Taft Versus Eisenhower and the Republican Fight Over the World

A pundit discovers, with the gravity of a man discovering fire, that the Republican Party is suddenly divided over how involved America should be in the world. He reports it as though he caught the party sneaking out the back door with a secret. Folks, the party has been having this fight since before your grandfather could vote. It is the longest-running show in American politics, outlasting every sitcom and most of the Sunday-morning programs that cover it.

What is useful about knowing the history is that you stop treating today's argument as a civil war between heroes and traitors. It is a family argument with a long pedigree, and both sides of it have, at different moments, been right. So here is the lineage, in order, from the America First Committee to the convention of 1952 and on to the arguments of our own time. By the end, you should be able to place any foreign-policy fight on the right in its family tree.

The first round: 1940 and 1941

The country in 1940 was tired of Europe's wars. The memory of World War I, the casualties, the disillusion, the argument that we had been talked into it, ran deep. The America First Committee was founded in September 1940, started by students at Yale and led by General Robert E. Wood, the head of Sears, Roebuck. It argued that America should build up its own defense, stay out of the war in Europe and refuse to be dragged in by foreign interests. It grew quickly, drew support from across the political spectrum, and had a famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh, among its speakers.

Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, the son of President William Howard Taft, was the Republican Party's leading conservative voice in the Senate, and he took the cautious side of the debate. He opposed the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, which let the president supply war materiel to Britain and other nations fighting the Axis. His argument was constitutional and practical: Lend-Lease handed the president enormous discretion over war and peace, and it drifted toward belligerence without a declaration by Congress.

The committee had a problem of its own making. In September 1941 Lindbergh gave a speech in Des Moines that was widely denounced as antisemitic, and it damaged the committee's standing. Then history settled the argument. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Four days later the America First Committee dissolved, which may be the fastest an American political argument has ever been settled by events.

Notice what that did to the party's argument. It did not make the case for restraint wrong forever. It made that version of it, in that moment, untenable. And it opened a question that the party has asked ever since: what lessons do you draw from being wrong about a war?

Vandenberg converts the party

Enter Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who had been a thorough isolationist before the war and changed his mind in public. In a Senate speech in January 1945, he argued that the lesson of the war was that America could not wall itself off from the world. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee after the Republicans won Congress in 1946, he became the hinge of the whole postwar order. He worked with President Truman, a Democrat, on the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and the Marshall Plan of 1948. The line "politics stops at the water's edge" is attached to his name by historians who describe his approach. The longer story is in Vandenberg's Conversion and the Republicans Who Built the Postwar Order.

In June 1948, the Senate passed the Vandenberg Resolution, which said that the United States should associate itself with regional security arrangements, in other words, with a defensive alliance in peacetime. It passed 64 to 4. That was the opening that led to NATO. Why did the Senate need a resolution first? Because this was a break with the American tradition, going back to George Washington's farewell address, of avoiding permanent alliances. Vandenberg understood he was asking a country to do something new, so he asked the Senate to say yes in advance. The contrast with the way Republicans answered the League of Nations in 1919 is explored in Lodge in 1919 and Vandenberg in 1948 gave two Republican answers on treaties.

Taft votes no on NATO

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington on April 4, 1949. The Senate approved it on July 21, 1949, by a vote of 82 to 13. Senator Taft was among the thirteen.

Be fair to him, because his case was not a crude one. Taft was no pacifist and no stranger to the Soviet threat. He had supported aid to Greece and Turkey, and he voted in favor of the Marshall Plan. His objection to NATO was that it committed the United States to the defense of Europe in advance, and then, he feared, would lead to a large and permanent American arms commitment to the continent. He thought a treaty of this kind could provoke the very conflict it was meant to prevent, and that it shifted the war-making decision away from Congress and into automatic obligations. Taft also leaned toward Asia in his strategic outlook and was a firm friend of Nationalist China, which put him at odds with the Europe-first emphasis of the administration.

Here are the premises of his case, as a debater would put them:

1. A permanent alliance with peacetime commitments changes the character of the republic.
2. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, and treaty obligations can shrink that power in practice.
3. Rearming Europe will cost American taxpayers and could encourage Europeans to depend on us.
4. A policy that treats the Soviet Union as an immediate military danger may cause the danger it fears.

Those are serious points. The first three have not gone away. The fourth did not hold up: the Soviet threat was real whatever the West said or did not say, and NATO's peacetime alliance did not spark the war Taft feared. But the question of how much the president can do without Congress came back with a vengeance.

The Great Debate of 1951

It came back in the winter of 1950 to 1951, after China entered the Korean War. President Truman announced he would send additional American divisions to Europe, as part of the NATO command structure. Taft rose in the Senate in January 1951 and argued that the president had no authority to do so without the approval of Congress. What followed is remembered as the Great Debate. It ended with the Senate approving the deployment of four divisions, along with a nonbinding statement that Congress should be consulted on any further troops.

Notice what is at stake in that fight: not the wisdom of NATO, but who decides. Conservatives who care about the Constitution's design should read the whole exchange, because it is a precedent for every later argument over war powers. The long version of that story is in Who Declares War? What the Founders Meant and Where We Drifted and the modern statute is explained in The War Powers Resolution Explained, and Why Presidents Resist It.

The convention of 1952

Now the two men meet.

Taft was "Mr. Republican," a man of towering reputation within the party who had lost the nomination in 1940 and 1948 and wanted it badly in 1952. His story is told in Mr. Republican Robert Taft lost the nomination three times, yet won the party. Dwight D. Eisenhower, meanwhile, was the most popular man in America, the supreme commander who had led the invasion of Europe. In 1951 Truman had named him the first Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe, so Ike was the man building the very alliance Taft doubted. Historians generally agree that Eisenhower's concern about a Republican nominee who would reject NATO and the postwar settlement weighed heavily in his decision to run. A "Draft Eisenhower" movement, led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., helped persuade him.

The Republican National Convention met in Chicago in July 1952. The fight was ugly and decided by something as unglamorous as seating arrangements: rival delegations from Southern states claimed the right to be seated, and the convention adopted a "Fair Play" rule that kept the contested delegates from voting on their own seating. That vote went Eisenhower's way. He won the nomination on the first ballot. If you ever wondered whether foreign policy gets decided by great strategic vision or by credentials committees, the answer is: yes.

What came next is the part that is easy to forget. Taft did not sulk. In September 1952, at a meeting in New York, he publicly endorsed Eisenhower, and the party went on to win the presidency. Taft became Senate Majority Leader in 1953 and worked with the new president until he died of cancer in July 1953. The fight was real, and so was the reconciliation.

What Eisenhower did with the argument

Eisenhower's presidency is often described as a victory for the internationalist wing, and the part about NATO is right. But he also absorbed some of Taft's concerns. He ended the Korean War with an armistice in July 1953 and refused to fight a ground war in Indochina in 1954. His "New Look" policy relied on nuclear deterrence and a cheaper conventional force, in part to control costs. He warned in his farewell address about the "military-industrial complex," a message explored in Eisenhower's farewell address gave two warnings and Republicans remember one. And he fought the Bricker Amendment, a proposal supported by many Republicans that would have limited the president's treaty and executive-agreement power, which fell one vote short in the Senate in 1954. Eisenhower thought it would tie the president's hands in a dangerous world.

So Eisenhower's answer to Taft was not "ignore your worries." It was "I will take the alliance, and I will watch the bill." That is a more conservative position than the caricature of internationalism allows. Burden Sharing Is Not a Trump Idea, It Is an Eisenhower Idea shows how seriously he took the matter of allies paying their share.

The family tree after 1952

The argument did not end in 1952. It changed clothes.

• Goldwater. The 1964 nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, took Taft's constitutional conservatism at home and married it to a hard anti-communism abroad, a different thing from Taft's caution. He voted against the 1963 limited nuclear test ban treaty. His brand was not restraint, it was winning the Cold War. The fusion is part of the story in Barry Goldwater lost 44 states and won the next generation of conservatives.
• Reagan. He took Goldwater's anti-communism, added a talent for talking to ordinary Americans, and joined a build-up with negotiations. Did Reagan Really Win the Cold War or Did the Soviets Just Collapse makes the historical case.
• Buchanan. In the 1990s, Pat Buchanan revived the old America First language. He challenged President George H. W. Bush in the 1992 primaries, won the New Hampshire primary in 1996, opposed the Gulf War and NAFTA, and wrote A Republic, Not an Empire in 1999. He argued that the end of the Cold War removed the reason for America's entanglements, which is Taft's argument with the Soviet threat removed from the picture.
• The post-9/11 years. The Iraq War of 2003 split the party's thinkers. Supporters argued it advanced American security and freedom, and critics, from the realist and restrainer camps, argued it was a mistake. Representative Ron Paul ran for the Republican nomination in 2008 and 2012 on a platform of nonintervention.
• The "America First" revival. In April 2016, in a foreign-policy speech, Donald Trump used the phrase as the theme of his campaign, joining it to criticism of allies who did not carry their share and of trade deals he said had hollowed out industrial America.

That last point has a straight line to the 1940s. The slogan is old, and the people who use it today do not always mean what the 1940 committee meant. Some mean Taft's constitutional caution, some mean Buchanan's skepticism of free trade and intervention, and some mean a Jacksonian instinct to hit back hard if attacked and otherwise stay home. For the taxonomy, see Hawks, Restrainers, Realists and Nationalists on the Right, Compared.

What each side got right

Here is my verdict, which you are free to argue with.

What Taft got right. Congress has a constitutional role in war that presidents of both parties keep trying to shrink. Alliances cost money and create obligations that can pull a country into a fight. Friends who are not asked to carry their share will let you carry it. And the habit of treating every problem as an American problem is a recipe for exhaustion.

What Eisenhower got right. Deterrence is cheaper than war. A country that stays out of the world does not stay out of the consequences. Alliances can be bargains: Western Europe's recovery and the long peace that followed were good for American families. And a firm commitment, made in advance, can keep an enemy from testing you.

The honest conservative takeaway is that the argument is not Taft against Eisenhower. It is Taft and Eisenhower, a permanent tension between prudence and responsibility that the party has to keep managing. A Republican who forgets Taft will drift toward unlimited commitments. A Republican who forgets Eisenhower will drift toward a country that thinks it can ignore a dangerous world.

The bottom line

• This is the oldest fight in the party. From the America First Committee in 1940 to Buchanan in the 1990s and the "America First" revival after 2016, the argument is more than eighty years old.
• Both men had a point. Taft was right about Congress, cost and entanglement. Eisenhower was right about deterrence and the value of allies.
• The party reconciled once and can again. Taft endorsed Eisenhower after losing a bruising convention. The goal is a stronger country, not a purge.
• Ask who decides. The Great Debate of 1951 was about the president's authority, and that question is still live every time a president moves troops.
• Place today's arguments in the family tree. Before you call a fellow Republican a traitor or a warmonger, find out which ancestor he is quoting.