
increased
immigration, and often seems willing to look the other way over illegal
immigration. The more immigrants, the greater the competition for jobs, the
lower the wage costs for business. Besides, someone has to mow the lawn and
look
after the kids.
Similar forces are at play in the case of trade. Tea Partiers are
suspicious of free trade and globalization in general, because they fear a
loss of
American jobs. Yet the Republican Party has traditionally been the party of
free trade. The Tea Partiers will find their closest allies on this issue
among Democrats, especially trade unionists. We just saw what the future
politics of trade will look like when President Obama had trouble concluding a
free-trade pact with South Korea, originally approved by George W. Bush in
2007. A coalition of Democrats and Tea Partiers inside and outside of
Congress opposed it, despite its potential to boost our economy and strengthen
crucial alliances in Asia.
In truth, on both immigration and trade, the Tea Partiers are in favor of
more government, not less, putting them at odds with Republican Party
laissez-faire instincts. However they may feel about the evil of deficits, Tea
Partiers are not libertarians. By majorities of almost two-to-one, they
support Social Security and Medicare. As Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen
write in their book Mad As Hell, “it would be a profound mistake to say that
they are an adjunct of the GOP.”
But it’s on questions of America’s role in the world that the divisions
between Tea Partiers and standard-issue Republicans begin to look like
chasms. The key figures here are the Pauls, Ron and Rand, longtime congressman
and recently elected senator, father and son. Ron Paul has been called “the
Tea Party’s brain,” its “intellectual godfather”; Rand Paul, by virtue of
his election victory, has made himself a powerful, perhaps the most
powerful, Tea Party spokesman on the hill.
The Pauls’ positions on foreign policy are not identical, but the links
between them are more than genetic. In a recent statement for Foreign Policy
magazine, Ron Paul called for an end to “the disastrous wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.” He went on: “We cannot talk about the budget deficit and
spiraling domestic spending without looking at the costs of maintaining an
American empire of more than 700 military bases in more than 120 foreign
countries.” And like father, like son. Rand Paul has said that “part of the
reason we are bankrupt as a country is that we are fighting so many foreign
wars
and have so many military bases around the world.” He opposes what he calls
“a blank check for the military.”
These freshly invigorated voices within the Republican Party are already
finding common cause with doves inside the Democratic Party. Ron Paul has
joined with Barney Frank in calling for the withdrawal of troops from
Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as from Germany, Japan, and South Korea. “We
don’t
need to be the world’s policeman,” Paul said, echoing the Vietnam war
protesters of an earlier era.
Hawkish Republicans have taken note. Casting a suspicious eye at the Tea
Partiers, John McCain has said, “I worry a lot about the rise of
protectionism and isolationism in the Republican Party.” There was a truce
within the
party until the elections, but now, as Richard Viguerie _warned_
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/us/26rove.html) , “a massive, almost
historic battle
for the heart and soul of the Republican Party begins.” Onlookers can
expect to hear a great deal of name calling in coming months as charges of “
isolationist” and “imperialist” fly back and forth.
At the center of this battle, of course, is Sarah Palin. She has allied
herself firmly with the Republican hawks, opposing any cuts in defense
spending and generally calling for a more activist and interventionist America
throughout the world. She is on record in support of an attack on Iran. To
much of the press and the punditocracy, she is the darling of the Tea
Partiers, but that’s not how it looks to many inside the movement, and if you
want
to hear the worst of the vituperation aimed her way, you should look not in
the direction of liberals and Democrats, but at the Ron Paul wing of the
Tea Party movement. Accused of hijacking the movement for the
neoconservatives, _she_ (http://www.infowars.com/tea-party-sarah-is-a-neocon)
_is_
(http://www.tnr.com/C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/emessinger/Local%20Settings/Tempo
rary%20Internet%20Files/OLK2A4/joerobertson.com/liberty/alex-jones-calls-out
-sarah-palins-neocon-tea-party) _called_
(http://www.amconmag.com/article/2010/feb/01/00040/) “a wolf in sheep’s
clothing,” “simplistic,” “
senseless and deranged,” “close-minded,” “arrogant,” “a neocon Stepford wife.”
She and Glenn Beck, another hijacker, are “duplicitous and deceiving
whores of the global establishment, practiced at fooling well-meaning
followers
into betraying their own interests.” And maybe worst of all, “just like
Obama and the Democrat version of Bush neocons.” (In a complicated political
maneuver, Rand Paul sought and Sarah Palin bestowed her endorsement in his
Senate race, a move that dismayed both his supporters and opponents; Ron
Paul said the endorsement “gave him pause.”)
Unsurprisingly, a considerable amount of the name-calling comes down to
Israel. It can’t be said that Palin has taken a strong stand on Israel—a
more appropriate characterization would be that she out-Netanyahus Benjamin
Netanyahu: “I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be
expanded upon, because that population of Israel is going to grow. More and
more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months
ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to
tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”
Such sentiments win no applause from the Tea Partiers aligned with Ron
Paul. He has repeatedly condemned Israeli policies, often in the harshest
terms. One of his staffers declared that, “By far the most powerful lobby in
Washington of the bad sort is the Israeli government.” Paul’s opponents
inside and outside the Tea Party see undertones of anti-Semitism in his
positions, or worse, though John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, gives
him
something of a pass: “I’m inclined to think that Paul, who is not the most
careful and prudent of speakers, is not an anti-Semite.” But he adds that
Paul does follow in a tradition of American isolationism that, in its history,
has been “a hotbed of classic and unambiguous anti-Semitism throughout the
20th century.”
One of the odder twists in this intramural debate—and possibly a sign of
things to come—was an idea _recently floated_
(http://www.jta.org/news/article/2010/10/24/2741415/cantor-take-israel-out-of-foreig)
by Congressman Eric
Cantor to remove aid to Israel from the foreign operations budget. It could
be seen as a preemptive step to preserve aid to Israel at a time when his
party, under the increasing influence of the Tea Party movement, is less
sympathetic to foreign aid and defense spending, and less automatically
supportive of Israel. The plan went nowhere as influential groups like AIPAC
roundly opposed it, and Cantor quickly backtracked. But as the only Jewish
Republican congressman, he may have been more sensitive to the drift of the
Republican Party than other Jewish leaders.
By the same token, if the president proposes cuts in military spending,
there will probably be Tea Partiers ready to support him. If Obama decides to
speed up withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, he could find Republican
backers for that, too. And most controversial of all, if he attempts to put
some distance between the United States and Benjamin Netanyahu’s
government, he may discover that as the Tea Party movement extends its sway,
his
political bedfellows have become stranger and stranger.
Barry Gewen has been an editor at The New York Times Book Review for over
20 years. He has written frequently for The Book Review, as well as for
other sections ofThe Times. His essays have also appeared in World Affairs,
The American Interest,World Policy Journal, and Dissent.
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