The Right And War
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There’s not a “dove” movement of significance on the American Right. But there is a strong sentiment among Republicans toward a Jacksonian view of war and an antipathy toward “nation building,” though. Indeed, George W. Bush campaigned hard on that platform. Both Afghanistan and Iraq were sold in Realist national security terms, with a bit of National Greatness neoconservative Idealism thrown in for flavor. But, over time, the latter overtook the former.
There’s also a significant paleocon wing of the Republican Party, which has no moral qualms about war but nonetheless is very reluctant to intervene militarily. And when they are roused, they tend to want to pursue the enemy hammer and tong with none of the niceties of limited war. ~James Joyner
James is right that there is no “dove” movement on the right, and unfortunately Ron Paul’s primary results showed us how few non-interventionists there were in the GOP, but I can’t completely agree with this description. To take the last point first, paleocons arrive at non-interventionist conclusions for a number of reasons, and our view of how wars should be conducted and how limited they should be is not uniform. Almost all paleocons would agree that wars should be defensive and should be fought only when the national interest, which is usually very narrowly defined, requires it, but once such a war is being fought there is no single view of how limited it should be. Opposition to starting wars may not be universal, but it is close enough that one can generalize about paleocon opposition to aggressive warfare. To the extent that there is consensus among paleocons on this question, there is probably more opposition to total and unlimited warfare than there is support for it. It is common for some mainstream conservatives to invoke mass bombing campaigns in WWII as examples of tactics they find acceptable and would have no problem seeing employed again, and there is an enduring strain of Vietnam revisionism on the right that claims that Vietnam could have been won if the military had been allowed to use everything at its disposal, but for the most part paleocons don’t agree with this and often we find such arguments to be appalling.
It is true that “Jacksonians” on the right lose patience with nation-building, but they also have nationalist convictions that our interventions abroad are always benevolent and initially they are very keen to repeat the propaganda that we are fighting wars of liberation or wars against tyranny (or evil or some new form of fascism). They might support military interventions without the trappings of democratist rhetoric, but they readily re-use this rhetoric whenever they are confronted with arguments that the war in question is unjust or illegal or unnecessary. In other words, they will insist on having national security reasons for going to war, but they will embrace every argument that makes the war appear to be an expression of charity and goodwill. Where they will draw the line is when they conclude that the benevolent, “humanitarian” justifications get in the way of achieving whatever amorphous concept of “victory” they hold.
What makes “Jacksonians” weary of nation-building is not the goal of establishing new political institutions in another country. It is instead the time that it takes to do this and the “ingratitude” of the alleged beneficiaries of our interventions that tend to turn them against prolonged deployments. The charge of “ingratitude,” of course, is inevitable if you believe that you have been doing another nation a favor by invading and wrecking their country. Jacksonians’ instinctive deference to the executive and their belief that criticizing a President in wartime is a kind of disloyalty force them to focus on nation-building and “political correctness” (i.e., refraining from bombing civilians) (as Rep. Chaffetz did) in order to criticize a President and his conduct of a war without suggesting that they lack in support for the military and military interventions in general. This is why “Jacksonians” may be critical of certain details in how a war is conducted, or they might, like Chaffetz, even favor starting a new war that cannot easily be started until the current war ends, but they could never seriously be described as antiwar.
This is how you get critics of the Afghan war plan from the right who want to be more pro-military than the military, and who believe that the rules of engagement that the theater commanders insist on imposing are driven not by military necessity but by “political correctness.” It may be that they cannot imagine why a military commander would want this kind of discipline, which just drives home how instinctive and visceral their “pro-military” views are and how unrelated these views are to actual military needs. This is an echo of that Vietnam revisionist sentiment that insists that the military should have the fewest possible constraints on what they do. Strategy and geopolitical considerations never enter into any of this. Hence you have someone like Chaffetz who says that Iran’s nuclear program should just be “taken out,” as if he thinks this is simply a matter of will and as if there are no costs or consequences to doing this. Even pragmatic considerations that less restrictive rules of engagement could prove to be extremely counterproductive in a counterinsurgency seem to be irrelevant to such “Jacksonians.”
James is mistaken when he writes that “Iraq and Afghanistan will once again remind us of the limits of American power and cause Republicans to be more skeptical of future wars, both in terms of intervening to begin with and in setting realistic war aims.” The wars do remind us of the limits of American power, but it is the Jacksonians who are most averse to admitting that these limits exist. To the extent that most rank-and-file Republicans could be described as Jacksonians according to Mead’s usage, they are not going to become more skeptical of warfare, but will instead become more insistent on an increasingly aggressive and unrestrained posture around the world. Vietnam did not make Republicans less hawkish, and it was by several orders of magnitude a greater debacle than Iraq has been. On the contrary, the aftermath of Vietnam pushed many Democratic hawks into the GOP, and movement conservatives have become accustomed over the last three decades to advocating for both a larger military and for a greater willingness to use force around the world. Skepticism of peacekeeping and humanitarian missions has tended to come from the belief that threats are ubiquitous and the military cannot be distracted by such irrelevancies, but this is absolutely not skepticism about deploying forces overseas and initiating force against a variety of other state and non-state actors. It is actually evidence of the depressing lack of skepticism Republicans have when it comes to entering into or starting wars.
If multiple military interventions are straining the military, the Jacksonian answer will often be that we should increase the size of the military. To the extent that Jacksonians are turning against Afghanistan, it is probably only because they have been led to believe that we need to free up more resources in order to start a war with Iran. The flaw in emphasizing imperial overstretch and strains on the military when arguing against a military intervention is that this part of the argument wins over a Jacksonian audience only insofar as it succeeds in exploiting their irrational fears of another exaggerated or non-existent threat.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
“Jacksonians’ instinctive deference to the executive and their belief that criticizing a President in wartime is a kind of disloyalty”
This should probably read “and their belief that criticizing a *Republican* President in wartime is a kind of disloyalty.” Go to any comments section in any American Spectator article to see how seriously the Fox News Right take that prohibition when a Democrat is in office. The right’s “principles” are entirely dependent on which party is in office – if it’s a Republican, criticism is disloyalty and evidence of a “derangement syndrome”. When a Democrat is in office, criticism is a patriotic duty.
I am a long time veteran of the internet wars between non-interventionist conservatives and interventionist “conservatives,” and your description of the “Jacksonians” is spot on. I recognize every detail you have written here in the stock “Jacksonians” who frequent pro-war “conservative” websites.
[...] Larison has an excellent analysis of the “Jacksonian” pro-war right up at AmConMag. It is true that “Jacksonians” on [...]
Thanks for the comments and the link.
While I’m thinking about it, I should add that I did not include the qualification that I don’t really like using the term Jacksonian to describe the people in question. I understand that it is supposed to convey more of an attitude than a coherent foreign policy tradition that traces itself back to Jackson, but the label still seems lacking. However, I don’t have a good replacement, so it will have to do.
I hope you are right that the view I’ve described above is in decline and may be on the way out. Perhaps you are seeing some change that I am missing.
Daniel – I remember reading your blog as the debate about “Jacksonians” and “Jeffersonians” was occurring, and I recall you being pretty unimpressed with the labels. Are they still in general use? Are they still meaningful? They seem a little bit too-jargony to be all that useful to me.
They are jargony, as you say, and I’m not sure that they are used that widely. I don’t think the labels are very accurate, and as I think I have said before only the Jeffersonian and Wilsonian labels refer to recognizable foreign policy traditions. Hamiltonian and Jacksonian try to describe policy views that are probably better associated with TR and Polk respectively. As a shorthand, these labels could be useful for distinguishing different strains in a person’s thinking, but they don’t do much to clarify the nature of foreign policy debates.
I would suggest that “Hamiltonian” and “Jacksonian” reflect an attitude rather than a set of of policies.
Not a very original insight but one that perhaps needs to be repeated if the terms are going to be thrown around.
“Wilsonian” is the only label that really means anything to me. I suppose I could grasp a “Washingtonian” based around the idea of no foreign alliances, etc. But all the others I’ll have to look up each time if they’re not included in the text…and I’m a history lover. Granted, not an American presidential history lover specifically, but not totally ignorant.
Larison’s analysis of scare-quote Jacksonians is pursuasive only insofar as his use of the term roughly corelates to what a Kos Kid would call a “patrio-tard.” I agree that such people exist and, further, that some self-describe themselves as Jacksonians, but in the Walter Russell Mead typology of American foreign policy types—Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, Hamiltonians and Wilsonians—the Jacksonian type is not quite as presented here.
Mead describes them with great care and specificity, and as a child of the lower middle class it is a description I recognize immediately, but rather than delve into that detail, let’s just simply take a look at Mead’s thumbnail sketch of the Jacksonian view of war.
“Jacksonian America has clear ideas about how wars should be fought, how enemies should be treated, and what should happen when the wars are over. It recognizes two kinds of enemies and two kinds of fighting: honorable enemies fight a clean fight and are entitled to be opposed in the same way; dishonorable enemies fight dirty wars and in that case all rules are off.
“An honorable enemy is one who declares war before beginning combat; fights according to recognized rules of war, honoring such traditions as the flag of truce; treats civilians in occupied territory with due consideration; and—a crucial point—refrains from the mistreatment of prisoners of war. Those who surrender should be treated with generosity. Adversaries who honor the code will benefit from its protections, while those who want a dirty fight will get one.”
* * *
“For the first Jacksonian rule of war is that wars must be fought with all available force. The use of limited force is deeply repugnant. Jacksonians see war as a switch that is either “on” or “off.” They do not like the idea of violence on a dimmer switch. Either the stakes are important enough to fight for—in which case you should fight with everything you have—or they are not, in which case you should mind your own business and stay home.”
* * *
“The second key concept in Jacksonian thought about war is that the strategic and tactical objective of American forces is to impose our will on the enemy with as few American casualties as possible. The Jacksonian code of military honor does not turn war into sport. It is a deadly and earnest business.”
* * *
“Jacksonian opinion takes a broad view of the permissible targets in war. Again reflecting a very old cultural heritage, Jacksonians believe that the enemy’s will to fight is a legitimate target of war, even if this involves American forces in attacks on civilian lives, establishments and property…. Probably as a result of frontier warfare, Jacksonian opinion came to believe that it was breaking the spirit of the enemy nation, rather than the fighting power of the enemy’s armies, that was the chief object of warfare. It was not enough to defeat a tribe in battle; one had to “pacify” the tribe, to convince it utterly that resistance was and always would be futile and destructive. For this to happen, the war had to go to the enemy’s home.”
It’s typical of a non-Jacksonian like Larison to not understand, if you’ll pardon the use of the word, the nuance of such a view. The hatred for “limited war” does not mean that the Jacksonian wants to nuke, nuke, nuke the Muslim world, nor doe the fact that Jacksonians take a large view of permissible targets mean that U.S. soldiers should be targeting children as much as possible.
To clear things up, here is how a Jacksonian views Afghanistan.
We were attacked by Muslim radicals operating out of bases which were in existence under the protection of the Taliban government of Afghanistan. After giving that government a fair opportunity to surrender and hand over those responsible, war ensued.
The enemy is not an honorable one. It slits the throats of flight attendants, beheads hostages, deliberately targets civilians, slaughters any American soldiers it finds and then booby-traps their mangled bodies, which are left in the mud like dogs. Therefore, they don’t get a fair fight.
The Taliban and all associated and allied with them are fair game. Tribes allied to them are wiped out. Tribes who wise up and change sides quickly are patted on the back and told how smart and lucky they are. Those remaining alive are told to hand over the head people we’re looking for or invite similar hell for another 72-hours. Repeat until the will to fight completely collapses.
We then leave with a warning of a return on similar terms if such a thing would happen again.
We don’t build them schools. We don’t fix their hydro-electric plants. We don’t bring them democracy. We don’t teach them about human rights. We deliberately target the main tribes that form the basis for their movement and apply extreme violence until the will to fight is broken.
Inhumane? No, just war. And, for all its harshness, this method would have ended the war in a matter of weeks or months, instead of the years we’ve seen to date.
And if we don’t have the will to fight that war, we have no damn business there in the first place.
You will, I hope, forgive us Cherokees if we take a wholly different view of Jackson in re’ “legitimate targets”, ” honor” and legality. We are rather of the opinion that the man was a scumbag. In fact, we hate no American President more.
I would further point out that no Afghan attacked the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. Your beef is with Saudis and Egyptians. But why worry about that? Them Muslims.
“Scare quotes?” Please.
What jetan said.
Also: “The Taliban and all associated and allied with them are fair game. Tribes allied to them are wiped out. Tribes who wise up and change sides quickly are patted on the back and told how smart and lucky they are. Those remaining alive are told to hand over the head people we’re looking for or invite similar hell for another 72-hours. Repeat until the will to fight completely collapses.”
When has this worked, historically, without extreme mitigating circumstances? This is a recipe for an incomprehensibly brutal partisan war, not “victory.” You’re making the point sound worse than Larison and his “scare quotes.”
I really recognized this aspect: “the belief that threats are ubiquitous” But it is not just that threats are ubiquitous, but that every threat is a potentially existential one. Here is what some Chicken Little named “wildcat129″ wrote on a thread at AmSpec.
“The very existence of Western culture and values is at stake in Afghanistan/Pakistan. Potentially, the whole world could fall to Islam and Shiaria law if we do not act now and decisively to halt the spread of this radical ideology.”
Read his whole entry if you are in the mood for a good laugh or cringe.
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/12/07/the-debate-over-afghanistan
People like this can not be reasoned with. If they want to believe that tribesmen in Afghanistan are about to take over the world then there is no talking them out of it. But this position is so self-evidently absurd that few take it seriously. This is alien abduction territory. This is why they are a dying breed. In order to justify their position they have had to continually up the ante to the point where it is now just absurd. This kind of hysteria falls on deaf ears among Joe Average right leaning swing voter.
jetan –
No doubt the Cherokee looks upon Jackson the man rather differently than other Americans. That has no bearing on whether or not Mead has correctly identified an actual tradition within American culture that has strong relevance as to its domestic and foreign policy. Jacksonians exist as a readily-identifiable sub-sect of Americans and their views are of critical importance, especially insofar as military and war-fighting issues are concerned as their offspring are vastly over-represented in the Armed Forces of this country.
As to the responsible nation, while it is no doubt true that Saudi nationals carried out the attack, they did so as members of a pan-Muslim para-military group, which group was given shelter, resources and materiel by the de facto government of the nation of Afghanistan, led by the Taliban. This is why they were given the opportunity to disassociate themselves from that group and hand over its leaders. There is no serious dispute that this Taliban government was responsible for providing the necessary base upon which al-Qaeda planned and executed the attack. Having rejected the offer to surrender, they then became fair targets by any measure of the law of warfare that one would care to apply.
Rowan –
You ask when such warfare has worked in the past. I refer you to jetan’s ancestors.
You may characterize this as “incomprehensively brutal partisan war,” which to me is simply another way of saying simply “war.” Jacksonians take such matters very seriously. This is why it should be resorted to only with ample just cause and then executed with ample force. Far from the easy characterization of “kill them all, let God sort them out” types, the Jacksonian understands the true meaning of war. To repeat: if the cause is not sufficient to justify such killing, then war is not justified.
The most difficult moral decision a nation can take is to go to war. However, once taken, the war must be prosecuted with all due force. If that force is not justified, then war is simply not justified.
This is what Jacksonian’s mean when they complain of restrictive rules of engagement or overly political considerations with regard to the level of force to be used. They do not mean in raising such complaints that limited force is never tactically a good idea or that there are no political considerations that must be made when deciding how and when to apply such force. What they mean is that once the decision to go to war has been made, to half-ass it and decide that what they really mean is “war-light” means that our men and women will be killed in a useless exercise that will produce no benefit and we may as well go home.
If you doubt the wisdom of that view, I point you to modern Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars being fought by your preferred humanitarian methods, resulting in thousands of preventable deaths, billions of dollars wasted and years in country with no end in sight.
Once a nation—and the calculation is no different than that made by a man (Camus’ “Letters to A German Friend” is excellent on this point)—decides that it has the right to pick up a rifle and shoot other men in the head, the only humane thing to do is to bring that man and those associated with him to their knees in submission as quickly as possible. To do otherwise is to engage in barbarism dressed up as humanitarianism.
Kevin, you give the Jacksonians a lot of credit. What evidence is there that the Jacksonians Daniel is referring to consider war a grave thing? In fact, they are rather cavalier about war and are quick to resort to it, quick to dismiss alternatives, and quick to extol its virtues. When arguing with a “conservative” interventionist see how quickly they resort to the America as world savior rhetoric and invoke the glories of WWII. And the only thing I can every figure out they mean when they complain about PC rules is the Laws of War. What? Would they rather us bomb civilians and mosques and hospitals? In what way have our soldiers been inhibited by restrictive rules of engagement? Whatever ROE there may be beyond the LoW are in place so as not to inflame the situation.
Kevin – the wars with the native Americans occurred under some of the most extreme mitigating circumstances in the history of the planet: wave after wave of disease, primarily smallpox, wiping out up to 95% of the population. The Europeans *never* successfully colonized and conquered any significant resistance that hadn’t previously been shattered by epidemic. Not the Incas, not the Aztecs, not the Powhatan, not the Narragansett, and not the Cherokee.
Unless Afghanistan gets the plague soon, your prescription leads directly to disaster, and a disaster not carried by you.
Rowan, I’ll remember to bring up your “war never solves anything” point of view the next time I’m sitting in a beautiful Cartheginian cafe or visiting the Confederacy. And, you’re right, obviously, but for disease non-European people are invincible. I’ve also been thinking about visiting the German imperial seat of Konigsberg, but all I can find on the map is some place called “Kaliningrad” and they apparently speak Russian there!
Do you enjoy your straw man arguments? I never said “war never solves anything” or, perhaps, given your arguments there, “war never changes anything.” I said that the type of brutal tribal warfare you described was unable to successfully accomplish the goals you declared that it would achieve.
If you want to talk about battles of nation-state against nation-state or empire against empire, that’s an entirely different argument, and I’d like to hope you’re not so intellectually dishonest as to realize that. But based on the last comment, I’m guessing otherwise.
Well, it seems to me that, since it’s now universally acknowledged that a large part of the Taliban is now located in Pakistan, any strategy that doesn’t explain how we cope with the Pakistanis is just not very serious. Do we just start staging invasions of a populous, already unstable, nuclear power? If so, we are going to need a lot more than 100,000 troops. And I really don’t think that China is going to let us go too far with that.
Moreover, I don’t think the USA has quite the same taste for just willy-nilly wiping out tribes that they used to have. More evidence of Western decadence, no doubt.
Rowan writes “Would they rather us bomb civilians and mosques and hospitals?”
You’ve already lost, man.
All that says to the enemy is “Be sure to store ammunition and construct sniper and fire bases from mosques and hospitals”.
Which, not coincidentally, is EXACTLY what they do.
You’re living in a dream world. Spit on me all you want, it makes no difference. War is war is war is war.
If you’re in, all that matters is forcing the enemy to submission. Everything else….is so much noise.
You’re not even talking about what I’m writing anymore, but attaching my name. You’re like a macho-man parody at this point. It’s kind of funny, actually.
Kevin, I made the hospitals and mosques comment. According to the LoW if the enemy stores ammo or constructs sniper towers in either place then they are in violation and those places become fair game, so there is no dilemma.
I wish you would answer my question. What evidence is there that Jacksonians as Daniel describes them consider war a grave thing? If so, why are they always agitating for it?
I think the Jacksonian view of warfare is essentially correct but there is one fatal flaw in its reasoning which explains why the doctrine worked so well for America as it expanded to California and failed so miserably when applied to conflicts in the post 45 era.
Jacksonian warfare only works when the payoff of victory is obvious and long lasting. Wage total war against the British in 1812 win the midwest for America forever. Wage total war agains the Cherokees, claim the south east forever. Take on Mexico in the 1840s and 1850s and win the south west. Grab the Phillipines and Cuba from the Spanish Empire … and here we catch a glimpse of the limitations of this doctrine as a method of foreign policy. What are the payoffs for a total war approach oversease? People point the WWII as an good jacksonian war but miss the point that the character of that conflict was determined by the behavior and ambition of Germany and Japan, not America, and was defensive in nature.
Take Korea. A jacksonian approach to that conflict would have require mass mobilization and a conventional war in China most likely with nuclear weapons and the intervention of the USSR. Tell me what is the long term payoff for America? Is there a total victory on the field in China that will justify the 250000 to 500 000 American casualties and the expense? Take Vietnam. Same basic issue. If the US invades North Vietnam what is to guarantee that the Chinese will not send 50 divisions over the border? Will it then be ok to start trading nukes with the Communist block? What is the long term payoff for America in such a victory? So the issue I have with the Jacksonian approach is that it easily loses sight of the value of victory for the sake of victory at any cost. Total war without reason. And historically this is exactly why jacksonian notions in American foreign policy have led to FP setbacks and failures. So any political faction in America that starts arguing from a principled jacksonian point of view for all of America’s FP issues is setting Americans up for disappointment and failure.
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