When I first became interested in the applications of nuclear physics I was most concerned by the coming shortage of energy. Since then it has become clear that this is not the main problem. There is plenty of energy for the next few hundred years: enormous deposits of coal, substantial amounts of oil and natural gas, and the likelihood of increasing contributions from nuclear power.

The main concern is now the effects on the world’s climate from the pollution of the atmosphere from fossil fuel power stations. It will be many decades before fossil fuel power stations can be replaced by non-polluting sources such as nuclear and renewable energy, and all that time the pollution will increase. Detailed studies by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change show that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is inexorably increasing and the evidence for its effects on the climate is steadily becoming more convincing. In addition, the predicted rise in sea level will have catastrophic effects on low-lying countries.

It is now becoming clearer that the principal danger is not the effects of gradual changes in the climate but the possibility of rapid and irreversible changes. We tend to think of the earth and its climate as a reliable and generally stable system where the weather remains more or less the same when averaged over long periods. There is now increasing evidence that this may not be true, that there is a distinct possibility of large, unexpected, and irreversible changes that quite rapidly have catastrophic consequences.

The study of climate changes is fraught with serious difficulties. Since time immemorial the weather has fluctuated unpredictably, with cold and hot periods, heavy rainfall and droughts, hurricanes, and earthquakes. How can the changes due to man’s activities be distinguished from these natural changes? It is notoriously difficult to establish the presence of a new trend in a fluctuating quantity, and the difficulty is compounded when the fluctuations are on several different timescales, as is the case for climate. There are changes from year to year and ice ages on a much longer timescale. If a trend over a few decades is established, how do we know whether it is soon to be reversed by a major change acting on a longer timescale?

When definite evidence for climate change has been found, it is important to understand the underlying causes and to deduce what is likely to happen in the future. The earth’s seas and atmosphere form a highly complex system, and although much research has been done we still know very little compared with what there is to know. This is an area of highly speculative science, where hypotheses are made to explain a few observations and are then refuted by the discovery of new facts. Scientists group themselves into schools of thought and argue fiercely with scientists of other schools. An agreed consensus may arise one year and dissipate the next. There is only one thing on which all agree, namely that the more we know the more frightening are the prospects for the future of the world.

Even if we understand the forces determining the climate we still have the problem of deciding what to do about it. Even if we have decided on the optimum course of action, we then have the problem of persuading governments to do what has to be done.

This article is concerned with the evidence for climate change and the possibility of future catastrophic changes. The political problems will be discussed in the next article.

The Evidence for Climate Change

By climate we mean the sum of the many variables describing the condition of the atmosphere: the temperature and humidity of the air, the rainfall, the strength of the winds, and the clouds. All these are constantly changing, and we can take averages for a local region or for the whole earth. Climate is determined by many natural causes, and in addition there is evidence that it is affected by human actions. We cannot do anything about the natural causes, but if there is a causal link between human actions and climate change we may have reason to expect the present changes to continue, and furthermore, we will have a strong incentive to take action to mitigate their harmful effects.

Such a causal link has been proposed. Extensive measurements have shown that the concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and some other gases in the atmosphere are steadily increasing. In the 1780s the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide was about 280 parts per million (ppm), as it had been for the last six thousand years. Industrialisation increased the level to 315 ppm by the 1930s, 330 ppm by the mid-1970s, and 360 ppm by the mid-1990s. In the last ten years the level has risen by a further 20 ppm. By the middle of the present century it could rise to 500 ppm. The annual increase of carbon dioxide is now 0.4 percent, that of methane 1.2 percent, of nitrous oxide 0.3 percent, of the chlorofluorocarbons 6 percent, and of ozone about 0.25 percent. In the European Union, fossil fuels are the main source: oil 50 percent, natural gas 20 percent and coal 28 percent. Of this, electricity generation accounts for 37 percent, transport 28 percent, industry 16 percent, households 14 percent, and the service sector for 5 percent. These are established facts, and in addition there is a strong correlation between carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature changes. It is then suggested that these increased concentrations are responsible for global warming and that global warming is responsible for other climate changes and predicted effects such as a worldwide rise in the sea level. The evidence for anthropogenic climate change has increased in recent years, and its reality is now generally accepted.

The connection between the increase in carbon dioxide and global warming is known as the greenhouse effect. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere acts like the glass in the greenhouse; it lets the heat of the sun reach the earth, and some of this heat is emitted with a different wavelength that is stopped by the carbon dioxide. The heat that is trapped in this way warms the earth so that the average temperature is 14 C. Without the greenhouse gases it would be –18 C (or –64 F).

There is impressive evidence for the reality of climate change during the last few decades. Some of this has been described in a book by Sir Ghillean Prance, former Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London. [1] He recalls that there were devastating floods in Mozambique and Venezuela and quite serious ones in England. In other countries there has been drought that in the Midwest of the United States in 1988–9 caused losses estimated at $39 billion. Hurricane Mitch killed ten thousand people in Central America. The average temperatures are rising in many countries: of the five warmest years ever recorded in the United Kingdom, four have been in the last decade. The heatwave in 2003 killed about 20,000 people in Italy and 15,000 in France as the temperatures topped 40 degrees celsius during the day and 30 degrees celsius at night. Crops failed, forests burned, and rivers reached an all-time low. It was almost certainly the direct result of global warming. On a longer timescale, one result of these increasing temperatures is that in some regions the growing season for plants is increasing, with earlier development in spring, and autumn events being delayed. Birds and animals are also affected, and some species, unable to cope with the climate change, have become extinct.

There are however many examples of climate change occurring long before large amounts of carbon dioxide were emitted into the atmosphere by human beings. Some communities that have flourished for centuries have been destroyed by climate change. One example is the Anasazi who lived in Colorado and were finally forced by major droughts in 1130–1180 and 1275–1299 to abandon their cities and to move away to areas with a climate that allowed them to continue their way of life. Greenland, as its name implies, was at one time a fertile land and supported a colony of Vikings until colder weather forced them to move elsewhere.

Other changes have not been quite so catastrophic. The same cold spell around the fourteenth century caused parts of the Baltic Sea to freeze, and also the river Thames. In the 1930s the reduction in rainfall on the Great Plains in the USA, followed by winds that removed the topsoil and created a dustbowl, forced farmers to pack up and move away. In other parts of the world weather patterns are subject to violent changes. The normally regular monsoons in India, for example, can sometimes fail, causing catastrophic famines. The warm ocean current called El Niño can have disastrous effects on the eastern Pacific shores. It is now known to be part of a vast global water circulation, and satellite observations and computer modeling now enable some predictions of its effects to be made. [2] Thus for example severe floods and storms were predicted to occur in California in 1997–1998. During autumn and over Christmas the weather was fine, but in January and February hurricane-force winds battered San Francisco, floods rose, and mudslides swept houses away. Floodwaters submerged the freeway to Los Angeles and swept away the Southern Pacific railroad bridge. Fourteen years earlier another El Niño caused floods and landslides that caused a billion dollars worth of damage. In other tropical regions, the 1997–1998 El Niño caused over $10 billion in damage. There were severe droughts in Australia and Southeast Asia, vast forest fires in Indonesia and Mexico, and famine in Brazil.

The weather cycles in Peru and Bolivia are quite regular, unless they are interrupted by El Niño, which is unpredictably variable. Mostly the result is torrential rainstorms, warmer seas, and changes in fish populations. Occasionally however an El Niño event causes significant changes to the climate and brings ruin to fishermen and farmers. Thus in 1925 the sea temperature off northern Peru rose over six degrees in ten days. Millions of seabirds perished as the anchovies on which they fed moved to cooler nutrient-rich waters. Cloudbursts turned dry ravines into raging torrents and the city of Trujillo received 396 mm of rain instead of the normal 1.7 mm. Farmlands and irrigation systems were destroyed by a sea of mud, and hundreds of people starved. Many other examples could be given of the devastating effects of El Niño.

It is conjectured that El Niño events played an important role in the decline and fall of ancient civilizations when they were already seriously stressed by other economic and political factors. Particular examples are the Maya civilization in Yucatan and the Moche civilization in Peru. In these cases, the devastation caused by El Niño was the final event that caused the once-flourishing societies to collapse.

The rapid changes in climate associated with El Niño events took place long before the temperature increase associated with global warming and still continue. They are not yet fully understood and make it more difficult to ascribe climate changes to anthropogenic emissions.

Another source of global warming is the variation in the brightness of the sun, already observed over several centuries. The sunlight intensity fell by 4 to 6 percent from the 1950s to the 1980s. Now it is rising again and there has been a 4 percent rise since 1990; it is estimated that this could account for a rise in temperature of 0.4 C by 2100. There are also daily variations of around 0.2 percent, and these could produce significant changes in the climate. In addition, there is a correlation between the temperature and the length of the sunspot cycle. The physical basis for this is suggested by another correlation, namely that between the cosmic ray intensity and the low cloud cover. The miniature Ice Age in the later part of the seventeenth century is known as the Maunder Minimum, which is correlated with the sunspot minimum between 1645 and 1715. The sunspot cycle is a measure of the solar activity, and this in turn affects the cosmic ray intensity. The cosmic rays produce ions in the atmosphere, and these can form condensation nuclei for clouds, which have a strong influence on the earth’s temperature. Detailed studies suggest that solar effects may be responsible for 30 to 57 percent of the observed global warming. Since this varies with the sunspot cycle, it sometimes reinforces and sometimes weakens the effects of global warming. Some fluctuations have been observed and these could be due to varying amounts of aerosols in the atmosphere. [3]

There is evidence that the mini Ice Age in the seventeenth century and the medieval warm period are part of a cycle that occurs over a period of about 1500 years. Supporting evidence is provided by the bands of rock in cores from the Northern Atlantic. These rocks came from Northern Canada, and must have been carried to where they were found by glaciers, indicating periods of cooling and warming. More evidence came from Greenland ice cores which revealed a series of temperature changes, again with a period of about 1500 years. There were also large increases in the dust particles in sediments off the coast of West Africa suggesting dust storms inland, also with the same period. It has been suggested that this cycle is ultimately due to periodic changes in the sun. The resulting changes in solar radiation changes the temperature and this may be detected by changes in the ratios of cosmogenic isotopes in ice cores. All this shows the extreme sensitivity of the climate to very small changes in the intensity of the solar radiation. The same must also be the case for man-made changes in the atmosphere. [4]

A recent study [5] has shown greatly increased frequencies for the more devastating hurricanes like Katrina, which struck New Orleans and the surrounding states in 2005. This increase has been attributed by some scientists to the rising temperatures of the oceans due to global warming. If this is the case, some regions of the earth will be liable to more devastating hurricanes in the future. The cost of the damage due to the hurricane Katrina has been estimated to be around $100 billion.

On a much longer timescale, the mathematician Milutan Milankovitch identified cold and warm periods alternating every 100,000 years, with smaller cycles every 41,000 and 10,000 years. These cycles are attributed to perturbations of the sun’s orbit by the moon that cause the precession of the equinoxes and by other small effects due to the planets and are confirmed by world-wide measurements of glaciers, coral reefs, peat bogs, and polar ice caps.

There are thus many ways the climate can be changed in addition to the effects of the greenhouse gases. Careful scientific analysis is therefore needed before their contribution can be established. Many scientists worldwide are making detailed calculations using increasingly sophisticated models of the atmosphere. This is obviously a very complicated task. What, for example, do we mean by the temperature of the atmosphere? We can measure the temperature at a particular place and height, but this needs to be done over the whole surface of the earth and for heights up to several miles. The best we can do is to establish a grid of points and measure the temperatures at these points as a function of the time. Even a coarse grid contains millions of points and the calculations are very time-consuming even on a fast modern computer. The more accurate we want our calculations to be the longer they will take. In addition, the results may be very sensitive to the initial conditions; this is called the butterfly effect. The main uncertainty at present seems to be the effects of water vapour, which are greater than those of all the other gases combined. These are sensitively affected by changes in the cloud cover, which in turn changes the amount of solar energy absorbed or reflected.

The results of such calculations are published periodically by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, consisting of about two thousand of the world’s leading climate scientists, under the chairmanship of Sir John Houghton. [6] With many qualifications, the conclusion of their assessment is that there is good evidence that world temperature is increasing, and it is predicted that the average temperature will rise by about four degrees centigrade by the year 2100. In the same period the sea level will rise by about 60 cm, or by 40 cm if the carbon dioxide emissions are controlled. Such rises will eliminate many islands such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and will inundate much of Bangladesh and some of Holland. Already the sea level has risen by 0.1 to 0.2 cm per year during the twentieth century.

The connection between the rise in temperature and the rise in sea level has been attributed to the melting of the polar ice caps. However, the ice immediately around the North Pole and in the ice shelves around Antarctica is floating, and so when it melts, it has very little effect on the sea level, as Archimedes knew very well. There may however be some small effects due to differences in salinity between the ice and the sea. There are other effects of melting ice in Antarctica that are discussed below.

Another uncertainty is the effects of soot on global warming. This soot comes from the incomplete burning of coal, biomass, and diesel, and also from forest fires, domestic heating, and factories. It has been said to “mask” global warming and also that it “generates” global warming. It has been called “a cooling agent” and also “the biggest cause of global warming after carbon dioxide.” What seems to happen is that the soot shields the earth from the sun’s rays, thus making it cooler. It also absorbs some of the heat and re-radiates it into the surrounding air. Thus soot heats the air and cools the ground. Some scientists think that soot is the third most important contributor to global warming, after carbon dioxide and methane.

Catastrophic Events

In some respects the earth is a self-regulating mechanism so that any change initiates secondary changes that restore it to its original state. This idea has been developed by James Lovelock into the concept called Gaia (the Mother Earth). [7] The mechanism works for small changes, but he recognises that there may be changes that irrevocably flip it into another state. We are familiar with such changes, as for example when a bridge collapses under a particularly heavy load. If this happens to the climate, the results could be devastating for large numbers of people.

One way this could happen is if even a small change initiates a series of events that reinforce the original change; this is called positive feedback. It is a runaway process that continues until the system is destroyed. Some of these processes are already happening to our climate, and others are serious possibilities.

One example is the melting of the polar icecaps, which is already having devastating effects on people living in the Arctic. In several places their traditional method of hunting seals is no longer possible because the ice has melted. As the ice melts the albedo, a measure of the fraction of sunlight that is reflected, falls rapidly from 0.8—0.9 to less than 0.1 The result is that more sunlight is absorbed, melting more ice in a continuing feedback effect. This is one of the main reasons why the Arctic ice is melting so rapidly, thus providing a sensitive indicator of global warming. Some computer models indicate that by 2080 the Arctic will be ice-free in summer, making it impossible for the polar bears to survive.

Satellite observations have shown that the perennial Arctic sea ice covers about seventeen billion acres. This area varies from year to year, but in recent years the overall trend has been strongly downward, particularly in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas and also to a lesser extent in the Siberian and Laptev seas. The shrinkage now amounts to about 250 million acres.

Another example is the melting of the permafrost, a thick layer of frozen soil in the Arctic. This contains moss and lichen that has accumulated for thousands of years and frozen before it could rot. The dry weather has caused widespread forest fires in Alaska, and the temperature of the permafrost has risen by two or three degrees. It has been predicted that most of the top three metres of permafrost across the Arctic will melt during the present century. As the thawed vegetation finally rots, it will release ten of billion tonnes of carbon dioxide if there is oxygen present, and the far more damaging gas methane if it is not. This methane will increase the rate of global warming still further, melting the permafrost by a positive feedback loop.

Antarctica occupies 13.2 million sq.km., about 1.3 times the area of Europe, and the ice cap is up to 4 km. thick. No less than 90 percent of the world’s ice is in Antarctica, and if this were all to melt the world sea level would rise by 70 to 90 meters. However the ice in central Antarctica is at a temperature from–40 to–60 degrees and so is unaffected by a rise in temperature of a few degrees. The same applies to central Greenland which occupies an area about one-sixth of Antarctica. The ice shelves surrounding Antarctica are somewhat warmer, but are floating like the Arctic ice and so melting them has little effect on the sea level. However the sea level is affected by warmer coastal glaciers flowing into the sea from the ice caps of Antarctica, Greenland, and Northern Canada. The glaciers are very thick, and the pressure on the ice where it rides over the ground is enough to liquefy it, and this makes it easier for it to slide down into the sea. An additional effect has been suggested: when the surface of the ice melts, lakes are formed and this water flows down through cracks in the ice until it reaches the bedrock. There it spreads and reduces the friction between the ice and the bedrock, further increasing the rate of travel of the ice towards the sea. When this happens it causes the sea level to rise, but by an amount that is difficult to estimate. There is increasing evidence that the ice shelves are breaking up, and this reduces the pressure on the glaciers so that their rate of flow increases.

The possibility of another type of irreversible change is provided by the Gulf Stream, which warms northwestern Europe. Without it, the climate would be like that of Labrador, at the same latitude on the western Atlantic. At present the Gulf Stream brings warm water from the tropics toward Europe by what is called the thermohaline circulation. This is due to the freezing of the Arctic water, which causes the salt water to drain out of the ice. This salty water is heavier than fresh water and so it sinks, thus drawing warmer water northwards from the tropics. As this water cools it becomes denser and also sinks, thus attracting more warm water. If the oceans are heated by global warming and more freshwater enters the polar seas it could slow and even stop the Gulf Stream. This could cause the temperature to fall by six to eight degrees celsius and so it would then be frozen for much of the year, and London would become like Siberia.

Further evidence of major climate changes is provided by the melting of glaciers in the tropics. In many countries in the Andes and the Himalayas, the Arctic, Alaska, and East Africa, studies of ice cores and the glaciers themselves provide massive evidence of permanent changes. Isotopic analyses of the ice cores show the evolution of climate from the start of the El Niños about 5,500 years ago, the drought that terminated the Moche empire, and the current effects of global warming. The glaciers began to form in South America about 25,000 years ago and were followed by glaciers in other tropical countries. The growth of the glaciers depends on the latitude, and this is linked with the slow precession of the earth’s axis. During this period the latitude at which the sun was directly overhead moved steadily from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn. It might seem strange that glacier formation takes place predominantly when the temperature is highest, but this is because maximum sunshine brings maximum rainfall and at the altitudes where glaciers form the temperature is always low enough to freeze the rain, forming glaciers. The melting of glaciers right across the tropics is quite unprecedented and seems to be an irreversible effect of global warming.

About three billion people, half the people on the earth, depend on the monsoon rains to grow their food. There have been several failures in the monsoon rains in the last two centuries, and the resulting droughts and food shortages have killed tens of millions of people. The reasons for this variability are not entirely clear, but a connection with the El Nino current seems very likely. Famines in India occur during large fluctuations in the Pacific climate. A study of the strength of the monsoons over ten thousand years based on the amount of plankton in marine sediments showed that that weak summer monsoons are correlated with colder periods in the North Atlantic whereas strong monsoons occur when the Northern Atlantic seas are warm. It is not clear just why these effects occur or how they interact with each other. The effects may prove to be benign or catastrophic.

Can These Changes Be Stopped and Reversed?

Whatever we do, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will inevitably increase. The danger of catastrophic climate change can be mitigated, however, if resolute action is taken to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The first essential step is to replace fossil fuels power stations with sources that emit nothing or only minuscule amounts. Already, several countries have substantially reduced their emissions by building nuclear power stations. Thus France (80 percent nuclear) has halved their emissions, Japan (35 percent nuclear) by 20 percent, and the USA (20 percent nuclear) by 6 percent.

Several international conferences have been held to encourage nations to promise reduction. At the Kyoto Conference in 1997 Britain promised to reduce emissions by 20 percent by 2020. Already there has been a reduction by 6 percent due to the improved efficiency of nuclear power stations. As most of these are scheduled to close in the next few years, emissions are bound to rise. Both Britain and the USA have no hope of reaching these very modest targets.

The importance of the atmospheric half-life of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is seldom recognised. Carbon dioxide lasts about a hundred years, whereas methane is mostly used up in a decade. A molecule of methane causes a hundred times as much global warming as one of carbon dioxide so methane is much more important in the few years after emission. Averaged over a longer period, the effect of carbon dioxide increases, so that over a hundred years the ratio of effectiveness falls to about ten. It is therefore of great importance to reduce methane emissions as soon as possible, although this was not recognized by the targets set at Kyoto. The reduction of methane emission from landfill sites, gas pipelines, coal mines, and many other sources would have an important effect in reducing global warming on the short term. Soot lasts only a few days in the atmosphere but has a large effect on global warming and so its emission should also be reduced.

During the next forty years about two thousand fossil fuel power stations must be replaced. This can be done in several ways. One is to build 4000 windmills occupying 500 square km each week. Or we can cover ten square km of desert with solar panels each week. Perhaps we can find more Severn estuaries and build barrages costing £9 billion every five weeks. Or finally, we can build fifty new nuclear power stations each year. This figure may be compared with the 43 that were built in 1983, the peak year for nuclear construction. This is the choice faced by world governments.

The next article will be devoted to an account of how governments have reacted to the world-wide threat to their very existence.

Notes:

1. Sir Ghillian Prance, The Earth under Threat: A Christian Perspective (Wild Goose Publications: St Andrew’s Press, 1996).
2. Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines and Emperors; El Niño and the Fate of Civilisations (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Brian Fagan, The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilisations.
3. Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
4. Fred Pearce, The Last Generation (London: Eden Project Books, 2006).
5. Richard A. Ker, “Is Katrina a Harbinger of still more Powerful Hurricanes?” Science 309.1807. 2005. P. J. Webster, G. J. Holland, J. A. Curry, and H-R Chang, “Changes in tropical cyclone number, duration and intensity in a warming environment,” Science 309.1844. 2005.
6. John Houghton, Global Warming: The Complete Briefing (Oxford: Lion Publishing, 1994).
7. James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. 1979–2003. James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our Living Earth.

Originally published in the Fall 2008 issue of the Modern Age.
Related articles: The Energy Crisis , Nuclear Power and the Energy Crisis

Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies by M. Stanton Evans (New York: Crown Forum, 2007)

Washington used to be a nice town, the reminiscence goes. Before our own day, when “the personal is political,” time was when the partisan fighting was fierce at the Capitol, but everyone played by the rules and went out for drinks together after all the wrangling was done. This is one of the most intransigent clichés in American politics.

In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he said he had a list of fifty-seven names of Communists working in the State Department. The next month, a Senate committee chaired by Maryland’s Millard Tydings convened to discuss the McCarthy list. The committee did not devote itself to investigating the accuracy of McCarthy’s list, much less to forming policy about what to do about the situation if it were true. Rather, its effective purpose was to frame McCarthy in a criminal act.

McCarthy was set in the dock before the Tydings committee and permitted to give his statement. In “his first 250 minutes on the stand [McCarthy] was allowed to read a statement for 17 minutes, and was interrupted 85 times,” as one historian counted it years later. After McCarthy had been badgered several times, Henry Cabot Lodge, McCarthy’s Republican colleague in the Senate, said,

Mr. Chairman, this is the most unusual procedure I have seen in all the years I have been here. Why cannot the senator from Wisconsin [McCarthy] get the normal treatment and be allowed to make his statement in his own way, and not be cross-questioned before he has had a chance to present what he has?… I think the senator from Wisconsin ought to have the courtesy that every senator and every witness has, of making his own presentation in his own way and not be pulled to pieces before he has had the chance to offer one single consecutive sentence…. I do not understand what kind of game is being played here.

Indeed, Lodge did not. As the proceedings went on (and as other deponents were treated graciously), it became clear that the committee chairman, Tydings, was determined to hang a perjury charge on McCarthy.

The idea was that McCarthy, under oath before Tydings, said falsely that he had used the number fifty-seven in Wheeling. The local paper (the Wheeling Intelligencer) had reported at the time that McCarthy had used the number 205. The reporter, but not his editor, was sticking by the story and had an audio recording. So if McCarthy, under oath before the Senate committee, said he had said fifty-seven at Wheeling, he was making a false statement to the Senate—a punishable offense.

The problem for the committee’s argument was that all the evidence for the number 205 lay in the newspaper account and the reporter’s vouching for it. The recording had been erased, and nobody outside the newsroom, including those who had heard McCarthy’s speech, verified 205. Indeed, in various addresses made by McCarthy in the days after Wheeling, he by all accounts used the number fifty-seven.

In the methodological canons of evidence use, sources are best when they are independent and verified. In this case, the only source of 205 was a messy draft that McCarthy had given to the Intelligencer before the speech. Along with using the number 205, the draft used the number 80 billion to describe the number of people in the Soviet Union. Indeed, the draft was full of ridiculous errors such as these—errors, it was plain from all additional evidence, that McCarthy did not repeat in Wheeling. The reporter’s vouching for the 205 in the speech was evidence dependent on the original independent source (the draft), which itself was noncontemporaneous with the event in question. In any event, the reporter conceded to the Tydings committee that the whole basis for his claim of 205 came from the draft, not the speech as delivered.

The case was a closed one—according to the canons of evidence, the 205 figure was poorly sourced, whereas the fifty-seven number was better sourced. No matter to Tydings. He said that he had an LP of the event and had photographers take pictures of him with the record, of which he claimed he had multiple copies. McCarthy would be proven a liar before the Senate once the thing was played—but that event never came to pass. A few years later, after McCarthy was disgraced, Tydings admitted that the record was a phony.

“It is noteworthy, indeed,” writes M. Stanton Evans, “that the idea of censuring McCarthy, expelling him from the Senate, and destroying him as a political figure was voiced so vehemently and so often in this early going in the spring of 1950.” This was “the note struck,” Evans continues, not only during the Tydings proceedings, but in contemporaneous “comments of [President] Truman to his staffers…and [a] follow-up memo from State directed to the White House. Granted that McCarthy had made a lot of people angry, this over-the-top reaction seems quite strange.”

Evans comes to this conclusion not only in the instance of the Tydings proceedings but at every juncture of McCarthy’s career in the Senate as an anti-Communist crusader. For all we have heard about the blustery and bullying tactics of McCarthy himself, Evans has compiled a thick book’s worth of examples of just this sort of behavior toward McCarthy by his colleagues and other high-placed mandarins. It is Evans’ inescapable conclusion that others treated McCarthy worse than he treated others.

Evans’ Blacklisted by History is destined to turn the freighter of hostile opinion about McCarthy more than a little in the direction of accuracy and sanity, because the book finally shines light not so much on what McCarthy was up to as on what everyone else was up to in going after him. We now know, thanks to Evans, that McCarthy’s political opponents consistently treated him in a rude and dishonest fashion, examples of which are legion—e.g., a panel’s unceasing inquiry into McCarthy’s innocuous financial history, or McCarthy’s inability to get a straight answer from anyone. One way McCarthy conceivably could have “gone away” would have been for the Senate, the president, whomever, to make transparent indications that places like State were well on the way to clearing out the “Reds,” as was Truman’s policy anyway. If there had not been such progress against Communism, McCarthy’s point could have been taken, and the progress initiated.

Instead, McCarthy’s charges met evasions. The standard one was that if the FBI had not taken action against a particular suspected individual, he must be clear. As Evans is at pains to illustrate, however, the FBI’s responsibility was to pass information to places like State, not to take action. Action was to be taken by the agencies or their supervising authorities in elective government. The replies to McCarthy’s charges were in essence a shell game.

Evans therefore strongly implies that McCarthy’s opponents brought McCarthy down on their own heads. Perhaps it was a convenient modus vivendi; McCarthy was useful. Democrats unsure about fighting a Cold War could find a pretext in McCarthy to act tough on Communism in places like Korea. Establishmentarian Republicans like Eisenhower could distance themselves from McCarthy and thus appear broad-minded as well as “conservative.” The Senate’s 1954 vote of censure was perhaps an indication that by that point McCarthy-as-foil had been used up.

It is a sordid story, made the more sordid by the likelihood that McCarthy had people in his sights who really did malignly influence American policy because of their philo-Communism. For example, Owen Lattimore, one of McCarthy’s more famous targets, wrote preposterous love letters about the Soviet Union and Mao, and to the extent that Lattimore influenced policy in China (which influence could not have been small), the United States was ill-served.

Yet Evans is correct to point out that the overriding policy objective of the United States in the Pacific from the 1920s was the guarantee of a stable, independent, and viable China; indeed, this objective had brought the United States to war with Japan in 1941. That China, after 1949, became the fiefdom of Chairman Mao cannot but be regarded as one of the most horrific outcomes that could have been contemplated as the United States pursued first diplomacy and then war in the service of China’s future.

What to make of the mess that has become our culture’s memory of Joseph McCarthy? To be sure, the man deserves a fairer hearing, and Evans has supplied it. Moreover, it appears to be the case that McCarthy’s “names,” or the equivalents of them, were indeed active in number in the U.S. government through the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, perhaps still as Communist conspirators.

But here the lesson gets muddied. One thing we have learned about the Soviet Union, now that it has met its demise, is that it was an incompetent state. It was never able to deliver anything in terms of economic prosperity, political legitimacy, cultural sufficiency—anything. Indeed, the reason the Soviet empire finally had to go is that it became untenable. With prosperity again the norm under Reagan and spreading over the world in the 1980s, even the Chinese bolted in the direction of private property, and all Reagan (and Thatcher) ever intoned about the Soviet Union was that it belonged on the “ash heap” of history. In the 1980s it became ridiculous to side with the Soviet “experiment.”

It had always been ridiculous, but the policy of containment set in place by Truman had conceded that the Soviets rightly had their sphere. A great “contest” was on, that of the “spheres of influence,” a contest whose very greatness could confer a shred of legitimacy on a Soviet imperial regime that otherwise could count on none, save the residual honor of having been the ones to roust Hitler out of parts of Europe.

The odd thing about some of the Reds in the U.S. government is that they did not see how containment played into Soviet hands. For example, Treasury official Harry Dexter White was a reflexive philo-Communist and Soviet agent who did everything to ensure that the postwar international monetary system would provide generously for the USSR, but the Soviets turned White down at Bretton Woods, and thereafter forbade their satellites from joining White’s creation, the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The Soviets realized that if they even began to manifest themselves in international institutions (outside of risible ones such as the United Nations), the fraudulence of their whole endeavor would quickly be ascertained. In the case of the IMF, they would have to maintain a convertible currency, something White thought would be great for them. They would have access to U.S. dollars and gold, but from the Soviet perspective, making the ruble convertible would violate Lenin’s rule of retaining the means of overprinting the currency. White sought to aggrandize the Soviets by giving them preferred access to the international order. The Soviets, for their part, realized the dangers that internationalism posed for their phony empire and put their hopes in containment.

That is to say, the uncommon efforts that Congress, the agencies, and the presidential administrations of the Truman-Eisenhower era took to keep McCarthy shouting and disreputable were themselves a substitute for a sounder Cold War policy. Perhaps the reason the United States had to fight a Cold War for decades until Ronald Reagan finally put his foot down was that Communist influence in State and other places played a role, at least early on. Then again, perhaps it was even more an intellectual failure on the part of those whose responsibility it was to see the nation into decades of peace and prosperity after the close of World War II.

Originally published in the Winter 2009 issue of the Intercollegiate Review.

In The Truth About Leo Strauss, Catherine and Michael Zuckert, both professors holding endowed chairs at the University of Notre Dame, have set out to vindicate the reputation of their mentor Leo Strauss. The results reveal both a detailed and sympathetic knowledge of Strauss’s teachings and the choice of eminently deserving targets for criticism.

The Zuckerts develop a far more plausible picture of Strauss than the caricatures offered by leftist critics in the national press and by two widely quoted academic writers of censorious volumes about Strauss, Anne Norton and Shadia Drury. The Zuckerts remind us that those who should know better, like Alan Wolfe, have ascribed to Strauss a bogus “fascist” lineage. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wolfe condemned Strauss and his disciples for, among other blunders, being associated with me in some unexplained fashion, because of my authorship of a book on Strauss’s supposed teacher, Carl Schmitt. Wolfe, a sociologist, does not document his assertion, a task that would be impossible since the assertion is baseless.

In one particularly problematic book, John McCormick’s Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism (1997), which the Zuckerts do not cite, the Straussian pedigree is even said to extend from Schmitt through Strauss to the “extremist” Republican Congress elected in 1994. Such fantastical genealogies now abound in print, all moving in the same general direction, from Strauss’s exaggerated contacts with Carl Schmitt, a now diabolized German thinker, down to the current Republican Party, with special reference to the neoconservatives.

Although the final link in this chain seems to me more credible than the Zuckerts are willing to admit, most such condemnations function as guilt by doubtful association. The only defensible detail is that Strauss did write and publish a thoughtful commentary on Schmitt’s brilliant essay, “The Concept of the Political.” The young Strauss’s work made a favorable impression on Schmitt, who appended it to the second edition of his work in 1931. Their subsequent relationship, consisting of letters between the young German Jew and the renowned Catholic conservative scholar, was later broken off, as Schmitt (unexpectedly) threw in his lot with the triumphant Nazis. At about the same time, Strauss left Germany by way of England, eventually arriving in the United States. Whatever might have been his original politics, Strauss in his adopted homeland was a New Deal Democrat and an outspoken supporter of Adlai Stevenson. The contention that he preached European fascist ideology during his tenure at the University of Chicago is entirely unfounded.

It is difficult to overstate the uniformly low quality of the anti-Straussian polemics that the Zuckerts refute in their book. Shadia Drury, for example, penned a several hundred-page exposé trying to link Strauss in his “fascist” sympathies to the Russian radical leftist exile in France, Alexandre Kojève, as well as to Carl Schmitt. While Strauss knew these men and held a published exchange with Kojève, on Xenophon’s dialogue Hiero, Drury simply cannot demonstrate any basis for her allegations. There is nothing in Strauss’s pertinent remarks that would suggest that he agreed with Kojève, who offered an extended defense of progressive world tyranny. (Although Kojève did not return to live in Communist Russia, he was an outspoken apologist for Stalin.)

Throughout their exchange, apropos the self-pitying remarks of a Syracusan despot that might have been written by Xenophon tongue-in-cheek, Strauss and Kojève seem to be speaking past each other. Save for their personal acquaintance and knowledge of Greek sources, it is difficult to ascertain any shared intellectual ground. The Zuckerts make these observations in passing, but Drury’s misreading is so willful that it might have warranted special attention as exemplifying the interpretive gymnastics engaged in by Strauss’s leftist detractors.

The Zuckerts also have no problem assembling texts that indicate Strauss’s affection for “liberal democracy.” I myself have noted this trait while reading Strauss’s comments on Plato and Thucydides, and for forty years I have been nonplussed by the various attempts to identify Strauss with the anti-democratic far Right. His works and, even more, the impressions of his students strongly confirm his Cold War liberal mentality—coupled with Zionist sympathies. To say the least, it is problematic that such views would be understood to place their holder on the anti-modernist or anti-egalitarian side of the political spectrum, even if he also chose to comment favorably on ancient political texts.

Strauss’s favorable statements about the ancients in relation to the moderns as political thinkers, moreover, have to be read through a Straussian optic. Thus, one must first take into account the Straussian tendency to modernize ancient and medieval authors, by attributing to them philosophical skepticism of a kind that is characteristic of their interpreters. What is missing in Strauss is a historically-based insight: that Plato might have accepted metaphysical assumptions about the universe that modern intellectuals generally reject. The insistence, moreover, that earlier thinkers expressed skepticism about conventional beliefs but did so esoterically opens huge hermeneutical difficulties. There is nothing beyond conjecture that would make us believe that Straussians are able to read old texts “between the lines” in the way that is claimed. Their showcasing of this claim may add to their often questionable approach to the past an appearance of trickery or else self-deception. But the Zuckerts are correct on the larger point: namely, that there is nothing in the methodological or cosmological perspectives of their fellow-Straussians that would indicate anything specifically right-wing.

What may be the weakest point of their defense of Strauss and the Straussians, however, is their unwillingness to take on critiques that have arisen on the intellectual Right. Since the neoconservatives do not like to debate their critics on the Right, this neglect might point to a possible behavioral similarity between the Zuckerts and the neoconservatives. The authors’ insouciance allows them to avoid grappling with critics of their thought who are not establishment left-liberals.

What we are therefore not granted in this monograph is the pleasure of seeing the Zuckerts’ responses to such noteworthy critics of Strauss as Claes Ryn, Barry Alan Shain, Thomas Di Lorenzo, and myself (except for condescending treatment of a truncated website passage in one footnote). The disregarding of such writers, and others, might cause one to wonder whether the Straussians, who are self-proclaimed anti-historicists, are at all sensitive to historically minded critics of their work. To his credit, Michael Zuckert has written one long essay, “Natural Rights and Protestant Politics,” that indirectly responds to those with contrary opinions about the role religion played in America’s political founding. Zuckert in his response generally subsumes under “Lockeanism” any religious, biblical frame of reference that might have affected the beginnings of the “American regime.” While his understanding of Protestant religiosity may not be of the first water, he has nonetheless engaged viewpoints that other Straussians have simply ignored.

Since the Zuckerts, at least in this book, do not engage their most incisive opponents, we must conclude that they have chosen not to do so. The result recalls for me the attempt by the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs to dispose of anti-Marxist thinkers by placing them all at the doorstep of European fascism. Those who held out by not accepting Marxist Leninism had supposedly embarked on some kind of “destruction of Reason,” as Lukacs claimed. It was thus unnecessary to sort out the cogent from the frivolous arguments. They were all of the same genus and arose equally out of the same defective consciousness. In a similar way, the Zuckerts have created the incorrect impression that all anti-Straussian polemics are substantially interchangeable. They are not.

A final animadversion about their work concerns their attempts to uncouple “Straussian” and “neoconservative.” Are the two identities as far apart as the Zuckerts would suggest? While granting that “the Strauss links to neoconservatism have been much overstated in both the popular and more scholarly press,” one might ask whether they are quite as disparate as the Zuckerts intimate.

The authors themselves provide evidence of these links by mentioning Straussian neoconservatives who were active in the Reagan and Bush, Sr., administrations, as well as in the current administration of Bush, Jr. They do make one point that I gladly concede: that a neoconservative ascendancy would be entirely conceivable even in the absence of Straussian advisors and of Straussian rhetoric in the orations of Bush, Jr. Although the neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol has claimed to be a Straussian, in anthologizing neoconservative publicists, the Zuckerts remind us, Kristol included only two certifiable Straussians. Even more telling, Kristol has repeatedly ascribed to Strauss views about Plato, Aristotle, and Rousseau that are exactly the opposite of those that Strauss in fact held. The Zuckerts are also correct that the security advisor Richard Perle is a self-identified neoconservative but not a Straussian.

Even so, the Zuckerts in this case may be missing the forest for the trees. The nexus between the Straussians and the neoconservatives has indeed been misstated as well as overstated for partisan ends, but it is still nonetheless there, as seen from two perspectives. Sociologically and culturally, the two movements are largely indistinguishable. Most prominent members of both groups have come out of the same ethnic community and from the same large American cities and identify themselves with Jewish nationalism and a certain pluralist vision of America as a “proposition nation.” They have also worked to define American identity in secularist, universalist terms—although not all neoconservatives have done so with the apparatus of learning evidenced by the more cerebral Straussians.

The two overlapping groups also produce similar historical narratives about good and bad or democratic and anti-democratic nations, while devising superficial generalizations to justify their conclusions: e.g., “democracies never fight each other.” The last statement rests on axiomatic opinions among the neoconservatives and the Straussians that the Central Powers in World War I and the Confederacy in 1861 were the systemically “anti-democratic” sides. But the antagonists in both the Civil War and the Great War may have had more in common with each other than with the neoconservative view of democratic universalism or the ideal of a purely propositional nation. Of course, the groups in question would not care to consider this hypothesis. They would also be unlikely to accept Carl Schmitt’s observation that those who preach democratic universalism as the necessary means to establish a peaceful world are, at least implicitly, declaring war on all non-likeminded societies.

These comments are not meant to disparage but rather to explain a certain perception about the considerable area of agreement between the neoconservatives and the Straussians. I am well aware that there are Catholic Straussians who do not fit the sociological definition offered. But these figures tend to be eclecticists who operate at the periphery of the neocon-Straussian Lebenswelt. They relate to the real article in the same way that ecologists who claim to be influenced by Marx are really hyphenated members of the Marxist creed. These hyphenated Straussians are more open than the full-blooded ones to those who are not Straus-sians; what drives them in the end are ideas and areas of inquiry rather than friend/enemy distinctions.

I am also not maintaining counterfactually that all American Jews are neoconservatives and Straussians, an oversimplification that Edward Shapiro has pointedly challenged in these pages. Nor am I denying that there are non-Jewish Straussians or neoconservatives, examples of which by now are legion. My point is rather that the Straussians and the neoconservatives show a much wider identity than the one that the Zuckerts acknowledge. The reader is referred to the penetrating observations about group consciousness in the opening section of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia.

Arguably the Straussians supply a theoretical justification for what the neoconservatives hope to achieve politically. In an entry on “Straussianism” in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (2006), Mark C. Henrie gives as “one plausible link” between his subject and neoconservatism a belief in “the straightforward sovereignty of politics over culture.” Unlike traditionalists, the Straussians and contemporary neoconservatives both believe that culture is defined by the “regime” in which it develops. It should be entirely possible therefore to impose American-style democracy on the Iraqis, since what supposedly has shaped American identity are the Lockean premises and institutions whence our own country emerged. Henrie regards such a view as “vulgar” as well as simplistic, but the notion of “the political” shared by the Straussians and the neoconservatives may be even less defensible than this. The “political” that these groups have in mind are abstract principles about democracy and human rights, which are detached from specific histories and assumed to be universally applicable. The Straussians in question are not presenting “the political” as a lived collective experience, which is shaped by the religious and the ancestral situation in which actual peoples evolve.

The Straussians are equally unmoved by the changes that “regimes” have passed through over the centuries. The transformations of the American regime since the 1790s, which they generally affirm as progressive ones, reflect for many Straussians some original “natural rights” foundation that is being extended. The past, like the present, becomes a canvas onto which they and the neoconservatives project their common presentist concerns, most particularly that of exporting democracy to the Middle East. If James Madison were still around and still guided by his Lockean beliefs, presumably he too would be trying to bring the present American version of “democracy” to the Arabs.

Like Henrie, I believe that there is withal a higher side to Straussian teachings and one of the positive effects of the Straussian influence has been to arouse an interest in political-theoretical texts on the intellectual Right. I also lean personally as a methodologist toward the perspective, at least with regard to the contemporary West, that politics influences culture as much as the former is shaped by the latter. But the talk about “regimes,” separated from cultural and historical contexts, exemplifies the weirdly abstract. In short, the point at which the Straussians and the neoconservatives intersect may show the Straussians at their worst.

I would finally note that there are at least some Straussians of my acquaintance, e.g., Stanley Rosen, Jules Gleicher, Charles Butterworth, and Joseph Cropsey, who have not rushed into print as defenders of neoconservative foreign policy. Some of them have remained methodologically indebted to Leo Strauss without descending into partisan vulgarity. I have also noticed, unexpectedly, representatives of what the Zuckerts and others call “Claremont Straussianism,” namely Harry Jaffa and his followers, making historically-grounded arguments about the efforts to export American democracy. Although their philosophical position might lead them toward the opposite shore, such writers as Charles Kesler have questioned the global democratic project. At times they have even begun to sound like the unabashed political realist and editor of Orbis James Kurth. Such figures underline the possibility of what the Zuckerts prematurely see as realized for their persuasion, a justifiable sense of distance from the rudely contemporary.

Originally published in the Winter 2007 issue of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review.

In Summer 2004 Modern Age published my case for a realistic American foreign policy grounded in pursuit of the national interest. 1 The essay had a long gestation— about twenty-five years. 2 At the time this essay was prepared for publication I hoped that President Bush was pursuing a foreign policy aimed at preserving the national interest of the United States. If not, I argued, “this country may become something other than it is now,” a revolutionary nation (not unlike the French nation of Napoleon), and a disruptive influence on the world stage, a threat to itself and to the stability and the order of traditional cultures, and world politics. 3 President Bush’s Second Inaugural and subsequent statements by him and his Secretary of State and other Administration spokesmen are clearer evidence that Wilsonian liberalism has been renewed and American foreign policy is in a steep spiral from which there is no escape.

At stake in the contest between Wilsonian Idealism and a reality-oriented foreign policy that pursues the American interest, is whether individual political freedoms will be protected by traditional constitutional limits on federal government power or whether those freedoms will be displaced by obligations to the interests of an imperial power. A reality-oriented foreign policy is critical for the survival of limited government because the United States has had imperial obligations thrust upon it at precisely the moment that its Constitutional law is written by judicial activists, and the executive branch is guided by Presidents who are insensitive to the limitations of state power. The foundations of a nation-state primed to become an imperial power were laid during the Great Depression, cemented during World War II, and buttressed during the Cold War. It is all too clear that the democratic idealism of American foreign policy in the present Bush Administration, fueled by war hysteria and the Administration’s “war on terror,” have engendered national security policies, and institutions such as the Department of Homeland Security, that threaten the future freedom of American citizens. When future generations reflect on their enslavement to the administrative state, they may trace their predicament to two American presidents: Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush.

Though the details of this potential threat to American freedom were not clear to me twenty-five years ago, the need to speak out against previous foreign policies guided by the cause of a New World Order began to become clear during the Reagan Administration when the Cold War elicited a rationale and public diplomacy for advancing democracy. That rationale stated that because the United States was a democracy, it could not allow itself to be surrounded by non-democratic regimes. In the context of the Cold War, this secular rationale for defeating Communism was a tolerable addition to the arsenal of intellectual defenses made in dealing with an ideology that sought to destroy anyone opposed to it. But we should notice also that Communism was an atheist life-force that threatened the religious foundations of every traditional culture with which it came in contact. As such, Communism and Democracy are “modernizing” movements that attain similar results: the secularization of society.

Let me, therefore, trace the development of my argument in Modern Age to its beginning. The substance of my Modern Age essay on the New World Order was presented in a speech to the Philadelphia Society in New York City immediately after the election of President Ronald Wilson Reagan and later published in The Hillsdale Review.⁴ The speech itself was well received—except by fellow-panelist Norman Podhoretz—who expressed disdain for this criticism of Richard Nixon: “American foreign policy exists in tension between two poles: realism without virtue and idealism without prudence.” “Realism without virtue,” or what I called a “vicious realism” was an appropriate description of the foreign policy of Richard Nixon.

There was more, however, to my motivation for presenting a strategy for American foreign policy to members of the Philadelphia Society than criticism of Nixonian realism. I am a child of the World War II generation that dominated American politics through the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush. I had joined the conservative movement in rebellion against policies that the World War II generation celebrated, especially its idealism. Their idealism (not the idealism of my generation) placed the burden of a growing federal government, indebtedness, welfare entitlements, and violent death in foreign wars upon my generation. To add insult to injury, they had fewer children than their parents, and stayed in power longer than previous generations because, thanks to breakthroughs in medical science, they lived longer. They dominated an America into which I was born until President Clinton defeated World War II hero, George Herbert Walker Bush.

It was my naive hope in 1980 that the election of Ronald Reagan would commence a reform of “World War II” thinking about government, including a rejection of Wilsonian idealism and the influence of secular Evangelism on American foreign policy. In 1980 we young movement conservatives eagerly waited a call to service in what we expected to be the “Reagan Revolution.” But, the Reagan administration was an old man’s administration.

Colin Powell observes in his autobiography that “the World War II generation was back in the saddle.”⁵ Political conservatives of my generation were shaped by the defeat of Richard Nixon by John F. Kennedy in 1960, the socialism of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the failure of the President’s will in Vietnam, and the 1964 presidential nomination fight against the Eastern Establishment by Barry Goldwater. That was our defining experience.

At the White House in 1980, and throughout the Reagan Administration, the President’s men remembered the Great Depression, World War II, and, especially, D-Day, and they recruited key staff from the failed administrations of Presidents Nixon and Ford. Contrary to popular opinion, young movement conservatives were not actively recruited to serve in the Reagan Administration,⁶ and those who somehow managed to secure an appointment, were not invited to stay around for a second term.⁷ That left a vacuum which today deprives Republican administrations of conservative leaders, particularly those with experience in foreign policy. In this regard, the Reagan Administration was a complete and utter failure.

A “Statement of Principles” issued by the Project for the New American Century could criticize traditional conservatives who, literally, had been blocked from influence in the Reagan Administration:⁸

…conservatives have not confidently advanced a strategic vision of America’s role in the world. They have not set forth guiding principles for American foreign policy. They have allowed differences over tactics to obscure potential agreement on strategic objectives. And they have not fought for a defense budget that would maintain American security and advance American interests in the new century.

The reason for the failure of traditional conservatives to advance “a strategic vision of America’s role in the world” is not because they did not have strategic foreign policy vision, but because none were advanced in foreign policy appointments by the Reagan White House.

Young conservatives interested in foreign policy were “off” the radar screen of the President’s men who looked for advice and appointments from past presidential administrations and were rejected by the President’s first Director of White House Personnel if they had strategic ideas, but lacked government experience. Those that did appear on political radar were shaped by careers that began in the Democratic Party, service to Democrat members of Congress, governors and presidents and who were to be found on the side of Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson in the 1960s.

Their influence today is seen in President George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural (written by presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson)⁹ and two so-called “principles” declared in the manifesto of Project for the New American Century:

we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values; we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad.

Compare these words with the Bush-Gerson statement in the President’s Second Inaugural address:

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending the tyranny in our world.¹⁰

Readers of Modern Age will recognize that the June 1997 Project for the New American Century’s “Statement of Principle” and President Bush’s Second Inaugural are characteristic of leftist manifes-toes in the arts, literature, and, of course, politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Manifestoes are not grounded in reason but in propositional reasoning motivated by the appetite for a “cause.” In my Modern Age essay I trace the origins of this mode of thinking to Marx’s “call for a revolution in permanence and Vladimir Lenin’s program of communist revolution….”¹¹ That is a prescription for pursuing a policy of idealism absent of prudence. The primary feature of this thinking, and President Bush-Gerson’s Second Inaugural, is the absence of analysis of the national interest of the United States, and the assertion that “true stability depends on the freedom of others.”

This Gospel of Democratic Idealism is an important influence in American life because, even today, instead of disposing of the idealism of Woodrow Wilson the President of the United States has embraced it. This brings me to the error of Professor Mordecai Roshwald’s response to my essay.¹²

There is a mode of thought that pursues answers to questions in a spirit of openness. From that perspective it is clear that nation-states exist in relationship to one another, and something called “balance” between them is preferable to imbalances or disequilibria that can lead to conflict and war. Presidents of the United States and their advisors should be guided by serious and skilled analysis of conditions that shape the national interest. That interest includes concern for morality and justice, but not, as Roshwald suggests, putting “an end to the chaos of history.”

How far have we fallen when a long-time contributor to Modern Age such as Professor Roshwald can refer to historical experience as “a complex problem”¹³ that is to be overcome by seeking “an end to the chaos of history.” Roshwald seeks a world in which “the use of force is banished and likens a realistic approach to the law of the jungle! Academics like Roshwald may count how many lambs may lie down with lions, but Presidents are obliged to count the fattened lions and keep them at bay. Unfortunately, President Bush (and Michael Gerson) has been looking at the lambs, not the lions.

In his Second Inaugural, President Bush said:

The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

On May 7, 2005, in Latvia, President Bush stated:

We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations—appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of… We have learned our lesson. No one’s liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security, and true stability, depend on the freedom of others.

Under the influence of Wilsonian Idealism the President announced in 2005 that the United States aspires to make the world democratic. That should be of concern to every American citizen because a President of the United States has announced that he seeks to pursue democratic revolt “in all the world.”¹⁴

Some day, perhaps, a truly conservative American President may articulate a viable foreign policy that seeks to preserve the national interest of the United States, and the American people will no longer be aroused by the hope that they may be redeemed by the actions of the U.S. Government. Salvation is not collective. And redemptive foreign policies that reflect the mindset of ideologues, not statesmen, will cut down in their youth the best of yet another generation of young Americans.

1. “Origins and End of the New World Order,” Modern Age, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Summer 2004), 195-205 (hereinafter referred to as “Origins”).
2. See my essay, “Croly, Wilson, and the American Civil Religion,” Modern Age, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Winter 1979).
3. “Origins,” 199.
4. “Civil Religion and American Foreign Policy” in The Hillsdale Review (Spring, 1981), Vol. III, No. 1, 3-11.
5. Colin Powell writes of this period in time, “One thing soon became apparent about the Reagan administration: the World War II generation was back in the saddle. …the war was defining experience for him.” My American Journey (New York, 1995), 257. In 1980 we hopeful young conservatives had forgotten that Ronald Reagan was born in 1911.
6. The much vaunted “ideological” purity of Reagan Administration appointments is a myth. President Reagan’s Office of Presidential Personnel was led by “head-hunter” Pendleton James who installed an apolitical system that gave preference to administrative experience, not philosophical commitment. See my book review titled “The Reagan Flaw?” Review of Politics, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Summer 1987), 435-437. I argue that the scandals of Reagan’s term can be traced to the “administrative system created during the transition period.”
7. Dr. Donald Devine and Tom Pauken were given important appointments in the Reagan Administration, and then junked by the White House when their principled conservatism conflicted with the liberal views of senior White House staff. At USICA (later USIA), movement conservatives Phil Nicolaides, Robert Reilly, Les Lenkowski, Ken Tomlinson, and the author, were sacrificed to the whims of President Reagan’s appointee whose only claim to competence was the friendship between his wife and Nancy Reagan. Examples at the U.S. Department of Education and other Agencies where movement conservatives were removed from their appointments make up what I call “the dark side of the Reagan Administration” (in a book in progress on the future of conservatism and the damage done to America by the World War II generation).
8. The website of this organization is located at http://www.newamericancentury.org.
9. Gerson, a graduate of Evangelical Christian Wheaton College, apparently became enamored at Wheaton with ideas usually associated with Christian heresies that seek collective redemption and modern ideologies that seek worldly salvation.
10. Compare the words of President Bush to the statement of Ukraine’s new president at his Inauguration on January 23, 2005: “We are ready to respect the interests of other states. Nevertheless, for me as well as for you, national interests are above all!” hup://ww2. yuschenko .COM.ua/eng/Press centre/168/2167/.
11. “Origins,” 200.
12. Mordecai Roshwald, “A Response to Richard J. Bishirjian,” Modern Age, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Winter 2005).
13. Ibid., 84.
14. Dmitri Simes’s response to Bush’s Second Inaugural is similar: “If Bush means it literally, then it means we have an extremist in the White House. I hope and pray that he didn’t mean it [and] that it was merely an inspirational speech, not practical guidance for

Originally published in the Winter 2007 issue of the Modern Age.

In the following commentary I want to pose this question to the readers of Modern Age: What is the proper role of the United States in world affairs? My answer is that it must be what it has always been: To serve liberty and justice as best we can while defending our security and national interests. None of these terms is susceptible of tidy definition, of course.

Foreign policy

The avoidance of entangling alliances, despite abiding appeal to isolationists, xenophobes, and pacifists, did not take us very far. It was effectively repudiated with the Louisiana Purchase which paved the way for Manifest Destiny. After the lessons taught by the War of 1812, the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 asserted the enduring principle that the United States is to be active in the world arena and that it stood against colonialism or lesser use of force within its sphere of influence then understood primarily as North and South America— but not forgetting the Barbary pirates and their ilk. This drawing of a line in the sand and daring anybody to cross it without suffering consequences has characterized foreign policy since that time. Speak softly and carry a big stick became explicit in the Theodore Roosevelt corollary. With the collapse of British power, the interest sphere expanded to encompass the rest of the free world during the Cold War, only so long as vital American interests are implicated. This included communist expansion or potential expansion (the Truman doctrine later elaborated by Walt Rostow) or any threat to vital national security interests judged sufficient to warrant diplomatic or military action. “Containment” positively meant keeping the world safe for democracy and out of the hands of totalitarian and especially communist despots—as first demonstrated on a large scale in the Korean conflict where major United States military assets were deployed with beneficial lasting results from 1950 until today.

The Bush Doctrine

From the time of the Founding there has been a moralistic if not plainly religious tinge to these policies, grounded like the country itself on the “laws of Nature and nature’s God” as “self-evident truths,” and felt to be an “almost chosen people” blessed by Providence, a light unto the nations. America did not have to wait for Woodrow Wilson to become righteous. It understood and represented itself as a force for good against palpable evil and tyranny from its beginning. Thus also in the wars of the twentieth century, whose rich rhetoric is familiar to all of us—with varying degrees of public acceptance of this overriding justification for action from the high ground while still attending to mundane military, economic, and geopolitical threats. A moral justification in addition to calculated rationality and interests has been judged essential in this country, if public support is to be marshaled and sustained for any period of time. The failure or the inability for various reasons to do so (a potent Left and biased media among others) ultimately doomed the Vietnam policy of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

Post 9/11

The trauma of this malicious Islamist attack engendered a shift in policy emphasis, from sturdy deterrence and containment to proactive diplomatic and military initiative.Preemption as a dimension of Just War theory, and of the universal right to self-defence, is not new with the current Bush administration (e.g., Bay of Pigs, Grenada), nor does it signal imperialistic designs much less eschatological intoxication—as the loud Left and our more excitable citizens clamorously assert. But it takes on sober importance (to include preventive war) as an option of last resort in an era of lethal danger of Weapons of Mass Destruction when absorbing the first punch could involve wholly unacceptable risk or a knockout. As Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said in 2002, “the risks of waiting must far outweigh the risks of action.”

This is not completely new—think of post-Civil War Reconstruction, the Open Door to China, and the Marshall Plan for instance—but more novel and ambitious is the express and energetic pursuit of transformative policies. These are calculated to foster by all available means the move of nations to liberal market economies and democratic free governments worldwide as the primary prophylaxis against hostility and deadly threat from regimes or from the fanatical enclaves they may finance or harbor.

Core Current Policy

This is different in tone and perhaps of more dubious validity. It rests on the convictions (as formulated on March 16, 2006) that: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world…. To protect our Nation and honor our values, the United States seeks to extend freedom across the globe by leading an international effort to end tyranny and to promote effective democracy. We will employ the full array of political, economic, diplomatic, and other tools at our disposal [to that end]…. We have a responsibility to promote human freedom. Yet freedom cannot be imposed; it must be chosen. The form that freedom and democracy take in any land will reflect the history, culture, and habits unique to its people…. The advance of freedom and human dignity through democracy is the long-term solution to the transnational terrorism of today…. There are four steps we will take in the short term: We will 1) prevent attacks by terrorist networks before they occur; 2) deny WMD to rogue states and to terrorist allies who would use them without hesitation; 3) deny terrorist groups the support and sanctuary of rogue states; and 4) deny the terrorists control of any nation that they would use as a base and launching pad for terror.” (Quoted from “The President’s National Security Strategy,” March 16, 2006, released by the White House.)

Pragmatism and Politics

Davy Crockett’s motto was “Figure out what’s right and go ahead!” This maxim well expresses the spirit of the Bush foreign policy in the war on terrorism: it is simple, honest, and moralistic. It is pure Texas (and Methodist) Sunday school, one might even say—and we have to take President Bush’s religious convictions seriously because he takes them seriously himself. It leads with the American trump card by transforming American exceptionalism into a universal movement: one invoking a universal human nature and identifying individual liberty as natural to all human beings—a defining God-given attribute and inalienable right. Relatedly, it favors free market global economics and fosters an international community of sovereign free democratic states. On the key point President Bush remarked at a press conference on April 13, 2004: “I have this belief, strong belief, that freedom is not this country’s gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty’s gift to every man and woman in this world.”

Can such policy also be realistic? Perhaps as realistic as drawing to an inside straight, if you play poker. However: Better a bold policy than a timid one, or no policy at all, in an ineluctable high stakes game where losing is no option. Besides: God takes care of children, drunks, and the United States of America, we cheerfully remember.

Potholes in the Road to Peace

No-body said this would be easy, and criticism abounds. For instance:

• Woodrow Wilson could not do it and neither can George W. Bush. But the United States was not then the preeminent world leader, hegemonic or superpower, and economy.
• The whole endeavor has a destabilizing effect on global politics: safe and friendly authoritarian regimes are better than hostile pseudo-democratic ones in the hands of terrorist entities like Hamas. This is madness we hear. (Bring Saddam back?)
• The other nations of the world will never accede to such blatant Westernization/ Americanization and/or secularization. Even (especially?) Europe is skeptical. It is either too religious or too secular. Perhaps. The American public—hearing the incessant clamor of the hollow men composing the world’s ideologized self-anointed “elites”—has no stomach for the kind of dissensus or for the protracted conflict and carnage before us. Isolation and pacifism are too strong to sustain the effort essential to even modest success. Anyway, we do not like imperialism, so bring the boys and girls home, and set up a perimeter around San Francisco, our last bastion of resolute true blue patriotism.
• In the media age of information overload, deculturation, manipulation of public opinion, and vitriolic politics, blood on the TV screens 24/7 dramatizing the horrors of war makes the whole effort patently un-American not to mention plain distasteful. Too many casualties! Where’s the good news? The price is too high! And for what?
• We will go broke in the process: Iraq may now be costing roughly a billion dollars per week, we are told; the deficit is soaring, the national debt threatens the economic foundations of the Republic: we can not afford the war on terrorism. Embrace peace in our time. The Soviets could not afford the Cold War; how can we afford this one? By making the tax cuts permanent?
• Rampant anti-Americanism has exploded both at home and abroad because of Bush policy. We have lost all our friends and politics has seldom been more polarized. Nobody remembers or cares that we saved the world from Adolf Hitler, Tojo Hideki, and later on from the Sino-Soviet evil empire in Central Europe and in Korea. Class-struggle fanatics, having mastered only one flawed text, monotonously decry a dark geopolitical capitalist plot. Peaceniks incapable of constructive action burn our flag in indignation that we seek to foster regimes devoted to honesty, justice, and individual liberty. Pass the soma. Give us the peace of secure serfdom is the cry!—like those oppressed by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor for whom hated freedom was the ultimate tyranny, personal responsibility. Away with all your principles! We want to be loved!

Reality check

• The world has gone from 20 to some 120 democratic nations since the Second World War: if there is a wave of the future in global affairs this is plainly it.
• If Indonesia and Turkey can democratize (“rowdy”or not) there is some reasonable hope for the rest of the Islamic world, even if not in accordance with Western models of free governments—a fact explicitly recognized by current Bush policy. Do not expect uniform results but amelioration of traditional systems. Politics is the art of the possible some sage once said. Economic freedom may induce political freedom. It is worth a try in any case since it brings better lives to all men and women—as can be seen everywhere it exists.
• Battle casualties is a painful subject. Every life is precious and cherished, yet some perspective beyond ifit-bleeds-it-leads sensationalist journalism and the howls of peacenik movements is mandatory: 140 miles west of where we are meeting today 51,000 American soldiers died in a 3-day battle in July 1863 at Gettysburg. Some 2,400 Allied men died on D-Day (June 6, 1944) and another 7,900 were WIA; over 6,500 Marines and 21,000 Japanese soldiers died in five weeks on Iwo Jima; the 82-day battle of Okinawa cost more lives (about a quarter of a million) than were lost through both atomic bombs dropped on Japan—one reason these horrific weapons were used to end the war. The great 1950 Chosin Reservoir 70-mile fighting retreat from entrapment by 100,000 Chinese troops, in 18 days cost 3,400 American (1^st Marine Division and the 7^th Infantry Division) and over 25,000 Chinese soldiers’ lives during combat. But it helped secure democracy in South Korea for the next fifty years, where it still thrives. That war is hell is more than merely a cliché. The 3,200 American military dead in three years in Iraq is grievous cost, to be sure, and in no way to be minimized. But it does not compare with troop losses suffered in many of our previous military actions.

Conclusion

If we can not “afford” current policy, what can we afford? What is your plan? World politics is not like a philosophy seminar or a college debate— all hypothetical or just for fun. Something has to happen, has to be done—right or wrong–sometimes with life or death consequences. Not long after U. S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk retired from office to become a law professor at the University of Georgia, I heard him say: “At last I can have an opinion!”

Thomas B. Macaulay once sniffily complained that the United States government under the Constitution is all sail and no anchor. However that may be, the wind is surely at our backs, and the sail is up. That sail is the Bush Doctrine.

Originally published in the Winter 2007 issue of the Modern Age.