DISADVANTAGE/BIPARTISANSHIP

LINK: ANGERING REPUBLICANS DESTROYS BIPARTISANSHIP

REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS ARE INCREASINGLY ISOLATIONIST

Lawrence F. Kaplan, executive editor of the National Interest,

The Weekly Standard September 27, 1999: Pg. 13 HEADLINE: Who Now Loathes the Military?; Congressional Republicans claim to be pro-defense. Do they mean it? // ln-10/99-acs

As representative Ron Paul explained during debate over an emergency defense bill last May: "The more we get into quagmires around the world and the more we accept the policy of policing the world, all we seem to do is come back and say, well, if we just put more money in [the military budget]. . . . Funding encourages a policy that is in error." Or, as congressman John Duncan has complained, "All we are doing is wasting billions of dollars and making enemies all over the world . . . billions and billions of dollars taken from low and middle-income Americans." Republicans in Congress, it seems, have finally discovered that the military is an instrument of foreign policy.

REPUBLICANS WILL NOT SPEND A LOT OF MONEY ON NEW DEFENSE INTIATIVES

Lawrence F. Kaplan, executive editor of the National Interest,

The Weekly Standard September 27, 1999: Pg. 13 HEADLINE: Who Now Loathes the Military?; Congressional Republicans claim to be pro-defense. Do they mean it? // ln-10/99-acs

So what animates this new generation of Republicans? At the simplest level, the explanation is fairly straightforward: In their telling, they were elected with a mandate to curtail the budget deficit, federal expenditures, and, more broadly, the government itself. "I'm a hawk," Newt Gingrich explained in 1995, "but I'm a cheap hawk." As for the former speaker's disciples, junior Republicans have indeed been revealed as cheap, though they could hardly be described as hawks.

REPUBLICANS WILL NOT AUTHORIZE FOREIGN MILITARY INTERVENTION

Lawrence F. Kaplan, executive editor of the National Interest,

The Weekly Standard September 27, 1999: Pg. 13 HEADLINE: Who Now Loathes the Military?; Congressional Republicans claim to be pro-defense. Do they mean it? // ln-10/99-acs

Yet if the new anti-governmentalism runs counter to the end of higher defense appropriations, so too do the minimalist foreign-policy aims embraced by the new Republicans. "An issue or crisis comes up and [their] reaction is almost Pavlovian," observes senator John McCain of the new generation of congressmen. "Don't send troops." And just as Republicans during the 1930s and following the Second World War quite consistently aligned their defense budget requests with their reluctance to intervene abroad, a new generation has likewise established that it makes little sense to champion larger defense expenditures while at the same time condemning the uses for which those expenditures are intended.