US Republicans “war party”? A myth to dispel, data and history in hand
American administrations, often on the basis of their political affiliation, have chosen different paths in shaping the role of the United States on the global stage, even if at times these divergences have appeared veiled. Contrary to what one might think, the actions of the past will not be judged in the present court. Nor will there be any attempt to justify one side at the expense of the other. We will simply try to clarify a question that needs further investigation: are Republicans really the most inclined to war?
Regardless of the faction we like, we must immediately clarify that in recent history no president can claim to be immune from having, in one way or another, used the military tool in foreign policy. Generalizing would therefore be misleading.
Having said that, in reviewing the work of overseas administrations, one often notices a narrative that is not very relevant to the facts. There is an unfounded belief that Democrats are more prone to détente, given their less emphasis on military spending, and Republicans are deeply thirsty for armed conflict. The latter have for more than twenty years been portrayed as ruthless warmongers, solely interested in American supremacy, while the former are remembered for the alleged idealism of their multilateral interventions. On the other hand, what should be specified is that, in the face of a broader overview that does not end only with recent wars, the real War Party does not appear to be the Republican one.
If one wanted to seek the disinterest and pure isolationism on the part of the United States, it would be impossible to find proof of this in the contemporary world. Isolationism is much older and the most recent examples are those of the Harding and Coolidge Republicans in the early postwar period. So if in the past there has been some non-interventionist period, this has certainly been expressed by the conservative front and not by the liberal world.
So discussing the ease with which they found themselves in war, in a confrontation between Democrats and Republicans, the former would win hands down. Although it is true that the republican right has long tended to support the importance of military spending by virtue of deterrence, this has not always been accompanied by an automatism in favoring the concrete use of weapons. On the contrary, the Democrats, children of Wilsonian idealism, have shown greater ease in involving the country in wars far from American soil.
Historically, the real "appetite" for war has therefore come from the Democrats, and has been since the days of Woodrow Wilson. The latter and Franklin D. Roosevelt among other things presided over the involvement of the United States in the two world wars of the twentieth century (and for us Europeans it is good that in those cases they did not stand by and watch).
But it is in the decades following 1945 that a considerable disparity emerges in the confrontation between Democrats and Republicans. It was the Democrat Truman who brought the army to Korea in 1950, just as it is in the eight years of the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies (1961-1969) that the Cuban crisis of 1962 and most of the bloody war in Vietnam are experienced ( then closed by a Republican: Nixon). Then there is the weak Carter presidency, up to the arrival of Clinton with the various Balkan conflicts and in Kosovo in the 1990s.
One of the most incomprehensible facts of recent years remains that of the award, in 2009, of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama who, no less than the Republican predecessor George W. Bush, is one of the presidents who bombed the most during his stay in Washington, continuing the conflicts that had already begun before his election and intervening in territories such as Libya, Syria and Yemen. In an unenviable historical toll, the Democrats of multilateralism and the export of democracy have fought far more than the Republicans.
On the Republican side, divided between Reagan-like unilateralism and Kissinger-like realism, it was possible to glimpse a greater ability to manage foreign affairs avoiding "hot" wars. As already mentioned, the explicit belief in strong defense is not intended as a pretext for triggering conflicts, but rather as a deterrence necessary for maintaining global stability. Net of targeted and limited military interventions, such as Tripoli, Grenada and Lebanon in the 1980s and Panama in the early 1990s, the policy of deterrence did not cause the disasters too often heralded as a devastating consequence of this approach. At the base there is the winning paradox according to which a defensive solidity, even nuclear, is a guarantee to smooth out and discourage the aggressiveness of the other side of the world. We were aware of this with Ronald Reagan and the gradual end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, which took place without bloodshed.
The Republicans who preceded Reagan sometimes inherited conflicts initiated by their Democratic predecessors, such as Eisenhower with the Korean War or Nixon with Vietnam. The first ended the conflict in a short time and the second, after the deplorable bombings in Laos and Cambodia, led to the dismissal of the Vietnam issue with the Paris Agreements of 1973, having Henry Kissinger as the main negotiator. Then there was the subsequent Ford interregnum which, also for its brevity, did not see any military intervention. In fact, no real protracted conflicts began with the Republicans in the White House, until the arrival of the Bushes.
In 1992, during one of his Heritage Lectures , the great conservative intellectual Russell Kirk affirmed that the Gulf War wanted by Bush 41 was the first real detachment of the Republican Party from a certain trend that in many cases had characterized his twentieth-century work:
Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson were enthusiasts for American domination of the world. Now George Bush appears to be emulating those eminent Democrats. When the Republicans, once upon a time, nominated for the presidency a “One World” candidate, Wendell Willkie, they were sadly trounced. In general, Republicans throughout the twentieth century have been advocates of prudence and restraint in the conduct of foreign affairs.
Also according to Kirk, who we understood to be critical of interventionist ambitions, the Republicans, who have always been appreciated for their being stolid (detached but concrete), have begun to appear imaginative , almost like their Democratic opponents, as will happen with Bush. 43 in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Summing up with one of the most brutal of the counts, namely that of the soldiers who fell from the Great War in Afghanistan, during the democratic administrations more than 600,000 American soldiers died (just over 100,000 if we did not count the two world wars), while during the the republican ones about 25,000.
Overall, the Republicans' actions have caused less human and strategic damage than their political counterparts, as the recent Trump presidency also testifies. The error of many commentators in portraying the GOP as the party of war stems from a prejudicial analysis reduced to the short term and corresponding only to the last few decades, ignoring the historical complexity from which instead a completely different factual evidence emerges.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/repubblicani-usa-partito-della-guerra-un-mito-da-sfatare-dati-e-storia-alla-mano/ on Sat, 12 Mar 2022 03:54:00 +0000.