A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny
by Patrick J. Buchanan
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Book Summary Information
Author: Patrick J. BuchananEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-02-01
ISBN: 0895261596
Number of pages: 437
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Book Reviews of A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny
Book Review: A Faux Republic becomes a Faux Empire
Summary: 5 Stars
In the interest of truth in advertising, I admit up front that Pat Buchanan is not one of my favorite news commentators, although I do not fail to listen to everything he has to say. In fact I try to "over-understand" his position because in my view, he has a brilliant but devious mind, that, depending on the going price, can be put to true patriotic use or can be turned into down right embarrassing and ugly demagoguery. That said, no one could deny that like Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan has a brilliantly trained Catholic mind, and is a fine student of American history. As a result, one has to take him seriously and has to read him carefully even when one disagrees with him. And thus one has to read this book if only to see how carefully Mr. Buchanan has read, digested and mined so much of American history. How he uses it and the lens through which he sees it, of course, are entirely different matters.
And while it is difficult to argue with his main thesis that America's empire days are over (...so why don't we just stop trying to act like an empire - and stop trying to police the world?) Yet his prescriptions of how to go about this task of reducing our empire footprint -- by returning to the Monroe Doctrine and annexing Greenland, being prepared to intervene in Canada and Mexico, etc. -- both baffles me and leaves me cold. I may be wrong but I believe that Mr. Buchanan takes his own reading of history much too seriously and much too literally, and thus cannot see the forest for the trees.
In the penultimate chapter, for instance, he does acknowledge that the international system is changing, but by failing to realize how radically it is changing and by failing to factor this into his analysis in any case, he reduces this acknowledgement to an empty slogan. Surely his understanding of history must have convinced him that unlike Great Britain for instance, the U.S. stumbled into its empire status. We were never, and will never be a "true empire." At best we are a reluctant faux empire. Clearly, we have become an empire by default. To pretend otherwise is to miss the point about the fragility of the American nation.
If we must turn to prognostication as Mr. Buchanan has done, then surely he can see as well as anyone else that the most likely scenario of doom for the "American Empire" will have little to do with its foreign policy misadventures. Its demise will occur as a result of an internal implosion due to its fragile domestic situation. And in this regard, we are becoming as much a "faux republic" as we are a "faux empire." Surely the most likely scenario for U.S. demise is that we will go the way of our erstwhile Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union. Over-reaching internationally was the least of its problems and surely will be the least of ours. A much greater problem for the U.S. than its foreign policy problems is the collision course emerging between America's ruling class and everyone else. The way our "so called" democracy has been seriously compromised and rendered moot by those able to manipulate the system "for fun and profit," that coupled with an immigration problem that we have no way of getting our hands around, and our with failure to deal seriously with ever tense racial problems, (both of which will be scapegoated and exploited by the ruling classes) and one does not have to spin far-fetched foreign policy scenarios to write America's obituary as an empire.
Thus Mr. Buchanan is right, but I believe for the wrong reasons: Although he has properly acknowledged that changes in the international system will occur, he has failed both to take the drastic and capricious nature of those changes into account and the fact that the U.S. can no longer affect events in such a rapidly changing world as it once was able to do during earlier parts of its history. Moreover, whatever may still be the U.S. influence on the international scene, "over-reaching internationally" is not the number one threat to the empire. The number one threat and the most likely source of the U.S. demise as a nation will be "under-reaching" domestically. That is to say, in failing to deal with the looming class discrepancies, and with its ever expanding racial and immigration problems. All of these problems, like foreign policy problems, too have a way of being unruly and taking on an unpredictable life of their own.
In summary, I believe that Mr. Buchanan's scenario is much too narrow, fortuitously so, and thus becomes a "too convenient straw man" picture of the future. The future will not be just a straight-line continuation of the history of the past, but promises to be a very different one -- one that will make radical and unpredictable turns from the tidy version of history the author has spun here. However for Buchanan's picture of American history alone (which is every where superb) this is clearly a five star effort.
Summary of A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny
Now available in paperback. All but predicting the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, Buchanan examines and critiques America's recent foreign policy and argues for new policies that consider America's interests first.Anyone who has caught Pat Buchanan's television appearances, or heard his campaign rhetoric, will be surprised at his relatively evenhanded and thoughtful tone as he writes--often quite persuasively--in favor of the restoration of the political, military, and economic independence that largely drove U.S. foreign policy in the 19th century. At the heart of A Republic, Not an Empire is a well-written history of U.S. foreign policy beginning with the end of the American Revolution, going through the First and Second World Wars, Vietnam, and the end of the cold war, up to the superpower's involvement in the Persian Gulf and the former Yugoslavia. This section is bookended by, essentially, two very long op-ed pieces that lay out Buchanan's view of U.S. foreign policy: American interests should determine all foreign-policy decisions.
The twin foreign-policy goals of interventionism and free trade that seem to drive the Clinton administration's foreign policy are, Buchanan argues, the same pursuits "that brought the British Empire to ruin." Empires fall, he reminds us, through war and too many foreign commitments. With the end of the cold war, he suggests, U.S. foreign policy has become chaotic, driven by special interests; the sum of U.S. global commitments has become greater than the country's ability to defend them. In the end, A Republic, Not an Empire proposes, the only country the United States can completely rely on and trust is itself. --Linda Killian
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