Excerpts of REMARKS BY WILLIAM KRISTOL BEFORE A FREEDOM HOUSE SYMPOSIUM ON ‘THE EMERGING REPUBLICAN FOREIGN POLICY’

The most striking thing…in the ’94 election, you
had this remarkably ideological election. Obviously, [it
was] a major election in American history. A Reaganite
Republican Party, achieving quite a major victory over a
Clintonite Democratic Party — a Republican party that
was much more Reaganite than it had been in ’92. I mean
’94 marked the victory of Reagan over Bush, if you want
to put it in a simple way.

In the contest for the soul of a moderate Republican
Party, and in a remarkably ideological general election,
you then had a Reaganite Republican Party against the
Clintonite Democratic Party defined for the American
people by its big government health care plan, a big
government crime bill, to some degree by a sort of mushy,
U.N.-centered multilateral foreign policy, and a pretty
clear victory for a conservative Reaganite vision.

Yet the striking thing is that we now have the
Congress moving ahead on what you might call a
neo-Reaganite domestic policy. There really is no
neo-Reaganite foreign policy, and I think that it worthy
of note. And I don’t think it’s simply explicable by the
fact that the Cold War is over — though that’s clearly
important.

The Importance of Foreign Policy to Republican
Prospects

People forget, now, how important foreign policy was
to the Reaganite vision of what the Republican party
should be, and of what the country should be. What
Reagan’s main issue in ’76 — for all the criticism of
Ford and Nixon, and the Ford/Nixon administrations, and
other issues — was detente.

…On Kissinger, on detente, there was this huge
platform fight in ’76, on the issue of morality and
foreign policy. A major platform fight of ’75. Reagan
spent ’77-’78 barnstorming the country against the Panama
Canal Treaty. That is what made him the undisputed — or
kept his status as the undisputed — leader of the
conservative movement after the failure of his challenge
to Ford in ’76. And even in ’80, in the inter-Republican
debates –though at that point supply-side economic and
other issues became very important — foreign policy was
awfully important as a distinction between Reagan and
more “mainstream” Nixon-Ford Republicans.

So, in the inter-Republican Reaganite versus —
whatever you want to call them — let’s say Nixon-Ford
Republican forces, foreign policy was an important issue.
And obviously, in the general elections that Reagan was
involved in, foreign policy was terribly important:
Terribly important in 1980. More important again than
people today think…if you go back and look at 1984,
where there was a big Democratic assault on Reagan’s
foreign policy, on SDI , on Grenada, on obviously the
failures — like Lebanon — calling the Soviet Union the
“evil empire,” the big push for the nuclear
freeze, which was a major part of the Democratic and
liberal flank in ’83-’84….

And even in ’88, I would make the case that foreign
policy played a not-insignificant role in electing Vice
President Bush as Reagan’s [successor] over Dukakis. The
most famous ad…of that campaign was not Willie Horton.
It was Dukakis in the tank with that cute little helmet.
That did symbolize something for people. And Bush had
that famous line in the debate with Dukakis. [Mr. Bush
said ] he would act according to the American national
interest [while] Dukakis would just defer to the U.N.
There was more foreign policy even as late as ’88 than
people realize.

Which makes it a little bit more striking, its sort
of total disappearance, when you have a resurgent
Reaganite Republican Party and a very ideological
election in ’94.

One could make the case that Reagan is the only
president — other than Roosevelt — who has won four
national elections in American politics; ’80 and ’84 in
his own right; ’88, when he basically elected his vice
president, George Bush, running as a Reagan Republican.
And then, after a lapse to Bush Republicanism [in 1992],
in ’94 when the party ran as a Reaganite Republican Party
and won a huge victory.

But again, the striking fact seems to me the
difference between ’94, and the first three Reaganite
victories. The differences being the absence of foreign
policy.

A Debatable Theory — The ‘End of History’
Model

And in large part, it obviously is due to the end of
the Cold War, and one can make the case that with the end
of the Cold War, things have changed — and you’re not
going to have centrality in foreign policy anymore. And
in particular, what you’re not going to have is — how
should I put this? — a kind of doctrinal dispute about
foreign policy. You’re not going to have disputes about
principles.

What you’re going to have is disputes about
prudential judgments. Should we have to be there? How
dangerous is Iran? What can we do about it? It doesn’t
make sense to have troops on the Golan Heights. Lots of
particularly discrete judgment calls which people will
disagree about and argue about, which will be colored by
a general world view. But you won’t have the kind of
ideological line-ups that you had in the old days. And
the whole doctrine, vision, principle, abstraction, will
recede from the foreign policy playing-field as foreign
policy itself recedes a bit from the political
playing-field.

And I think that’s a plausible argument. It certainly
was true in ’94 and I suppose we’ll argue it’s been true
so far in ’95.

Where’s the Republican Critique?

For all the talk about Republican criticism of
Clinton’s foreign policy, what strikes me is basically
the moderation of the critique. And, in fact, it turns
out to be reduced to a few pretty discrete points;
creates skepticism at the U.N., a little more sympathy to
defense spending. There has not been a major
confrontation after all, on foreign or defense policy,
the sort we were used to in the ’70s and ’80s between the
two parties.

Which isn’t to minimize the importance of the
differences. So one could make the case that there is no
point yearning for what isn’t going to be anymore. You
don’t have the Cold War. You’re not going to have the
kinds of clear doctrinal disputes that we used to have;
and, therefore, correspondingly you’re not going to have
the sort of doctrine of foreign policy for a party that
one used to have. Parties aren’t going to define
themselves by their foreign policy views.

The Necessity for a ‘Vision of America’

Let me suggest very briefly why I think that may not
be true — having said so far why I think it could be
true — or why I at least hope it’s not true, even though
I can’t prove that it’s not true. In other words, why it
is important that one has foreign policy doctrine and
principles, both from the point of view of the party and
the country?

From the point of view of the party, I’ll just put it
very simply: A key part of Reagan’s appeal was the appeal
that he was going to restore American strength and
greatness. He appealed to patriotism. He appealed to
national pride.

And I think, speaking now as a Republican and a
conservative, it is simply as a matter of domestic
politics, hard to sustain an agenda of relimiting
government, and strengthening the institutions of civil
society, which I think is at the heart of the Republican
agenda. Relimiting government, strengthening the
institutions of civil society — I am entirely for both
of those things. I think the Republican Congress has done
very well in beginning us down the road on those two
paths. But, I think something more is needed.

People need more of a vision of their nation than
merely that the government is going to be cut back, and
gotten out of their lives, good though that would be. And
even more than the hope and the intention that our civic,
and other voluntary institutions are going to be
strengthened, people need a sense of what the nation is
all about, why we should be proud to be Americans. And
that does translate into a vision of America’s role in
the world.

I think you see different Republicans trying to pick
up this Reaganite sense of American greatness, and a
distinctive American role in the world. Buchanan has a
certain view of it. The Bush Republicans have a certain
view of it — [they favor] responsible engagement, free
trade, living up to our obligations, etc.

Someone like Malcolm Wallop tries to articulate yet
another view, which is neither Buchananite, nor
Bush-Baker-like.⁽¹⁾
And these are all — I guess — competitors, you might
say, for attempting to articulate this view and the
Reaganite view. None obviously commands a huge amount of
support, I would say, within the Party.

But I think just from the party point of view, it’s
hard to have a governing party, it’s hard to realign
American politics, it’s hard to do what Republicans would
hope to do, and sort of lay out a framework for the next
few decades, shape the course of American history,
without having a major foreign policy component to that
effort, a certain vision of America’s role in the world
that goes beyond merely being grown-up and handling the
problems that face us more competently than the Clinton
Administration has — though we should be more grown-up
and handle it more competently than the Clinton
Administration has.

Secondly, the world itself, I think, invites a
certain amount of doctrine, or principle on our
part….If you really look at the world, you could say —
look, there are only a few major problems: There’s
weapons of mass destruction, proliferation of them.

At the end of the day, a nation needs more guidance
than just prudential judgment calls….The world is so
contingent that you will endlessly debate what we should
be doing in particular circumstances, unless there’s a
certain underlying sense of what America’s role should
be, what we would want it to be beyond, merely minimizing
all these different dangers to us.

I think the real debate in Republican circles and
probably for American foreign policy over the next few
years will be about this underlying vision….Ultimately,
the debate over American foreign policy is a debate over
America — as to what kind of nation we want to be, and
it is a debate over two different visions of foreign
policy that ultimately comes down to different visions of
what it is to be a great democratic nation that supports
liberty, and the extent to which that implies a certain
pulling back from the world and putting domestic policy
first….That’s a debate we need to have over the next
few years, and that is entirely unresolved — both in the
nation, and, frankly, in the Republican party.

[In response to a question] …Gingrich’s
victory on domestic policy in ’94…was explicitly based
on repudiation of the Bush Administration’s breaking of
its “No New Taxes” pledge — it was [an]
explicit repudiation of Bush domestic Republicanism and a
reversion to Reaganism.

In foreign policy, you haven’t had that yet, and you
probably need that, not because Bush foreign policy did
not have many good successes, and not because there
aren’t important lessons to be learned from the Bush
Administration, [but] because you need a fresh slate.

You need to have people who don’t have a stake in
defending the decision not to go after Saddam in ’91 or
the decision not to go into Bosnia late in ’91 and early
’92.

I just think generationally, as it were, you need a
fresh set of people without a stake in old battles to
articulate the new foreign policy….It just hasn’t
happened yet. And I think it will and could happen in a
presidential campaign.

(1) For excerpts on a recent
speech by Senator Wallop, see the Center’s Press
Release entitled A Definitive Critique, And
Winning Platform, On Security Policy: Will Republican
Candidates Have The ‘Vision Thing’ To Embrace It?
(No. 95-P 24, 13 April 1995).