Indeed, Buchanan draws on a wider range of opinion than is usual for a national political figure and even for many diplomatic historians: mainstream scholars like H. W. Brands, Wayne Cole, Justus Doenecke, Robert Ferrell, Walter McDougall, Melvin Small, and Robert Remini; “realist” theorists George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Robert Tucker; conservative ideologists Marvin Olasky and Paul Johnson; and libertarians Ralph Raico and Murray Rothbard. His goal is to construct a usable past for his current foreign policy prescriptions. Simply put, having won the Cold War, the United States should approach the rest of the world with greater political and military restraint, a position Buchanan sees rooted in such classic sources as George Washington’s Farewell Address and John Quincy Adams’s admonition against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Making his case for “enlightened nationalism” (a term borrowed from Lippmann), Buchanan mixes historical popularization, conservative folklore, partisan sniping, avid anticommunism, ethnocentrism, a self-serving definition of empire, and some good sense.

From the War of Independence through the nineteenth century, the United States was the “most expansionist nation on earth” (p. 178), Buchanan writes with candor reminiscent of the imperialists of that era. And he applauds all of it until 1898. Although marked by a “spirit of covetousness,” the War of 1812 was a “righteous” defense of national honor (p. 79). While conceding that President James K. Polk offered a dubious interpretation of clashes along a disputed border, he dismisses as “another lie in the Blame America First series” the notion that the United States provoked Mexico into war (p. 105). According to Buchanan’s self-serving definition, “Manifest Destiny” did not qualify as imperialism because the “lands were contiguous, largely empty, [and] easily defensible” (p. 122). Buchanan hails William Seward as a great secretary of state, but ignores Seward’s promotion of commercial expansion as the “real empire.” Throughout the book the exercise of American economic power over other nations does not count as imperialism and receives slight attention.

Rather, the “nation became an empire” (p. 141) when President McKinley not only led the country into a war with Spain over Cuba that could have been avoided through patient diplomacy, but also acquired Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Echoing the anti-annexationists from that day, Buchanan rejects control over “lands we had no intention of converting into states, and peoples we had no intention of allowing to become U.S. citizens” (p. 159). He also joins them in condemning the brutal suppression of the Filipino insurrection. His main complaint, however, is that the Philippines represented a vulnerable possession. That vulnerability was multiplied by the “declaratory overreach” (p. 176) of the Open Door notes, which Buchanan, following Williams and Charles Beard, views as a “classic dogma” of American foreign relations (p. 169). Viewed as history rather than usable past, this is the best part of the book.

Within the rubric of “progressive imperialism” (p. 179), Buchanan accepts the familiar, forced distinction between Theodore Roosevelt as a tough “realist” and Woodrow Wilson as a utopian “idealist.” It therefore pains him to concede Wilson’s greater wisdom for initially opposing American entry into a world war in which “no vital U. S. interest was at risk” (p. 193). By 1917 this wisdom was undermined by elite Anglophilia, British propaganda, German submarine warfare, and economic ties to the Allies (the “command of gold,” as Senator George Norris said in a speech Buchanan cites). Drawing heavily on Kennan, Buchanan treats World War I as the great disaster of the twentieth century because directly or indirectly it produced so many others, including the Communist victory in Russia, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and the Cold War. Without American entry, he plausibly suggests, the conflict might have ended in a stalemate, but even a victory by the Central Powers would have been better than what actually followed.

Instead of a Wilsonian peace without victory, the Treaty of Versailles placed a crushing economic and psychological burden on Germany. It also compromised American sovereignty in ways that merited rejection by the Senate. That defeat hardly made the United States “isolationist” in the 1920s. On the contrary, administrations dominated by the “first generation of Republicans to buy into the myth of economic man” (p. 243) encouraged overseas investment, tried to stabilize the international financial order, and advanced their own utopian program to outlaw war.

Even amid the current mood of uncritically celebrating American victories in all wars hot and cold, the two long chapters dealing with entry into World War II might have provoked less outrage and more analysis had somebody else written them. After all, Buchanan’s career reveals an exaggerated view of Jewish influence, a visceral incapacity to let go of the topic, and an obliviousness to complaints that this behavior constitutes anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, his examination of the “great debate” of 1939–1941 deserves serious attention rather than invective.

Buchanan does deny that the Axis powers threatened the United States. The country had “no vital interests in Asia” (p. 284) and the Japanese conquest of Manchuria was comparable to the British, French, and American conquests respectively of India, Indochina, and the Philippines. Hitler made “no overt move to threaten U.S. vital interests” (p. 268); nor could he have done so if the United States built an adequate defense. In Buchanan’s ideal scenario, if the United States had not entered the war, Nazi Germany would have conquered the Soviet Union and then accepted a peace with Britain.

This course of events is not the only counterfactual possibility. An Allied victory with the Soviets occupying almost all of Europe looks at least as likely. Furthermore, Buchanan’s preferred scenario would have left the United States far more vulnerable than it ever was during the Cold War – and probably fairly soon. Nazi Germany was more expansionist than the Soviet Union as well as technologically more advanced; prototypes of a transoceanic “America-Bomber” already existed in 1940. Unlike the Soviets, Nazi leaders often viewed war as a good in itself. Finally, the racist Hitler discounted American economic power in a way that was unimaginable for a Marxist like Stalin.

Borrowing heavily from Cole and Doenecke, Buchanan defends the non-interventionists, particularly those in the America First Committee (AFC), against FDR’s charge that they were Axis agents or dupes. Almost all of them deserve that defense. Unfortunately, like many of them, Buchanan is unduly fond of the AFC’s most famous but least astute leader, Charles Lindbergh, a racial theorist who wanted “neither” side to win the war even before the Soviets were involved. Speaking at Des Moines, Iowa, in September 1941, Lindbergh placed American Jews on a par with the British government and the Roosevelt administration as one of the three main forces pushing the United States toward war. Lindbergh never grasped that his singling out of Jews combined with his inflated view of their power qualified as anti-Semitism. Judging from Buchanan’s treatment of the controversy as a case of ethnic politics, he does not grasp the point either.

Unlike fellow conservatives Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, who credit FDR with greatness, Buchanan just can’t stand him. He draws on venerable conservative folklore to charge Roosevelt with deliberately provoking war on two oceans and maneuvering the Japanese into “firing the first shot.” For the Atlantic theater, a fairer judgment is that FDR was willing to risk war to supply Britain and defeat Germany but never fully admitted the probable consequences of his actions – total involvement rather than limited belligerency – even to himself. For the Pacific, the president was less hawkish and the Japanese more recalcitrant than Buchanan suggests. Nor did Roosevelt expect a Japanese “first shot” to begin a military disaster at Pearl Harbor or anywhere else.

The partisan folklore should not obscure the good sense. Even a brutal Japanese sphere in Asia would not have threatened vital American interests, and FDR should not have risked a two front war when the United States was unready to fight on one. Moreover, Buchanan rightly criticizes Roosevelt’s persistent deception as well as those historians who call this behavior leadership without contemplating the long-term consequences. FDR’s characterization of the German attack on the USS Greer as “unprovoked” was a “true ‘Tonkin Gulf’ incident” (p. 279). When citizens are treated like children who cannot understand their own interests in a monumental issue, Buchanan asks, “what has become of our constitutional republic?” (p. 296).

Although Buchanan has read some recent scholarship on the Cold War, his brief account here consists almost entirely of conservative folklore. He gives no sense of the complexity of world affairs or policymaking at home, let alone of moral ambiguities, lost opportunities, and the possibility of nuclear apocalypse. Eastern Europe fell under communism because an “utterly naive” FDR “truckled” (p. 307) to Josef Stalin not because the Red Army did most of the fighting. When the U. S.-sponsored invasion of Cuba failed in 1961, President John F. Kennedy should have moved in with American forces. Detente, viewed by at least four presidents as a subtle strategy of liberation, is to Buchanan simply a failure. Once engaged in the Vietnam War, the United States should have invaded North Vietnam even at the risk of provoking Chinese intervention. In his single Cold War insight, Buchanan presents his hero, Ronald Reagan, as a kind of latter-day Dwight Eisenhower. While using the Wilsonian rhetoric of universal democracy, Reagan did most of his Cold War fighting through “proxies” (p. 361) and pursued rollback via “minimum risk and moderate pressure at the peripheries of [the Soviet] empire” (p. 322).

Beyond the specific lapses, there are two problems with Buchanan’s analysis of the Cold War, one of which he addresses and one of which he ignores. First, victory required an extraordinary array of foreign “entanglements” that seem to contradict his central message. Attempting to preempt charges of inconsistency, Buchanan calls them temporary expedients intended to last only “as long as the crisis endured” (p. 310). Second, Buchanan postulates that the Cold War began and endured because Communist actions anywhere threatened vital American interests. After casually deciding that Nazi domination of Europe in 1940–41 left vital American interests unscathed, he describes Soviet foreign policy in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a “worldwide rampage” (p. 322). Because the Cold War, rather than the defeat of Nazism, is his ideological war, Buchanan cannot bring himself to examine it with the detached eye of a realist.

Buchanan concludes by inferring lessons for the present from this usable past. In his view, three factions are in contention to determine foreign policy. Wilsonian “multilateralists,” most of whom are liberal Democrats, would surrender at least part of American sovereignty to the United Nations, World Trade Organization, and other international organizations. The “hegemonists,” including the Republican establishment, seek a Pax Americana. Their shared propensity for political and military intervention abroad is supported by transnational corporations, powerful ethnic groups, and religious activists promoting an “absolute free market for religious faiths” (p. 346). But such sweeping internationalism is “not rooted in America’s history or its heart” (p. 363). Rather, most Americans viscerally prefer his enlightened nationalism and agree that it is “time to let go of empire” (p. 368)

As the hegemonic power in a relatively peaceful hemisphere (a situation that others would acknowledge as an informal empire), the United States has the luxury of choosing war only if vital interests are affected. As a general rule, this country should serve as an “arsenal of democracy,” Buchanan writes in an odd appropriation from FDR (p. 386). It should sell arms to friendly nations in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East (including Israel) but no longer act as a “front-line fighting state” (p. 376). While Buchanan’s repudiation of idealistic interventions to prevent ethnic or religious massacres is predictable, his post-Cold War standard for measuring realistic vital interests is surprisingly rigorous. For example, if a revolution cut off petroleum from Saudi Arabia, the United States should ride out a global recession rather than intervening militarily. And what might be called the Buchanan corollary to the Monroe Doctrine would leave leftist governments in Latin America undisturbed as long as they remained independent of U.S. enemies.

At his best, Buchanan urges a friendly approach to Iran, recognizes that the U.S. military presence in the Middle East prompts anti-American militancy, and warns against provoking or humiliating Russia. He cannot make up his mind, however, when discussing the “truculent” (p. 374) People’s Republic of China (PRC), which he expects to become the dominant power in Asia. On the one hand, he wants the United States to withdraw from Asia before it is driven out. On the other hand, he leaves open the possibility of military action if the PRC managed to “neutralize the Pacific rim and Japan” (p. 374). And he anticipates a crisis over Taiwan, perhaps a PRC blockade or a missile attack, some time within the near future. What then?

Buchanan does not say. Perhaps he cannot bring himself to admit how easily the United States, even while operating on his anti-interventionist premises, might slide from an arsenal of democracy for Taiwan to a front-line combatant. Amid invocations of credibility, national honor, and falling dominoes, a president might decide that the United States must deliver the arms from our arsenal and then defend the American ships or planes making the deliveries. The strategic and ethical dilemmas involved in such a scenario, as well as the psychological denial of the likely consequences, would be familiar to Wilson, FDR, and even to Lyndon Johnson.

At his nativist worst, Buchanan insists that the greatest threat to the republic is the “loss of our American identity as a nation” (p. 372). He wrongly maintains that acculturation occurs less rapidly in the latest “new immigrant” families from Asia, Africa, and Latin America than among their European predecessors (an error he shares with his multiculturalist adversaries), demands strong curbs on legal and illegal entry, and warns against Puerto Rican statehood. In this instance, he makes race and ethnicity rather than belief and behavior the tests of Americanism. Moreover, seeing no informal U.S. economic empire in Latin America, Buchanan cannot conceive of illegal immigration as one of the costs of this imperialism.

In the end, it is hardly surprising that A Republic, Not an Empire elicited invective rather than reflection from the foreign policy elites. Even Ronald Steel’s more subtle and anguished meditation on the “temptations of a superpower” failed to dent internationalist orthodoxy. Yet such elite insularity is shortsighted because in two essentials Buchanan reflects the feelings of many – perhaps most – Americans. He wants the benefits of informal empire while denying that there is an empire, and he loathes the prospect of prolonged military intervention abroad.