A foreign policy that puts America’s just interests first was not born of Donald Trump.
In a summer in which Israel, Iran, Ukraine and Russia dominated the news cycle, this seems easy to forget, even if it is important to remember.
“The foreign policy of the United States must be, within broad moral bounds, motivated and concerned with our national interest,” Frank Meyer insisted to Henry Kissinger in December 1968.
The letter, one of tens of thousands of lost documents found in a warehouse as part of a search for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Improbable Life of Frank S. Meyerillustrates that, even during the Cold War, the right understood that the Soviet Union was only temporarily reorienting the United States’ role in the world. When that ended, active U.S. involvement in countries most Americans had never heard of would also end — or at least that was the idea.
Kissinger, appointed by President-elect Richard Nixon to serve as his national security adviser shortly before Meyer sent his letter, sought Meyer’s advice on ideas that should animate America’s relations with other nations. He had hosted Meyer as a guest speaker for his Harvard class a few years earlier and had arranged a meeting between New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Meyer, his constituent most fiercely critical of him. Kissinger and Meyer called and corresponded occasionally.
But neither were really Nixon’s men. That year, the German Jewish émigré advised Rockefeller and his older German Jewish friend to be the most visible supporter among intellectuals of Ronald Reagan’s presidential candidacy. They saw the world differently even though they traced their ancestors to the same fundamental place.
THE National review The editor wrote to Kissinger:
the social systems of other nations are not our policy, except to the extent that they represent armed power ideologically directed toward our destruction. Active benevolence, charity, cannot be a foreign policy objective either, since charity is the privilege and responsibility of individuals, not of the guardians of the money taken from people through taxation; and, in the current specific case – the backward countries – in any case, the only serious way to advance their economies is to invest under the control of the market system. Certainly our politics cannot be distorted by taking seriously unrealistic utopian concepts as a world government either.
Donald Trump’s foreign policy represents not so much a diversion from the interventionist orientation of George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney as a return to what, even during the Cold War, was an admittedly temporary position of American conservatives.
The American right wants limited government. Skeptics of the government’s ability to deliver a letter generally don’t trust it to remake the Third World in America’s image.
Meyer, a board member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in his twenties in the 1930s and later in the United States an ally of party great leader Earl Browder, understood the threat the ideology posed to the United States. His “messianic” nature that aimed for “world supremacy,” he told Kissinger, forced the United States to become involved in the affairs of foreign countries, including Vietnam.
Frank Meyer, top right, at a peace demonstration circa 1934, when he was a member of the Communist Party and working under Walter Ulbricht, who later erected the Berlin Wall as dictator of East Germany. In 1962, conservative Frank Meyer implored Nikita Khrushchev to “tear down the Berlin Wall.” (Photo courtesy of Daniel J. Flynn)
As Meyer explained to a Yale audience in a debate with former Congressman Allard Lowenstein in 1971: “I would oppose the Vietnam War, I would oppose all alliances, all forms of foreign aid, and participation in the United Nations…if it were not for the threat of communism.” He described the Vietnam War as one battle in a much larger conflict, saying that “if that weren’t true, the whole thing would be a farce.”
Later that year, Frank Meyer, ravaged by cancer, wrote his final column “Principles and Heresies” for National review. In it, he imagined a world without the Soviet Union that he had served so zealously for 14 years and then fought penitentially in courtrooms, magazine pages, lecterns and protest lines for the last quarter century of his life.
He pointed out that “great importance has been placed on globalist utopianism, the export of democracy and, generally speaking, the role of social worker throughout the world” by elites who have clashed with “a dominant American desire, dating back to Washington’s Farewell Address, to stay out of global power struggles.”
Meyer viewed his approach to foreign policy as not new but inherited. Since Washington’s farewell address during the first century of the new republic, the word “restrained” accurately describes America’s interactions with the world. He imagined a day without the disorienting force of the Soviet Union, when America could once again mind its own business without fear of another nation minding its own business as well. Conservative advocacy for limited government could then extend beyond domestic spending and extend to 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, is not the originator of all this as a new idea. He inherited it. Trump’s slogans derive from Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign (and many of Buchanan’s slogans derive from Ronald Reagan and previous candidates). He continues a long tradition on the right. Meyer, who pushed Republican Bob Taft in 1952 to such an extent that he lost his independent seat with The free man when the magazine’s board dumped its anti-Eisenhower editors, absorbed his foreign policy perspectives from the Ohio senator and others.
Trump, as he has proven in Iran, Ukraine and elsewhere, is not isolationist. Of course, Meyer, fiercely anti-communist, was not either.
Common sense conservatives avoid hiding. They also hate adopting a “I’m from government and I’m here to help you” mindset.
Washington understands this – even if the city that bears his name rarely does. So did Taft, Meyer, Buchanan and Trump.
Daniel J. Flynn is the author of The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Improbable Life of Frank S. Meyer (Meeting/ISI Books) and visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution.
