Current American military engagements in Libya and Afghanistan have raised the issue, for many Republicans, of what a conservative foreign policy alternative to Obama should look like. This issue will no doubt heat up as the 2012 GOP primary season approaches. When conservatives think of a successful Republican foreign policy president to use as a model, they all agree on Ronald Reagan. Last week, I suggested that Reagan was comfortable and unapologetic about the decisive use of American military power, but that he was generally reluctant to deploy U.S. troops into combat under absurdly constrained or unpromising conditions. His usual instinct was to either win or stay home. This week, let's examine current U.S. military commitments in Afghanistan, and ask how Reagan might have handled them, followed by some broader implications for Republicans as they head toward 2012.
President Obama entered the White House promising to escalate militarily in Afghanistan. There is no indication that he had thought through, at first, what exactly this might mean. In the spring of 2009 he authorized a new American mission against the Taliban in order to "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda" in its Afghan base, but without providing U.S. troop levels fully adequate to the stated mission. A second round of deliberations, conducted later that year, led Obama to settle on a further increase of 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, under the stipulation that American forces would start to come home in July 2011. Of course this publicly declared timeline for initial withdrawal contradicted the purpose of the deployment, since it encouraged the Taliban to believe that they could simply wait out the Americans. But most Republicans in and out of Congress supported Obama's overall decision, because it showed a willingness on the part of the President to take on Al Qaeda and its allies.
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Now, over a year later, the Afghan mission grows increasingly unpopular with American public opinion. Indeed there are signs that it may become a campaign issue as potential Republican presidential candidates weigh in on various sides. The position of Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), for example, is rapid and complete U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. But that is not the mainstream conservative inclination right now, nor is it likely to be in 2012. More interesting was the dust-up last month between two very credible potential candidates, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi and former Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota. Barbour stated in an Iowa speech, as well as in an interview with the American Spectator, that the U.S. should consider shrinking its troop presence in Afghanistan, saying "I worry about nation building" and "I don't think our mission should be to think we're going to make Afghanistan an Ireland or an Italy." Pawlenty responded to Barbour by saying that we ought to defer to the recommendations of General Petraeus, updating the mission as need be, but certainly not withdraw prematurely.
How would Reagan have approached the issue of current U.S. military commitments in Afghanistan? Obviously the circumstances in Reagan's time were not identical to those today, so a certain amount of humility is in order when drawing comparisons. Reagan for example never had to face a catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil like that of September 11, 2001. It is hard to believe that he would not have responded to such an attack in a fierce and decisive manner, involving U.S. military strikes as well as a range of other policy tools. Beyond that, however, the question is more open. As president, Reagan was generally dubious toward placing American troops in sustained combat operations overseas under what he viewed as deeply problematic conditions. His usual instinct on matters of military intervention was to either act boldly, robustly, and if need be unilaterally, or to avoid unpromising armed entanglements in the first place. Yet we know that well prior to assuming the presidency, for example in the late 1960s, he argued for military escalation once the U.S. was already at war in Vietnam.
Clearly, Reagan was powerfully inclined to support American troops and their commanders already in the field, particularly when he believed the cause to be intrinsically vital to U.S. national security. He also understood the power and danger of fanatical, totalitarian ideologies in world affairs. In his own time, the most dangerous such ideology internationally was Communism. Today, it is a version of radical Islam that justifies terrorist attacks on innocent civilians. Reagan understood that to face down Communism required tradeoffs on other matters. For example, it meant that the United States might have to work with some very imperfect allies in order to contain and roll back Communism. So the single organizing principle of Reagan's foreign policy was not so much democracy promotion, as anti-Communism, since democracy could hardly flourish worldwide in the face of Communist expansion. Reagan was also entirely willing, as part of his anti-Soviet and anti-Communist strategy, to intervene abroad militarily in some cases. But he realized that under some circumstances U.S. military intervention could be counter-productive in serving and sustaining the larger goal of rolling back Soviet Communist expansion internationally. He ruled out direct American military intervention in Nicaragua for that very reason. Reagan was not in favor of intervention for its own sake - he was for it when it served his overarching anti-Soviet strategy and against it when it did not. A Reaganite approach to the changes sweeping the Arab world would therefore be not to simply call for democracy promotion and the toppling of autocrats, but to navigate these events in such a way as to hurt rather than help radical Islamists - the single greatest threat to American interests and democratic values in the region.
In Afghanistan, hopes for a more decent political system, U.S. national security interests, and American intervention happen to coincide, since the Taliban insurgency opposes all three with a vengeance. I think Reagan would have recognized that U.S. military success in grinding down this insurgency really is both vital and possible. If the Taliban win, they will no doubt make room for their Al Qaeda allies to plan terrorist attacks from Afghanistan, as they did before September 11, 2001. Some people argue that the Taliban can be accommodated diplomatically, but the core leadership of the Taliban is just as violently hostile to the United States as is Al Qaeda, and they both take Western diplomatic overtures as a sign of weakness. The Taliban must therefore be set back and undermined militarily in forcible, concrete ways. American airstrikes alone are inadequate under such circumstances, since Afghan civilians will not provide the needed intelligence regarding the Taliban to U.S. and allied forces until they feel secure from retaliation. This, in turn, cannot be done without boots on the ground. For the moment that includes large numbers of American boots. And while it is often said that America's Afghan war has dragged on for almost a decade, in truth the central phase of U.S. efforts on the ground against the insurgents began only last year. The main implication is that American forces should not withdraw from Afghanistan prematurely. General Petraeus has led the U.S. military effort in that country with great skill and intelligence, and he does deserve a certain amount of deference on the question of troop levels when he faces Congress again this summer.
There is, however, still room to consider what else can be done for the U.S. to succeed in Afghanistan before popular patience runs out back home. Certainly Reagan was sufficiently creative, aggressive, and politically shrewd to have asked this question. As Marine veteran and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Bing West points out in his new book, The Wrong War, the Obama administration's current focus in Afghanistan puts tremendous emphasis on themes of civilian governance and economic development by the U.S. military as opposed to war-fighting. The problem is that even in a war of a counterinsurgency, the single most important task of American soldiers and Marines must be to hunt down, fight, and either kill or capture enemy insurgents. Irregular war is still war, and combat is still violent, as both U.S. forces and the Taliban certainly understand. Yet American troops fight under very strict, self-imposed constraints, due to a myriad of legal, political, and diplomatic concerns at the highest level, while the Taliban are free to set the pace and location of combat. Moreover, the heavy emphasis on turning U.S. soldiers and Marines into governors, developers, and nation-builders carries certain opportunity costs, in downgrading tactically aggressive operations against the Taliban. There is also considerable evidence, to say the least, that much "development" money handed out by U.S. soldiers and Marines is misused by supposedly friendly Afghans. The reason ought to be familiar to conservative critics of domestic welfare programs: many recipients of American aid receive, in effect, something for nothing, and come to feel entitled to or even dependent upon it without sensing any corresponding need to align clearly with the U.S. counterinsurgency effort. If Bing West is right, then there may very well be room to shift the main emphasis for American soldiers and Marines on the ground from governance, development, and nation-building back toward war-fighting, precisely in order to better attack and undermine the Taliban. Reagan would probably have been sympathetic to this argument, and Republican presidential candidates should consider making it. Not only would it have inherent policy merit - it would also be a way to recognize and channel growing frustration within the United States over Afghanistan without pulling the plug on the war.
This brings us back to the issue of what a winning, persuasive, Reaganite foreign policy platform might look like in 2012. For some, the main problem with Obama is that he places insufficient emphasis on hopeful possibilities for democracy promotion overseas. This is an interesting line of argument, but I don't believe it would have been Reagan's central theme, certainly not in relation to U.S. allies. Reagan obviously possessed great faith in democratic forms of government, yet was quite reluctant to push allies aggressively on the democracy theme when it carried the possibility of leading to something even worse. Indeed this was one of his main foreign policy arguments when he ran for president against Jimmy Carter in 1980. As author Walter Russell Mead has pointed out, Reagan was not so much Wilsonian as Jacksonian on foreign policy matters. Wilsonians look back to the example of Woodrow Wilson, who viewed himself as a kind of disinterested president of the world, and specialized in painfully reluctant interventions overseas, characterized by sanctimonious hand-wringing and undertaken for highly abstract reasons with tremendous emphasis on multilateral legalisms. That sounds much more like Barack Obama than Ronald Reagan, and is hardly a model for conservatives in any case. Jacksonians like Reagan, on the other hand, are doubting of parchment guarantees in world affairs; protective of the nation's honor; convinced of American exceptionalism; inclined toward the decisive use of military power; tough-minded about international relations; skeptical of nation building; disdainful of surrender; and uncompromising in relation to external threats. This is the foreign policy mindset today of many grassroots conservatives and tea party activists nationwide, just as it was Reagan's mindset, and to dismiss it as isolationist would simply be incorrect. Any Republican presidential candidate wanting to sound Reaganite notes that resonate with GOP primary voters should remember that Reagan was much more than an optimist: he was tough. In fact he was relentless, beneath that genuinely sunny demeanor, first in acquiring the presidency, and then in wearing down the Soviet Union. That is truly the Reaganite mentality we need today when approaching the threat from violent jihadists at home and abroad: not simply hopeful or optimistic in relation to international changes, but firm, decisive, unapologetic, and tenacious in the face of danger.
Colin Dueck is associate professor of public and international affairs at George Mason University, and the author of the forthcoming book Hard Line: The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy since World War II (Princeton, October 2010).
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