Anyone who has caught Pat Buchanan's television appearances, or heard his campaign rhetoric, will be surprised at his relatively evenhanded and thoughtful tone as he writes--often quite persuasively--in favor of the restoration of the political, military, and economic independence that largely drove U.S. foreign policy in the 19th century. At the heart of A Republic, Not an Empire is a well-written history of U.S. foreign policy beginning with the end of the American Revolution, going through the First and Second World Wars, Vietnam, and the end of the cold war, up to the superpower's involvement in the Persian Gulf and the former Yugoslavia. This section is bookended by, essentially, two very long op-ed pieces that lay out Buchanan's view of U.S. foreign policy: American interests should determine all foreign-policy decisions.

The twin foreign-policy goals of interventionism and free trade that seem to drive the Clinton administration's foreign policy are, Buchanan argues, the same pursuits "that brought the British Empire to ruin." Empires fall, he reminds us, through war and too many foreign commitments. With the end of the cold war, he suggests, U.S. foreign policy has become chaotic, driven by special interests; the sum of U.S. global commitments has become greater than the country's ability to defend them. In the end, A Republic, Not an Empire proposes, the only country the United States can completely rely on and trust is itself. --Linda Killian

Claiming to rescue history from the clutches of revisionists who not only slander the idea of isolationism but also get their history wrong, Buchanan (The Great Betrayal, etc.) offers a ringing defense of isolationismAthough he doesn't call it that. Instead, Buchanan calls his foreign policy one of national interest. It is rooted in an outlook that is not just politically conservative but metaphysically conservative: "The fatal flaw in the globalist vision is that it is utopian. It envisions a world that has never existed and can never exist, because it is contrary to fallen human nature." Scoffing at dreamy internationalism (e.g., Woodrow Wilson's na?ve desire to make the world "safe for democracy" and George Bush's trumpeting of a "new world order"), he invokes George Washington's Farewell Address warning against foreign entanglements and John Quincy Adams's dictum that it is not America's destiny "to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy." At issue, argues Buchanan, is America's sovereignty: the country should not make commitments to the U.N. or even NATO that will exact a price of blood and treasure where no vital national interest is at stake. As Buchanan ranges widely through American history, historians will find ample opportunity to sling analytical darts. But readers who can stomach the author's more outrageous fits of polemical bile (e.g., claiming that Joseph McCarthy "did nothing to... compare to what was done to the patriots of America First") will have to admit that Buchanan makes a stirring and entertaining argumentAeven if, as U.S. intervention in Kosovo and NATO expansion illustrate, it is, for the foreseeable future, a losing argument. (Sept.)
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The companion to Buchanan's excellent book on the usually soporific topic of trade policy, The Great Betrayal , shows the columnist^-broadcaster^-presidential candidate still in top form. A Republic is his foreign policy book, in which he criticizes both current approaches--the new Wilsonism of President Clinton and the king-of-the-mountainism, so to speak, of most Republicans. As he sees it, these approaches invite trouble by requiring the U.S. to dominate the world, which he considers impossible and undesirable. It is impossible because Americans won't tolerate "another Vietnam" and don't intend to provide the military resources to make good on global commitments. It is undesirable because it makes the U.S. the military servant of other, often quite wealthy and populous nations (e.g., Japan, South Korea, Israel) and the target of resentment from dissidents in those nations: from the first situation the U.S. gets nothing in exchange, and from the second it may get terrorist attacks and, should the dissidents gain power, enemies. Instead of a globalist-internationalist policy, Buchanan urges that self-interest drive U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. should protect its citizens within its own well-defended borders, offer assistance short of troop deployment to allies (and require allies not to sell military technology to U.S. adversaries), withdraw troops from other nations that can afford their own defense, and avoid wars in places or for causes in which the U.S. has no interest that its citizens will accept as reason to fight. The best feature of Buchanan's argument is that he bases it in a history of U.S. foreign policy from Washington to the present. With his vivid columnist's prose, he also produces a read as riveting as it is provocative. Ray Olson

A theoretically coherent analysis but an unnecessarily flawed prescription. Political pundit and presidential candidate Buchanan embraces George Washington's advice to avoid foreign entanglements and argues that American foreign policy has become hopelessly overextended. The hubris which identifies vital interests in every nook and cranny of the world and allows us to believe we should shape other political regimes and even their policies according to democratic and humanitarian standards is folly flirting with disaster. No empire in history has survived such ambitious commitments; indeed, no empire has ever undertaken such commitments. Consequently, Buchanan advocates reining in our definition of national interests and undertaking a foreign policy much more independent of states and organizations outside our borders. Critics deride such suggestions as isolationism, but Buchanan appropriately points out that such charges are made to ``stifle debate.'' In fact, his approach is that of a true conservative, offering a perspective rooted in American tradition initiated by Washington and maintained until Wilson took us into WWI. Unfortunately, he forfeits the credibility built up through systematic logic and historical analysis by insisting that intervention in Vietnam was ``a legitimate war of containment'' in a book where the necessity of American participation in WWI and WWII is questioned. Perhaps this inability to overcome old wounds and rigorously apply his own foreign policy criteria reflects Buchanan's overriding concern with culture-war rhetoric on the domestic front. Certainly this must be the case in his attack on ``hyphenated Americanism'' and the great dangers posed by the loss of ``our American identity as one nation.'' Whatever one's reaction to multiculturalism, it's hard to see a necessary linkage between Washington's admonition against foreign entanglements and Buchanan's flirtation with xenophobia. Why this material is included in a purportedly serious discussion of foreign policy is unclear. Hopefully readers will look past the warts and approach the central argument with the gravity it deserves. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.