BRET STEPHENS: THE RYAN NEO-CON MANIFESTO
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America’s real interests, he understands, come from our deepest values.
Last summer, the chairman of the House Budget Committee made a foray into foreign-policy land with a speech to the Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington, D.C. About 100 people showed up, and it got next to no coverage. That should now change—and not just because Paul Ryan’s views on America’s role in the world are no longer a matter of one Wisconsin congressman talking.
Here, in CliffsNotes form, is what the speech tells us about Mr. Ryan. First, that he’s an internationalist of the old school; in another day, he would have sat comfortably in the cabinets of Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. Also, that he believes in free trade, a strong defense, engagement with our allies—and expectations of them. Also, that he wants America to stay and win in Afghanistan. Furthermore, that he supports the “arduous task of building free societies,” even as he harbored early doubts the Arab Spring was the vehicle for building free societies.
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It tells us also that Mr. Ryan has an astute understanding of the fundamental challenge of China. “The key question for American policy makers,” he said, “is whether we are competing with China for leadership of the international system or against them over the fundamental nature of that system.”
What Mr. Ryan’s speech really tells us, however, is that he knows how to think.
Most foreign-policy speeches by American politicians take the form of untidy piles of verities and clichés. Here, for example, is Barack Obama on China: “As we look to the future, what’s needed, I believe, is a spirit of cooperation that is also friendly competition.” Here he is on the U.N.: “The United Nations can either be a place where we bicker about outdated differences or forge common ground.” Here he is to the British Parliament: “The time for our leadership is now.”
Mr. Ryan doesn’t have the president’s reputation for eloquence. Nor do his speeches ride on the windy drafts of “Yes We Can.” But unlike Mr. Obama, his speeches communicate ideas and arguments, not pieties and emotions.
Thus this speech begins not with a cliché but with a contention: “Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course.” It proceeds, briefly, to demonstrate the point quantitatively: Defense spending in 1970 consumed 39% of the federal budget but takes only 16% today. In the proverbial guns-to-butter ratio, our veins are already clogged.
Next there is history. Why can’t the U.S. simply cede the cumbersome role of world policeman to somebody else? Didn’t Britain do as much in the 1940s? It did. Yet, “unlike Britain, which handed leadership to a power that shared its fundamental values, today’s most dynamic and growing powers do not embrace basic principles that should be at the core of the international system.”
Associated PressRepublican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan
That’s not a novel insight, exactly, but it’s something that needs to be said and is said only rarely. Similarly with Mr. Ryan’s next point: American exceptionalism isn’t a type of jingoism. Instead, it derives from the fact that it was the first nation born of an idea, and from an idea that is true not only for Americans. “America’s foundations,” he says, “are not our own—they belong equally to every person everywhere.”
So what follows? “If you believe these rights are universal human rights . . . it leads you to reject moral relativism. It causes you to recoil at the idea of persistent moral indifference toward any nation that stifles and denies liberty, no matter how friendly and accommodating its rulers are to American interests.”
Note the consistency of the logic. Note the quality of the language. Note, finally, Mr. Ryan’s understanding that America’s real interests are derived from our deepest values. For most other countries, it’s just the opposite: The interests come first, and “values” are a synonym for justifications.
None of this means that Mr. Ryan is a foreign-policy crusader. He talks of a “healthy humility” about the degree to which the U.S. can “control events in other regions.”
Yet humility should not be a prescription for passivity or fatalism. Speaking of the U.K., he notes the extent to which its postwar leaders chose their own diminished fate: “Once they concluded that they should manage Britain’s decline, it mattered little what Britain was objectively capable of achieving on the world stage. The crisis of self-perception was fatal to Britain’s global leadership.”
What kind of congressman speaks—and maybe even writes—sentences like these? When Mr. Ryan gave the speech, in June of last year, Congress and the Obama administration were gearing up for their epic budget grudge match. He had no inkling he’d be the vice presidential nominee in 14 months and had probably already decided he didn’t want to run for president. Which means he could easily have fobbed off the Hamilton Society with GOP platitudes about “keeping America strong.”
Instead he delivered one of the most thoughtful speeches in years about America’s global role and the means required to maintain it.
What a great thing he’s on the ticket. Pity he’s not at the top of it.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared August 14, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Paul Ryan’s Neocon Manifesto.
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