A foreign policy that puts America’s legitimate interests first did not begin with Donald Trump.
During a summer when Israel, Iran, Ukraine and Russia dominated the news cycle, it seems easy to forget, if important to remember.
In December 1968 Frank Meyer insisted to Henry Kissinger, “The foreign policy of the United States must, within broad moral limits, be motivated by and concerned with our national interest.”
The letter is one of thousands of lost documents found in a warehouse as part of research The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. mayorShows that, even during the Cold War, the right understood that the Soviet Union had only temporarily redirected America’s role in the world. When it ended, so did America’s active involvement in countries most Americans had never heard of – at least that was the idea.
Shortly before Meyer sent his letter, Kissinger, nominated by President-elect Richard Nixon to serve as his national security advisor, had asked Meyer for advice on what ideas should animate America’s dealings with other countries. He had hosted Mayer as a guest lecturer for his Harvard class a few years earlier and arranged a meeting between New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Mayer, who was his biggest critic. Kissinger and Mayer occasionally telephoned and corresponded.
But neither of them was really a Nixon man. That year, the German-Jewish émigré advised Rockefeller and his old German-Jewish friend served as the most outspoken supporter among intellectuals of Ronald Reagan’s presidential bid. Even though their lineages trace back to the same place of origin, they saw the world differently.
national review The editor wrote Kissinger:
The social systems of other nations are of no concern to our policy, except as they represent an armed force ideologically directed toward our destruction. Nor can active philanthropy, charity, be the object of foreign policy, because charity is the prerogative and responsibility of individual persons, not of the custodians of wealth taken from the people by taxation; And, in the specific case relevant today – the backward nations – the only way to seriously advance their economies, in any case, is through investment under the control of the market system. Nor certainly can our policy be distorted by taking seriously unrealistic utopian concepts such as world government.
Donald Trump’s foreign policy George W. Bush, represents not so much a departure from the interventionist leanings of John McCain and Mitt Romney as a return to the admittedly temporary position of American conservatives, even during the Cold War.
The American right wants limited government. Those skeptical of a government’s ability to deliver generally do not rationally trust it to remake the Third World in America’s image.
Meyer, a member of the board of the Communist Party of Great Britain during the 1930s and later an associate of Earl Browder, head of the party in the US, understood the threat posed by the ideology to the United States. Its “messianic” nature aimed at “world domination” forced the United States to involve itself in the affairs of foreign countries, he told Kissinger.
Frank Meyer, upper right, at a peace protest in about 1934, when he was a member of the Communist Party and working under Walter Ulbricht, who later built the Berlin Wall as dictator of East Germany. By 1962, conservative Frank Meyer urged Nikita Khrushchev to “tear down the Berlin Wall”. (Photo courtesy of Daniel J. Flynn)
As Meyer explained to a Yale audience during a debate with former Congressman Allard Lowenstein in 1971, “I would oppose the war in Vietnam, I would oppose all alliances, foreign aid of any kind, and participation in the United Nations… if it were not for the threat of communism.” He described the war in Vietnam as a fight in this broader conflict, saying that “if it weren’t true, the whole thing would be a farce.”
Later that year, Frank Meyer, suffering from cancer, wrote his last “Doctrine and Heresy” column. national reviewIn it, he envisioned a world without the Soviet Union, which he had so passionately served for 14 years and then fought for penitently in courtrooms, magazine pages, lectures, and protest lines for the last quarter century of his life.
He reported that “there has been a great emphasis on one-world utopianism, exporting democracy and generally acting as a social activist throughout the world” by elites who “came on the road to a prevalent American desire, rushing to Washington’s farewell address, to remain aloof from the world’s power struggles.”
Mayer saw his foreign policy approach not as innovative but as legacy. Washington’s farewell address during the first century of the new republic accurately described America’s interactions with the world as “restrained.” He envisioned a day without the distracting power of the Soviet Union when America could again mind its own business and not have to worry about any other country minding its own. Then, the conservative argument for limited government could extend beyond domestic spending to foreign policy.
Frank S. of Woodstock, New York. Meyer, a former teacher who belonged to the Communist Party, testified before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in July 1959 about Communists working in education. Meyer stated that he was a communist from 1931 until his separation from the party in 1945. (Bateman/Getty Images)
Unlike Frank Meyer, Donald Trump did not originate all this as a new idea. He inherited this. Trump’s slogans were taken from Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign (and many of Buchanan’s slogans were taken from Ronald Reagan and earlier candidates). He carries on a long-standing tradition of the right. Mayor, who in 1952 pushed Mr. Republican Bob Taft to such an extent that he lost his freelance position freeman When the magazine’s board removed its anti-Eisenhower editors, the Ohio senator and others absorbed his foreign policy viewpoints.
Trump, as he proved in Iran, Ukraine and elsewhere, is no isolationist. Of course, Meyer was not a staunch anti-communist.
Common sense conservatives avoid hiding. They also hate adopting an “I’m-from-the-government-and-I’m-here-to-help-you” mentality.
Washington understood this – even if his name rarely came up in the city. Taft, Meyer, Buchanan, and Trump did the same.
Daniel J. Flynn is the author of The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. mayor (Encounter/ISI Books) and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution,
