I was having a discussion with my friend Shoq on Twitter, and he was curious about why I would prefer (or even defend) conservatism these days. It’s a variant on an old question I used to get as a young Reaganite in the 1980s: “How can a guy as smart as you be a…” And then something like “Republican,” or “conservative,” or “Reagan voter” would follow.
That’s too long a question to get into here. (Especially since my time in state government was with a Democrat, and in the Senate it was with a notably moderate Republican. These days I’m an independent). But in my new book, No Use, I did include a page about missile defense and what it means to conservatives and liberals that I asked several friends — both conservative and liberal — to look at during the drafting of the manuscript. It’s on page 60 and it describes, briefly, how I see the two movements as they relate to foreign affairs.
I’m reproducing it here as a kind of short-hand explanation for how I see the politics of the foreign policy world. (I should note, however, that unlike many conservatives, I am not a partisan of national missile defenses, which I think are a waste of money.) More to come later.
The missile defense debate cuts across party lines and ideologies. But as a general observation, American liberals tend to value international institutions, see the processes of international negotiation with opponents as valuable in itself, and are sympathetic — sometimes overly so — to the concerns of other nations about the magnitude of U.S. power.
Conservatives, by contrast, focus on the anarchical nature of the international system, and are more attracted to the classical imperative of self-help. They think in terms of outcomes, rather than processes: international institutions and negotiations are important only insofar as they tangibly assist U.S. security, a belief which itself reveals an often corrosive — and often self-fulfilling — cynicism about those institutions and their purposes.
American conservatism became somewhat more internationalist in the late 20th century, particularly during Ronald Reagan’s two terms as president, but there is a persistent streak of unilateralism and American exceptionalism that runs through conservative thinking about foreign affairs.
This is not a judgment on either school of thought, both of which have great virtues and deep flaws. Rather, it is to point out that a notion like missile defense naturally animates these differences in a highly divisive way. For many liberals, national missile defense is provocative and destabilizing, especially if it involves the extension of American power into space. Defenses are not only a threat to strategic stability but a needless and self-inflicted wound to American diplomacy. Conservatives see missile defense as an attempt to use America’s remarkable capacity for technological innovation to add one more layer of insurance that will save lives and limit damage to the United States should all else fail. (And conservatives, who tend to be pessimistic students of history, assume that sooner or later all else will fail.)
