December 17, 2024
Opposing perceived isolationism, the outgoing Senate Republican leader is advocating a return to Cold War militarism.
One of the hallmarks of American gerontocracy is that even when aged and ailing leaders step down from official positions, they do not actually relinquish power; they continue to be the dominant figure in Washington, using their historic status to continue to shape events. Nancy Pelosi, who at the age of 82 allegedly resigned from the leadership of the House of Representatives of the Democratic Party in 2022 (and now currently recovering from hip replacement surgery after falling in Luxembourg at the weekend), was before the injury, she was busy working on the phones to prevent Alexandria Acasio-Cortez from becoming the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. Similarly, 82-year-old Mitch McConnell, although allegedly stepping down from the leadership of the Republicans in the Senate and himself tends to be afraid of health— including a recent fall that resulted in a concussion — is actively seeking to become the senior statesman defending the GOP’s traditional hawkish foreign policy against what he sees as growing isolationism in both major political parties.
McConnell posted on Monday a lengthy treatise Art Foreign affairsa traditional organ of the American national security establishment that warns of the “price of American retreat.” Because the article contains criticism of the right, which is skeptical of continued military aid to Ukraine, the mainstream media framed it as a principled Republican alternative to Trumpism. According to Axios“McConnell is warning Trump — and the entire GOP — that he plans to take an active role in the looming GOP civil war on foreign policy.” Axios had described earlier McConnell is the leader of the Republican Senate Resistance to Trump. The Independent has highlighted McConnell has been called “one of the few Republicans critical of Trump recently as much of the party continues to fall in line.” McConnell is supposed to be bashing Trumpism earned bipartisan praiseadvertised by both Republicans and Democrats.
It would be pure madness if the Democrats let McConnell become the face of the resistance against Trump, following in the footsteps of Dick and Liz Cheney, who were supported by the party elite in the recent elections. If that happens, we might as well give up, because the bellicosity and imperialism of the Republican hawks is even more dangerous than Trumpism.
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Progressive analysts Nancy O’Kyle and Matt Duce also write Foreign affairs, accused Joe Biden and Donald Trump have a “foreign policy of nostalgia.” The same criticism applies even more to McConnell, who offers a fanciful vision of the United States returning to the rampant militarism of the early Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s, when it confronted the Soviet Union, China and anti-colonial insurgencies around the world.
The great illusion of the original Cold Wars was that the threat came from a monolithic international communism, which meant that the United States constantly ignored the fact that the Soviet Union and China had very different ambitions—and were, in fact, often in conflict. McConnell has a similarly myopic view of the world, arguing that Russia, China, Iran and North Korea “are now working more closely than ever to undermine the US-led order that has underpinned Western peace and prosperity for nearly century”. What McConnell fails to consider is the fact that, to the extent that this is true, it has to do with choices made by the United States to impose sanctions on these countries or regional alliance systems such as NATO (in Europe) , the Abraham Accords (in the Middle East) and AUKUS (in Asia). This insistence on US primacy on all fronts has pushed previously hostile powers (particularly Russia and China) closer together.
Like Biden and Trump, McConnell speaks the language of the last century and its fantasies of unchecked US hegemony. It’s no coincidence that McConnell mentions the “arsenal of democracy” and the bipartisan military Keynesian agenda that fueled decades of domestic economic growth.
Equally fanciful is McConnell’s division between isolationists who want to retreat and internationalists who support America’s global commitments. This framing itself dates back to a long-standing attempt by Cold War centrists (both liberal and conservative) to steal the historic prowess of Roosevelt’s anti-fascism for a policy of permanent American militarism.
Unfortunately, there is little real isolationism in Donald Trump’s GOP, as evidenced by his nomination of ultra-hawkish Marco Rubio for secretary of state, and the militancy that characterized Trump’s first term in office.
In truth, as McConnell acknowledges, the so-called America First isolationism of Trumpists is actually a policy of pivoting to Asia to contain China. To the extent that some—though by no means all—of Trump’s advisers want to defuse the Russia-Ukraine war, it is in order to attract resources to build an anti-China alliance.
There is much to criticize about this pivot to Asia policy, but it is at least based on the realistic view that American resources are limited and that the United States must therefore fight its own battles. This strategy is an heir to the conservative realism of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who realized that it was foolish to continue to pretend that there was an international communist alliance when it was more profitable to confront Russia and China. McConnell, on the other hand, sounds like a sullen warrior of the cold arena in the spirit of recent times National review editor James Burnham, who not only wanted to continue fighting in Vietnam, but also rejected detente with the USSR and Nixon’s opening to China.
The policy of unleashing a war on all rival powers made no sense in the early 1970s—and is completely delusional in 2024, when the rise of China makes American assertion of global primacy even more difficult.
The Cold War analogies are apt because McConnell literally wants the United States to return to Cold War spending levels. U Foreign affairsnotes McConnell:
In 2018, the Commission on National Defense Strategy—a bipartisan group of defense experts created by Congress—stressed that maintaining the United States’ military superiority will require sustained real growth in the defense budget of three to five percent. By 2024, the commission, noting worsening threats, called that range “the bare minimum” and advocated budgets large enough to “support an effort commensurate with the U.S. national effort during the Cold War.”
To put this proposition into perspective, the United States currently (as McConnell points out) spends 3 percent of GDP on military spending. During the Korean War, the figure was 13.8 percent, and during the Vietnam War, it was 9.1 percent. Therefore, a return to Cold War spending levels would mean that the military budget would have to be three to four times larger than it is now.
Does the American public really want a return to the Cold War? Barack Obama won the largest majority in American presidential politics in recent history, promising to end stupid wars. In both 2016 and 2024, Donald Trump received significant support—perhaps crucial to his victory in both elections— presenting himself as an anti-war candidate whose rivals were the warmongers.
Trump’s speech was cynical, of course, but it was also effective because Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris (who inherited Biden’s foreign policy) are actually too attached to a very unpopular militarism. The right way to deal with Trump is to point out that his anti-war stance is bogus, and he has embraced militarism of his own messy and messy variety.
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But to make that argument, Democrats need to reclaim their party’s anti-war sentiment. The danger is that too many party leaders will repeat the failed strategy of taking on the Cheney family and the national security establishment, making Mitch McConnell the main figure to stand up to Trump on foreign policy. If that happens, the Democrats will again be dragged down by their inability to break with the fantasies of a gerontocracy that refuses to admit that the world has changed.
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