Hawks, Restrainers, Realists and Nationalists on the Right, Compared

Four conservatives walk into a seminar on foreign policy. The first has a plan to spread freedom to a country he cannot find on a map. The second wants to know what it will cost and who benefits. The third has already left, because he thinks the whole country should have stayed home. The fourth asks a simpler question: who hit us, and why are we still talking?

That is not a joke about people. It is a joke about ideas, and it is how a lot of conservative arguments about the world actually go. Everyone says "Reagan" and means something different. Everyone says "strength" and means a different thing by it. Treating the right's foreign policy as a single position is a bit like treating Americans' food preferences as a single menu. You will argue all night and order nothing.

So here is a map. There are at least four schools on the right, each with a core belief, a family tree, a view of allies and of force, and a weak spot. I am using historical figures and public records only, and I will try to state each school the way its own members would. Then I'll tell you where I think each one is right and where it overreaches.

Why the label problem matters

When a Republican says "hawk," he might mean a neoconservative who wants to promote democracy by force, or a Jacksonian who wants to flatten whoever attacks us and then go home. When someone says "isolationist," he is usually using a slur for a restrainer who would be insulted by the word. And when someone says "realist," he may mean a Nixon-style negotiator, or just a man who is annoyed.

The result: two people argue about the same policy, each assuming the other has the wrong values, when what they really have are different theories of what makes America safe. Name the school and you can name the disagreement. The first step to a useful argument is knowing which argument you're having.

The table

Now let us take them one at a time.

Neoconservatives: freedom is the strategy

The term describes a group of thinkers, many of them former Democrats who had grown disillusioned with the liberal approach to the Cold War and domestic policy in the 1960s and 1970s. Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, were among its founders. Jeane Kirkpatrick's 1979 essay "Dictatorships and Double Standards" in Commentary caught the attention of Ronald Reagan, who named her ambassador to the United Nations. The 1997 Project for the New American Century, founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, brought a new generation into the discussion.

Core belief: a world with more free governments is safer for America, and American power should be used to encourage it. The school's high-water mark was the administration of George W. Bush, which published a National Security Strategy in September 2002 that embraced preemption against emerging threats, and which in his second inaugural address in 2005 declared the goal of ending tyranny. The Iraq War began in March 2003.

What they get right: free countries do make better partners, and the Cold War shows that ideas are a weapon. Reagan's willingness to say the Soviet system was wrong was not diplomatic malpractice. It was part of the victory.

The strongest critique: the Iraq War did not go the way its backers said it would. No stockpiles of the weapons the intelligence had pointed to were found, and the occupation cost American lives and money far beyond what was promised. A school that sold a war has to answer for the war. Critics ask whether the faith in democratization underestimated how hard it is to build institutions from the outside.

Realists: interests, not crusades

The realist tradition in modern American politics runs from Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger through George H. W. Bush and his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. Nixon went to China in February 1972, and in May of that year he and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation agreement and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. You can read more about the China trip in Nixon went to China and what the 1972 trip teaches about hard bargaining.

Core belief: a nation should pursue its interests, pay attention to the balance of power, and deal with the world as it is, not as it ought to be. The realist asks what a policy will cost, who will enforce it, and what happens if it fails.

What they get right: they ask the hard questions that crusaders skip. In the Gulf War of 1991, Bush and Scowcroft liberated Kuwait with a broad coalition and chose not to march on Baghdad, a decision they later defended as a way to avoid an open-ended occupation. In August 2002, Scowcroft wrote a Wall Street Journal essay titled "Don't Attack Saddam." Realists were warning about the aftermath before the invasion. George H. W. Bush managed the end of the Cold War without a victory lap shows the style at its best.

The strongest critique: it came from the right. By 1976, Ronald Reagan was challenging President Ford in the Republican primaries partly on the grounds that détente was a one-way street. The conservative objection to realism is that it can treat the moral difference between a free country and a tyranny as a detail, and that it sometimes buys a calm today by giving the other side something it does not give back.

Restrainers: the older tradition

Restraint has the longest pedigree of the four. George Washington's Farewell Address of 1796 warned that "it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world." John Quincy Adams said in 1821 that America "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." Senator Robert Taft carried it into the Cold War, as Taft Versus Eisenhower and the Republican Fight Over the World explains, and Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul carried it into the modern Republican Party. Many in the school prefer the word "restraint" to the label "isolationist," and they have a point: most restrainers favor trade and diplomacy with the world. What they oppose is the use of military force for anything but the defense of the country.

Core belief: the United States is the most secure great power in history, protected by two oceans and a strong military, and its wars have cost more than its enemies ever did. Spend less abroad, keep the military for defense and let others handle their regions.

What they get right: Congress is supposed to decide on war; allies have often done too little; the costs of long wars are real; and the debt is a security issue too. Burden Sharing Is Not a Trump Idea, It Is an Eisenhower Idea documents that the demand for allies to pay up is more than a half-century old.

The strongest critique: the twentieth century. Twice, a Europe dominated by one hostile power drew in America anyway, and the second time at a far higher price than a deterrent would have cost. Critics say that stepping back does not remove the threat, it only removes America's ability to shape it. Restrainers answer that these cases are chosen to prove the point, and that deterrence can be maintained at a lower cost, with a military focused on defense.

Jacksonian nationalists: honor and the common man

The term comes from the foreign-policy writer Walter Russell Mead, who in his 2001 book Special Providence described four traditions in American foreign policy, which he called the Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, Jeffersonian and Jacksonian. The Jacksonian tradition, named after Andrew Jackson and his victory at New Orleans in 1815, is populist and values honor, security and the interests of ordinary Americans. Mead used it again in his 2017 Foreign Affairs essay "The Jacksonian Revolt."

Core belief: the government's first duty is the physical safety and economic well-being of the American people, and a country that is attacked has the right to hit back with everything it has. Jacksonians are slow to anger, but when they get there they do not want a seminar.

What they get right: this is the school that understands the public. In Mead's telling, the fury after Pearl Harbor and after September 11 was the Jacksonian spirit at work, and wars in which the public is not convinced the cause is its own do not last. They also insist on a clear enemy, a clear goal and a clear finish, which is a valuable test for any use of force.

The strongest critique: modern conflicts do not come with a clean finish. A Jacksonian is not suited to a long, ambiguous campaign, and public support can turn quickly when the war stops looking winnable. The school can go from "hit them hard" to "bring everyone home" without a stop in between, and neither extreme is a strategy. It is also short on views about trade and the long game with a rival like China, where honor does not tell you what to do next.

Where they overlap, and where they fight

Notice that the schools are not tidy teams. Reagan borrowed from three of them. He was a moralist about the Soviet system, which is neoconservative. He was a deal-maker at Reykjavik, which is realist. And he was a Jacksonian in his instinct to speak plainly about enemies and to respect the soldier. You can see the mix in How Reagan built strength first and then sat down with Gorbachev.

The schools tend to agree on a few things and split on the rest.

1. Agree: the military must be strong enough to deter. Even most restrainers want a powerful defense. That is the point of Peace Through Strength Is Older Than Reagan and It Still Works.
2. Split: whether the purpose of that strength is to defend the homeland, to protect an order of allies, or to spread a system of government.
3. Agree: allies should pay more. Hawks, realists and nationalists all say so.
4. Split: whether allies are an asset worth the price or a liability worth shedding.
5. Split: China. Realists, hawks and nationalists may all see a rival, but they disagree about whether trade, containment or confrontation is the right tool. We Bet That Trade Would Make China Free and the Bet Did Not Pay and Strategic Ambiguity, Clarity or Retreat on Taiwan, Compared show the arguments in practice.

For the bigger picture of how these schools sit among the right's other strands, Five Strands of the American Right Compared in One Table is a useful companion.

Who each suits

If you want to know where you land, ask yourself four questions.

• Do you think America's safety depends on other countries being free? You lean neoconservative.
• Do you think the best foreign policy is a good deal that serves a concrete interest? You lean realist.
• Do you think most of our troubles abroad came from doing too much? You lean restrainer.
• Do you think the rule is "don't start it, but finish it"? You lean Jacksonian.

Most of us are a blend, and that is fine. The point is to know your blend, and to know your opponent's. A debate between a realist and a restrainer is not a fight over loyalty to America. It is a fight over methods.

The bottom line

• Four schools, not one. Neoconservatives, realists, restrainers and Jacksonian nationalists each have a core belief, a lineage and a weak spot.
• Name the school before the fight. Half of the shouting on the right is two people using the same word for different things.
• Each has one idea worth keeping. Freedom matters, interests matter, restraint matters, and a clear finish matters.
• Each has one blind spot. Overreach, coldness, vacuums and impatience, respectively.
• Argue methods, not loyalty. When another Republican disagrees with you about Iraq or NATO or China, ask which tradition he is drawing from before you question his patriotism.