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, 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 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 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, “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 is called “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 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.
