A foreign policy that puts America's fair interests first did not come from Donald Trump.
In a summer when Israel, Iran, Ukraine and Russia dominated the news cycle, it seems easy to forget, although important to remember.
“The foreign policy of the United States must, within broad moral limits, be motivated by and take into account our national interests,” Frank Meyer insisted to Henry Kissinger in December 1968.
The letter is one of tens of thousands of lost documents found in the warehouse during the investigation. The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Incredible Life of Frank S. Meyershows that even during the Cold War, the right understood that the Soviet Union had only temporarily reoriented the US role in the world. When it ends, so will active US involvement in countries most Americans have never heard of—or at least that was the idea.
Kissinger, whom President-elect Richard Nixon had appointed as his national security adviser shortly before Meyer sent his letter, turned to Meyer for advice on what ideas should revitalize America's relations with other countries. A few years earlier, he had accepted Meyer as a guest lecturer in his Harvard courses and arranged a meeting between New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Meyer, his most harshly critical constituent. Kissinger and Meyer called and corresponded from time to time.
But none of them were actually Nixon's men. That same year, a German-Jewish émigré reported that Rockefeller and an older German-Jewish friend were the most prominent intellectual supporters of Ronald Reagan's presidential bid. They saw the world differently, even if they traced their ancestry back to the same place.
National Review the editor wrote to Kissinger:
the social systems of other nations are not the object of our policy unless they constitute an armed force ideologically bent on our destruction. Active charity, charity also cannot be the goal of foreign policy, since charity is the privilege and responsibility of individuals, and not the custodians of money taken from the people through taxation; and, in the specific case relevant today – backward countries – the only way to seriously advance their economy in any case is through investment under the control of the market system. Surely our politics cannot be distorted by taking seriously the many unrealistic utopian concepts of world government.
Donald Trump's foreign policy represents less a departure from the interventionist orientations of George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney than a return to what, even during the Cold War, was the admittedly temporary position of American conservatives.
The American right wants limited government. Skeptics about the government's ability to deliver the letter generally don't believe it can remake the Third World in America's image.
Meyer, a board member of the British Communist Party in the 1930s in his twenties and later an ally in America of party kingpin Earl Browder, understood the threat that ideology posed to the United States. His “messianic” nature, aimed at “world supremacy,” he told Kissinger, led the United States to intervene in the affairs of foreign countries, including Vietnam.
Frank Meyer (above right) at a peaceful protest around 1934, when he was a member of the Communist Party and worked under Walter Ulbricht, who later built the Berlin Wall as dictator of East Germany. By 1962, conservative Frank Meyer was begging Nikita Khrushchev to “tear down the Berlin Wall.” (Photo courtesy of Daniel J. Flynn)
As Meyer explained to a Yale University audience during a debate with former Congressman Allard Lowenstein in 1971, “I would have opposed the Vietnam War, I would have opposed all alliances, any kind of foreign aid and participation in the United Nations… if not for the threat of communism.” He described the Vietnam War as a battle in this much larger conflict, saying that “if it weren't true, it would all be a farce.”
Later that year, cancer-stricken Frank Meyer wrote his final “Principles and Heresies” column for the magazine. National Review. There he imagined a world without the Soviet Union, which he had so zealously served for 14 years and then repentantly fought in courtrooms, on the pages of magazines, on pulpits and in protest lines for the last quarter century of his life.
He noted that “much emphasis has been placed on one-world utopianism, exporting democracy, and generally acting as a social worker for the world” by elites who were hampered by “the prevailing American desire, dating back to Washington's Farewell Address, to stay out of the world's power struggles.”
Meyer considered his foreign policy approach not new, but inherited. Throughout the first century of the new republic, Washington's farewell address accurately described America's engagement with the world in a “restrained” way. He imagined a day without the disorienting power of the Soviet Union, when America could once again mind its own business without worrying about another country minding its own business, too. Then the conservative call for limited government can move beyond domestic spending and into foreign policy.
Frank S. Meyer of Woodstock, New York, a former Communist Party teacher, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in July 1959 about communists working in education. Meyer said he was a communist from 1931 until he broke with the party in 1945. (Bettmann/Getty Images)
Donald Trump, like Frank Meyer, didn't come up with all this as a new idea. He inherited it. Trump's slogans are borrowed from Pat Buchanan's 1992 presidential campaign (and many of Buchanan's slogans are borrowed from Ronald Reagan and earlier candidates). He continues a long tradition on the right. Meyer, who in 1952 pushed Republican Mr. Bob Taft to such an extent that he lost his freelance job in Freeman when the magazine's board threw out its anti-Eisenhower editors, he adopted his views on foreign policy from the Ohio senator and others.
Trump, as he has proven in Iran, Ukraine and elsewhere, is not an isolationist. Neither, of course, was the ardent anti-communist Meyer.
Sane conservatives avoid cover-ups. They also hate the “I'm from the government and I'm here to help you” mentality.
Washington understood this—even if the city that bears his name rarely does. So did Taft, Meyer, Buchanan and Trump.
Daniel J. Flynn – author The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Incredible Life of Frank S. Meyer (Meeting/ISI Books) and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution..
