Sen. Tom Cotton at the Capitol in Washington, Nov. 16, 2022.
Photo:
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Most politicians try to keep the writing bug at bay, perhaps remembering Job’s cry in the Bible: “Oh . . . that mine adversary had written a book.” A writer gives hostages to fortune on every page, and opposition researchers will comb over the books of rival politicians for years to come.
For Arkansas Sen.
Tom Cotton,
however, writing has been key to his political rise. As an Army officer serving in Iraq, he wrote a letter to the
expressing hope that the Justice Department would prosecute the journalists responsible for revealing information that endangered the lives of soldiers. The Times declined to publish it, and the resulting controversy helped launch his career. Subsequent Cotton encounters with the Times have been equally consequential, wreaking havoc at the paper and boosting his standing on the right.
Now Mr. Cotton has written a book on foreign policy that one suspects the Times won’t find space to review. (Although the senator mentions my work in the text, I did not see any of the book before publication—or even know that he had a book under way.)
The title, “Only the Strong: Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Power,” is as polarizing as any Fox News host could want. But beneath the tough tone the book combines a polemical description of how leading Democrats think about American foreign policy with a subtle articulation of the case for critical American engagement in ways that a young generation of Republican thinkers can embrace. In his “attack the Democrats” mode, Mr. Cotton connects his critiques of Democratic foreign-policy thought with core conservative critiques of Democratic domestic ideas. In his “reach out to Republicans” mode, Mr. Cotton reminds readers that American interests require thoughtful engagement with allies and partners around the world.
Mr. Cotton sees Democratic foreign policy oscillating between two distinct approaches. One he traces back to the technocratic progressivism of figures like
Woodrow Wilson.
This tradition, valuing an all-powerful federal bureaucracy guided by well-schooled progressive administrators, scoffs at constitutional limits on federal and executive power, and it recognizes no limits on the power of the U.S. government to remake both American society and the world.
The second, more radical trend Mr. Cotton sees in Democratic foreign-policy thought is frank anti-Americanism. For this portion of the left, America is a white-supremacist power engaged in the systematic rape of the world’s resources. These activists seek to disarm the U.S. and weaken it at every turn. Less America makes for a better world.
The two trends often are at cross-purposes, but there they share a contempt for American interests conventionally understood. The anti-American radicals see conventional U.S. interests as bad by definition. For the world-shaping technocrats, it is ignoble and petty to use American power for anything as mundane as securing national interests. Wilson wanted to turn World War I into a war to make the world safe for democracy rather than a war to make the world safe for the U.S. In turn, his heirs elevate grandiose and often unattainable goals such as global LGBTQ rights over American interests such as reducing foreign tariffs on American-made goods.
The result, as Mr. Cotton sees it, is a mess of proliferating commitments and diminishing means. American attention is diverted toward dozens of competing, often incompatible priorities while the pillars of our economic and military power are undermined. We carry out elaborate plans to transform Afghan society while neglecting its defense. We are more focused on getting the military to net-zero emissions than on having enough weapons to supply both Ukraine and Taiwan.
The Obama years saw these tendencies operate largely unchecked. Grandiose plans for nuclear disarmament collapsed when President Obama’s ineffectual response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the folly of Kyiv’s surrendering its nuclear weapons to Moscow at America’s behest. The announcement of a pivot to Asia foundered as China militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea with no serious response from Washington. Declarations about healing the rift between America and Sunni Islam guttered out as Mr. Obama dithered in the face of the Syrian regime’s murderous attacks on its own people.
None of this was enough to convince Mr. Obama and his aides that their trademark mix of moralism and restraint was a recipe for serial disaster. One hopes the Biden administration will take note.
Mr. Cotton’s book is, of course, a partisan document. Democrats have their flaws, but Republicans don’t always approach foreign policy with the appropriate mix of Bismarckian drive and Metternichian finesse. Still, having senior politicians lay their convictions before the public is good for the country. One hopes more of them will take the time to share their foreign-policy views. These are grave times; we need a more substantive debate than tweets and cable-news sound bites can provide.
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Appeared in the January 3, 2023, print edition.
