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.
