America: a Beacon, not a Policeman	Buchanan's "A Republic, not an Empire"	Americans Against World Empire  Homepage

9/19/01  U.S. Paying Heavy Price for Empire

5/1/01 Buchanan on Taiwan--Bush reverses Reagan-Diplomatic relations since Nixon

12/29/00   Support for Buchanan's "Moral Foreign Policy"

12/21 LEFT/RIGHT ANTI-WAR ALLIANCE  by Brian Doherty.

12/16 FOR A MORAL FOREIGN POLICY   (Buchanan Speech) Economic Sanctions & the Death of Innocents

BUCHANAN FOREIGN POLICY SPEECH AT CATO

BUCHANAN CANDIDACY BRINGS FOREIGN POLICY INTO PRESIDENTIAL RACE  by Doug Bandow

COLUMN ON BUCHANAN BOOK by Robert Novak     

THE ENEMY OF OUR ENEMIES IS OUR FRIEND by Gene Healy

ANSWERING THE PODHORETZ--"WAR" STREET JOURNAL SMEAR by Justin Raimondo  BUCHANAN'S LETTER TO WSJ ANSWERING SMEAR by Pat Buchanan 

    Of course Buchanan is right about the argument, better to have let the Nazis and Communists exhaust each other.  He's even right that many Jews might have been saved, certainly if there had been a negotiated peace instead of demand for unconditional surrender to America's Morganthau Plan to starve Germany, destroy all its industries, and give half its territory to the communists.  Indeed, in the LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH (6/7/99), Auberon Waugh wrote that the systematic mass murdering of Jews began after the Tehran Conference in mid-1943 when Hitler knew he was losing the war and learned about Stalin/Roosevelt plans for a defeated Germany.

    America did not go to war to fight the Holocaust; in fact before the war refugee Jews were forbidden entry into the United States.  Following is a fair report on the issue from the NEW YORK TIMES.    (We strongly disagree with Buchanan's economic/trade protectionism, but, on war and American interventions, he's 100% right---it's TheWarParty who fear him so much and why  we love Pat because of his enemies (LIBERTY  12/99)  (ed.)

NEW YORK TIMES Op-Ed
30 September 1999
A FAIR READING OF HISTORY   http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/oped/30schw.html   

Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwartz

The authors answer accusations about Patrick Buchanan being accused of harboring pro-Hitler sympathies in his recent book and being an isolationist.  They say that diplomatic historians have long made arguments similar to the ones Buchanan now makes, namely that Germany posed no direct military threat to America until it declared war in December 1941; and that America was virtually immune to attack.



According to Mr. Buchanan, Germany was unable to threaten the United States. The authors site other scholars
who made the same argument and quote Bruce Russett, a Yale political
scientist, and his 1972 book No Clear and Present Danger. Indeed, the view that America could have left Germany and Russia to fight each other was even proposed by Harry Truman in 1941.  They quote Truman,  "The United States should not fight in the European conflict, the future President argued. Instead, America should
encourage Germany and Russia to fight one another to exhaustion, thereby weakening the aggressive totalitarian threats of both Communism and Nazism.

They write about England's guarantee to Poland, quoting British Historians like David Dilks and A.J.P. Taylor who wrote that the guarantee left England's decision to enter the war in the hands of other nations.  Also the confirm that America did not enter the war to save the Jews, but rather that America's goal was not even concerned with Jewish interests.  They say that Buchanan's past criticism of Israel and his polemical style is why the book was attacked on the grounds of his World War II views.


Christopher Layne is a visiting scholar at the Center for International
Relations at the University of Southern California. Benjamin Schwarz is a
correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly.

www.Worldnetdaily.com
9/28/99
GUNNING FOR PAT
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Only yesterday we were lectured against the "politics of personal
destruction." Politics, everyone agreed, should be about "the issues" and
not about this or that personal trait of a particular individual. Do Bill
Clinton's private peccadilloes matter so long as his policies meet with
public approval? Why should anyone care whether George Bush used drugs 25
years ago when it's his platform we ought to be debating?

Well, when it comes to Patrick J. Buchanan, yesterday's civic pieties have
turned to dust. The reason? The establishment, with a vested interest in the
two-party cartel, wants to prevent him from running for president on a
third-party ticket. Recall that Ross Perot was similarly blasted when he ran
in 1992 and 1996, even without any hope of being elected. Pat is so much
more passionate and interesting than the canned acts of the major parties
that he might actually threaten the regime as we know it. Therefore he must
be stopped.

The ostensible reason for the attack is his book "A Republic, Not An
Empire." In it, Pat deals directly with the US military's role in the
post-Cold War world. He compares the present US military presence around the
globe to that of the British in the 19th century, and warns that the US is
wildly overextended–a position embraced by huge majorities, including most
people employed in the armed services.

Consider such pointless adventures as the war against Serbia and the
continuing attack on Iraq. These are not backed by most people and they have
soiled the image of the US around the world. Whatever credibility bounce the
US experienced after the collapse of the Soviet Union has been squandered.
Because of this and many other reasons, Pat believes US foreign policy
should be recast along the lines spelled out by the Framers.

To make his case, Pat turns to history, in particular to the US role in the
war on Spain, the two world wars, and the Cold War. His position on William
McKinley's imperialist adventure is clear: it was costly to American
liberties and cruel to the nations which became captives of American power.
Regarding the First World War, he agrees with the legion of historians who
say the US should have stayed out, and that US entry may even have helped
bring about the Second World War. Regarding that disaster, he engages in
counterfactual analysis to ask whether anything could have been done to
prevent its ghastly bloodshed, and the communization of Eastern Europe.

It would be one thing if his opponents in the press and politics engaged his
historical argument. For example, there are real questions about the
consistency of his political vision. Pat calls himself a nationalist, but
nationalism was the prop of McKinley's imperialism, which Pat opposes. He is
an avowed protectionist, and yet it was Britain's blockade against Germany
that led to the US being dragged into World War 1.

And even given the chaos generated by the Versailles treaty, well analyzed
by Pat, an interwar policy of free trade on all sides (which Pat
anathematizes) might have prevented the bloody global massacre that
followed. In a further irony, the labor unions that Pat now courts received
their biggest boost from the wars that Pat believes could and should have
been prevented.

Finally, his admirable penchant for independent thinking does not carry over
to the Cold War and all the hot wars it spawned. The pre-war America First
isolationists Pat praises were uniformly against the Cold War state as well.
John T. Flynn, Frank Chodorov, and Felix Morley opposed Truman's and
Eisenhower's warmongering, viewing it as a pretext to feed the
military-industrial complex at the expense of American liberty. Here Pat
parts company with his self-chosen intellectual lineage.

All of this makes for a very interesting discussion. But instead of dealing
with his arguments, Pat's opponents call him every name in the politically
correct handbook. When carefully trimmed quotations from his writings aren't
enough to make the point, commentators say he speaks in code. Having cracked
the code, they tell us what Pat really means, and conclude that American
democracy has no room for such a heretic. So much for free speech. So much
for letting the voters decide. So much for sticking to the issues and
barring the politics of personal destruction.

Shocked Pat supporters have wondered if this character assassination could
have been prevented. Perhaps their man should not have come out with this
book at the very time he was considering running for the nomination of the
Reform Party. And why should World War 2 be considered a campaign issue at
all? After all, he is not running for national historian.

In his defense, what Pat senses is that US involvement in the world wars had
a profound impact on a conception of government he believes should be
changed. The US is seen as wholly blameless, playing a sanctified role in
not only beating back tyrannies abroad, but in planning the economy and
society at home. It was during the war years, and the decades which
followed, that the people, the government, and the media marched in
lockstep. Those days are long gone–and thank goodness–but pressure groups
are reluctant to let go.

Consider Tom Brokaw's silly book, "The Greatest Generation," which might
also be called "An Empire, Not a Republic." You might think that Brokaw is
merely praising the folks who lived through the terrible years of depression
and war. Not so. At the root of this book is a political argument: the
Second World War was wonderful because it baptized a generation of people
into accepting federal power. This attitude is sadly rejected by the
current, supposedly cynical and thereby less-great generation.

>From Brokaw's perspective, loving and serving the government is a wonderful
thing, which is why his book reads like 50-year-old, and very stale, war
propaganda. That generation was great, he says, because it gave us not only
a war victory, but also the expansion of federal power in every area of
life. It gave us the welfare state, affirmative action, public housing,
Medicare, and the whole Leviathan state we know and are thoroughly fed up
with. Thus Brokaw celebrates the lives of such public menaces as George
Bush, Robert Dole, Lloyd Cutler, George Shultz, and Arthur Schlesinger (a
court historian Brokaw can only feebly imitate).

Like all official histories, and the popular spinoffs which echo them, this
book is devoid of objectivity or an appreciation for the complexity of
political events. It swallows conventional wisdom whole, which Pat's
treatment, for all its limitations, does not.

So, for questioning established orthodoxies that are important to the state
and its interests, Pat is being skinned and smeared. By whom? By people who
have a self-interest in seeing a certain view of US imperialism perpetuated:
that it was born without sin and is infallible in all its ways. They also
want to preserve the neat, stable, and wholly predictable two-party system
that supports the warfare state. Pat should take their attempt to silence
him as a compliment.

* * * * *
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
in Auburn, Alabama.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/justincol.html
Behind the Headlines
Justin Raimondo
September 27, 1999
BUCHANAN UNBOWED
The storm unleashed by Patrick J. Buchanan's courageous book, A Republic, Not an Empire, continues to wend its way across the American political landscape. As the pundits hurl rhetorical lightning bolts, and ominous waves of thunder interrupt the rhythms of ordinary political discourse, a single man stands serenely at center of it all, virtually alone in the eye of the media hurricane, unbowed and undefeated.

A NOTE ON STRATEGY
Many commentators, even Bob Novak, have remarked on the supposed tactical blunder of releasing this book at a crucial moment in his presidential campaign. But seen as part of Buchanan's battle for the heart and soul of the conservative movement, the publication of A Republic, Not an Empire makes perfect sense – and perfect timing. With the Cold War era long since come to a close, and the conservative wing of the GOP up in arms over foreign interventionism in Kosovo and around the world, now is the perfect time to raise the banner of America First and bring the noninterventionist message to the American people – as the political pundits, to their horror, will soon discover.


BRAYING DONKEYS
Any ordinary politician would be crawling on his belly through the mud, backtracking, and begging for forgiveness. Buchanan was not only unrepentant, but actually went on the offensive over the weekend, on every talk show and newscast, attacking both parties, "especially the Republicans," as "the braying donkeys of interventionism." We are headed, he said, for World War III unless the people wake up to the questions posed in his book: the U.S., he said, should apologize for "double-crossing" the Russians and going ahead with NATO expansion, a clearly provocative act that could restart the Cold War, unleash Russian nationalism, and lead to a military confrontation with Moscow. "We are repeating the errors that led to World War II," he warned, "and for heaven's sake, stop it before we wind up starting World War III."

WHAT THEY AREN'T SAYING
This is Buchanan's real sin, opposing the drive to war – not any of the made-up charges of "anti-Semitism" and the spurious comparisons to Father Coughlin, the pro-FDR "radio priest" whose bigotry was his undoing. The charges of "homophobia" and "xenophobia" and all the other phobias that supposedly bedevil Pat are not what this debate is really about. These accusations are nothing new, they are merely the same old recycled and already discredited smears of two presidential campaigns ago. We are, after all, talking about a book here, not some random off-the-cuff remark deemed offensive by the politically correct. If you want to know what the elites are really all riled up about, then listen to what they are not saying.

FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
One thing they are not saying is what is actually in the book – which leads many to believe that its harshest critics have not even read A Republic, Not an Empire. Don't you believe it. Not only have they read it, they have pored over every line, and their natural reaction is fear and loathing – fear that Americans, especially conservatives in an isolationist mood, will wake up to the war danger, and loathing of a man who dares speak truth to power.

FAKE "NEWS" FROM SALON
Yes, they have read it, but are careful not to quote from it, except in very brief and selective passages, fragments of sentences torn out of context. Here, for example, is what passes for a "news" report from Salon's Washington correspondent,

"The flap began with the release of Buchanan's latest isolationist screed, A Republic, Not an Empire, in which the on-again, off-again host of CNN's Crossfire asserts that Hitler and the Nazis posed no threat to the United States, and thus the US had no business interfering in his plans to conquer Europe – the slaughter of 12 million innocents, including 6 million Jews, notwithstanding."

THE FACTS
This summary does not contain a single quote because the author, the prolifically shameless Jake Tapper, is simply making it up as he goes along. In the vapid world of Gen-Ex Journalism, the assumption is that no one cares enough to check. But those old-fashioned fuddy-duddies who insist on accuracy will note that, in an important sense, Buchanan takes precisely the opposite stance imputed to him by Tapper: on page 266 of A Republic, Not an Empire, Buchanan avers that war with the West could have been averted in time for the West to prepare:

"Had Britain not given the guarantee to Poland, Hitler would almost surely have delivered the first blow to Stalin's Russia. Britain and France would have had additional years to build up their forces."

DOES TRUTH MATTER?
As the German National Socialists and the Russian Communists engaged in a fight to the death on the Eastern front, the victims of the Holocaust in Belgium, Holland, France, etc., would have been saved. Anne Frank might be alive today. This is Buchanan's thesis in the chapters dealing with World War II, which the pundits have focused on to the exclusion of all else. Throughout these chapters, the author's horror and disgust at the great crime of the Holocaust is apparent, indeed the possibility that Western nonintervention could have in large part prevented that catastrophe is what appears to motivate much of his critique. This naturally matters not one whit to Tapper and the liberal-neocon "Get Buchanan" alliance.

A CURIOUS QUOTATION
When Tapper finally does get around to quoting the book, however, he manages to reveal his complete dishonesty as well as his own rather embarrassing ignorance of history, to wit:

"'Hitler's real ambitions lay in carving out an empire in the east,' Buchanan writes. 'He had given up the idea of global empire ... Hitler saw the world divided into four spheres: Great Britain holding its empire; Japan, dominant in East Asia; Germany, master of Europe; and America, mistress of the Western Hemisphere.' Thus, he argues, the US should have allowed Hitler to conquer Poland and Czechoslovakia, since he could have served a greater good for the US by balancing the power of Stalin's USSR."

HISTORY 101
To begin with, the idea that the US was ever going to go to war with Germany over the fate of Poland or Czechoslovakia is a figment of Tapper's perfervid but grievously uninformed imagination. As the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudentenland and finally Poland fell before the German blitzkrieg, FDR was pledging "again and again and again," as he put it, "that I am not going to send our boys off to war." The US did not declare war against Germany and Italy even after Pearl Harbor, and FDR's war message to Congress in the wake of the Japanese attack did not even mention Germany. So much for Jake Tapper, historian. Now, we move on to Jake Tapper, dissembler . . .

THE CUT & PASTE SCHOOL OF SMEARMONGERING
What is really wrong with the passage quoted above, however, is not really so much the bizarre ignorance of history – bizarre in someone with the impressive title of "Washington correspondent" for one of the most self-important and little-read magazines on the Internet – but the shameless way in which Tapper falsifies the quote from A Republic, Not an Empire. For the part quoted before the ellipses appears nowhere near the rest of the quotation after the ellipses. Tapper has simply cut and pasted the two together, and the effect is to imply that Buchanan thinks we ought to have handed over Europe and the Soviet Union to Hitler – in the belief that it would "balance the power of Stalin's Russia," as Tapper describes it. But Buchanan says no such thing. Indeed, he says the complete opposite: that Hitler's dream of world domination would have been foiled far sooner and the Nazi regime ended by Hitlerian hubris. Buchanan approvingly quotes Harry Truman's view that US policy should be to allow the two totalitarian regimes to destroy each other. Elsewhere (p. 266) he makes the point that the exhausted Germans, after taking on the Soviets, would be in no condition to turn Westward, and would in any case be vulnerable to a formidable Allied counterattack.

THE TAPPER-IZATION OF A REPUBLIC, NOT AN EMPIRE
The Tapper-ized quotation from Buchanan's book gives the deliberate impression that Buchanan is a kind of Vichy Republican who would have welcomed the Germans as they marched down the boulevardes of Paris. As is so often the case in Tapper's journalism, the truth is precisely the opposite: indeed the whole thesis of the chapters on World War II is that Hitler was following the familiar German foreign policy of Drang nach Osten, the "drive to the East," and would have struck first at Eurasia and not Western Europe.

JOHN McCAIN, DARLING OF THE LIBERAL MEDIA
Tapper spends most of his piece pumping the ignorant and opportunistic accusations of presidential aspirant Senator John McCain, who has become the Anti-Buchanan and the preferred instrument of the media lynch mob. Liberals love him for his warmongering during the Kosovo war – he could hardly wait to bring in the ground troops and take Belgrade, if you remember. Liberals particularly like his support of silencing organizations such as the National Right to Life Committee and independent citizens groups through draconian (and completely phony) campaign finance "reform" that violates the First Amendment rights of ordinary citizens.

A SLEAZY CHARGE
And with their newfound enthusiasm for militarism, liberals exult in the prospect of a McCain-Buchanan slugfest, in which the "war hero" takes on the dreaded "isolationist." Tapper touts McCain as coming from "a line of Navy royalty," chronicles the military career of the McCain clan, and reiterates the story of McCain's experience at the infamous Hanoi Hilton, a POW camp. He writes: "Buchanan, conversely, a legendary teenage brawler who was arrested for fighting while at Georgetown University, sought and received a medical deferment for rheumatoid arthritis during the Vietnam war." But so what? While Tapper may think that a world where Buchanan was drafted and never lived to write books and run for office would be a better world, I beg to differ.

WAR HERO?
And as for McCain's much-touted status as a "war hero," why hasn't the media researched that as carefully as they've combed the complete works of Patrick J. Buchanan? If they did, they would find the following snippet from the US News and World Report of May 14, 1973, in which McCain described his experience as follows:

"I think it was on the fourth day [after being shot down] that two guards came in, instead of one. One of them pulled back the blanket to show the other guard my injury. I looked at my knee. It was about the size of a football . . . when I saw it, I said to the guard, 'O.K., get the officer' . . . an officer came in after a few minutes. It was the man that we came to know very well as 'The Bug.' He was a psychotic torturer, one of the worst fiends that we had to deal with. I said, 'O.K., I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital.'"

MOVE OVER, JANE FONDA
The last time I looked, giving information to the enemy was not a qualification for war hero status. And what about the broadcast statements purportedly made by McCain admitting to bombing civilian targets and assuring his audience he was being treated well by his North Vietnamese captors? A Washington Post story [June 5, 1969] "Reds Say PW Songbird Is Pilot Son of Admiral" reported that:

"Hanoi has aired a broadcast in which the pilot son of United States Commander in the Pacific, Adm. John McCain, purportedly admits to having bombed civilian targets in North Vietnam and praises medical treatment he has received since being taken prisoner. The English-Language broadcast beamed at South Vietnam was one of a series using American prisoners. It was in response to a plea by Defense Secretary Melvin S. Laird, May 19, that North Vietnam treat prisoners according to the humanitarian standards set forth by the Geneva Convention."

Move over, Jane Fonda, and give the future Senator and presidential candidate that microphone. So much for the myth of the War Hero versus the Cowardly Isolationist.

BLOVIATIONS
Incredibly, Tapper accuses Buchanan of "playing the victim" in his response to the terrific storm of protest set off by his book. Pat a victim? In spite of the virtually unprecedented media pile-on, Tapper isn't buying it: "Pat Buchanan Wednesday decided to play victim" in demanding "an apology from the Vietnam war hero." But Buchanan was responding to a statement by McCain, in which the war hero bloviated on about how "Defeating Hitler's Germany and Tojo's Japan was a very noble cause. And I wouldn't want any Republican to ever think otherwise – or any American for that matter."

VULTURES IN SEARCH OF A MEAL
As if Buchanan thought otherwise! It is really pointless to underscore the passages in A Republic, Not an Empire in which the author declares that, "whether or not it had been America's war before December 7, it was our war now. In Yeat's line, 'All changed, changed utterly.'" (p. 294) Does anyone really believe that Jake Tapper, or McCain, or the legions of media vultures exulting at the prospect of picking at Pat's bones, care about the truth?

DOES McCAIN HAVE NO SHAME?
McCain owes Pat more than an apology. Out of sheer shame and what should be, in any decent man, an almost unbearable chagrin, McCain should drop out of the presidential race. Indeed he would be doing us – and himself – a real favor if he dropped out of politics altogether – before journalists in search of a story begin to uncover the truth about the "war hero" status of the warmongering McCain. But the pomposity and self-importance inherent in the character of most politicians is, in McCain, amplified to the nth degree, and so such an honorable course is entirely ruled out in his case.

McCAIN'S MUTINY
What the Hate Buchanan crowd loved about McCain's statement on Buchanan was precisely its overblown pomposity and moral posturing. This, combined with the aura of military prowess, gave his peroration just the right tone of hysterical self-righteousness, to wit:

"At a time when Americans are growing increasingly cynical about public service and increasingly disillusioned about their political leaders, I was disappointed to see my fellow Republicans' reaction to recent comments and writings by Pat Buchanan concerning our nation's role in defeating Nazi Germany. By continuing to appease Buchanan, several of our candidates appear to have put politics ahead of our party's principles."

HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?
And so Buchanan, like Hitler, is not to be "appeased." Having written a book raising the question of whether Hitler could have been defeated without direct US military intervention, Buchanan is now equated with Hitler by a third-rate politician on the make. Are we to be spared nothing? Is there no outrage, no matter how low and demagogic, that McCain and Tapper and their Bushian allies will not stoop to in their campaign to destroy Buchanan? The answer to this question appears to be an emphatic no.

LITMUS TEST
"There is no place in the Republican party," declared the bombastic McCain, for Buchanan and anyone who questions the Official History as laid down by the court historians. One can only wonder what other litmus tests for GOP membership will be unilaterally declared by McCain and his Thought Police: must all Republicans take a similarly enthusiastic view of World War I and rejoice in the terms of the Treaty of Versailles? And what about the Spanish-American war, that fatal step in which we first donned the imperial purple? And, of course, there is always Vietnam – a war that most Americans think we should never have allowed ourselves to get dragged into. Are all these people to be excluded from McCain's "militarists only" GOP? That is going to be a very exclusive club, which could be comfortably housed under a very small tent. But notice how the "big tent" theory, so often touted by GOP "moderates," goes completely out the window when it comes to Buchanan. Now why, do you suppose, is that?

NOVAK'S NAUSEA
Bob Novak said it best on CNN's Capital Gang this weekend: "The assault on [Buchanan] by the media, by members of the media, some of whom are reporters, not even commentators, and then Senator McCain with the temerity to read him out of the party and then accuse George Bush for not reading him out, I think it all makes me a little ill."

BACKLASH
Yes, ill – but not discouraged. Far from it. For the gap between what Buchanan wrote in A Republic, Not an Empire, and what they are saying about it, is so great that any thinking person can discern it by simply reading it. In their zeal to obscure the real message of the book, the smear artists and character assassins are in danger of creating a backlash in precisely those quarters – the Reform Party and other dissident sectors of American society – where Buchanan is likely to find his base of support. Conservatives are used to confronting and challenging the lies of the media. When they find out that the liberals are at it again (with more than a little help from their neoconservative friends), then stand back – and watch out. Bereft of its conservative base, the GOP will wither on the vine, the captive plaything of political hacks and northeastern Rockefeller Republicans. Buchanan, if he leaves the GOP, will take the American Right with him – and that is what this fight is really all about, at least from Buchanan's perspective.

BUCHANAN ANSWERS CRITICS

Friends,
    Buchanan goes over the British guarantee to Poland and whether Germany posed a strategic threat to the US in 1940. As I pointed out in my lengthy piece, the British guarantee obviously did not help out Poland. And there doesn't seem any way that Germany could have threatened the US in the early 1940s. All of this, however, does prove some long term predictions? And this seems to be on the minds of many critics who don't seem to have read what Buchanan actually wrote. A victorious Germany could have been a long term threat to the US, though not necessarily more dangerous than the Soviet Union. And as C.S. Lewis pointed out in "Screwtape Letters," war does enable people to engage in sacrificial activities, repent of sins, and turn to God. Solzhenitzsyn, for example, said that he would not have turned to God had he not been thrown in the Gulag. Maybe World War II increased the population in Heaven from what it would have otherwise been.
Steve Sniegoski
AN UNNECESSARY WAR?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
October 11, 1999
The Washington Post
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


In A Republic, Not An Empire, I take many controversial stands: Indicting Jefferson for naval disarmament, defending Polk's war with Mexico, decrying U.S. annexation of the Philippines, and supporting Harding's Washington naval treaty.
But all has been trampled under by the hysterical reaction to two assertions: That Britain's war guarantee to Poland was a monumental blunder, and that after the Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain in 1940, Germany posed no strategic threat to the U.S.A.

Why was Britain's war guarantee flawed? Because Britain had neither the will nor power to honor it. In 1939, only one nation could save Poland from Hitler: Russia. "Without Russia," declared Lloyd George, "our [Polish] guarantees are the most reckless commitment any country has ever entered into. I say more, they are demented."

By threatening war for Poland, Britain impelled Hitler to cut his deal with Stalin. Result: Annihilation of Poland, Stalin's serial rape of Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as Hitler swallowed Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, and France.

By mid-1940 Hitler controlled Western Europe, Stalin Eastern Europe; and the British had been routed at Dunkirk and ensnared in a war that would cost 400,000 dead and bring down the empire.

Yet, Poland was not saved! What, then, did the war guarantee accomplish? And why would it have been immoral for Britain to re-direct Hitler's attack away from the West, toward Stalin's slave empire, and let the monsters eat each other up as Harry Truman urged?

Had Britain not declared war, Hitler would have attacked an unprepared Stalin in 1940. The result might well have been the liberation of the Gulag and its 12 million souls, the eradication of Bolshevism in Russia and China, no Cold War, no Korea, and no Vietnam. Instead of six years of World War II bloodletting, we may have seen six months of a Hitler-Stalin war, ending with one dead and the other crippled.

But, comes the cry, Hitler sought "world domination." After Russia he would have seized Western Europe, Britain, and launched his final attack on us. But, would he? According to historian A. J. P. Taylor, "Eastern expansion was the primary purpose of Hitler's policy, if not the only one." To Labor Party statesman Roy Denman, "The fear that after Poland Hitler would have attacked Britain was an illusion....Britain was dragged into an unnecessary war."

On August 11, 1939, Hitler had railed to the Danzig League of Nations commissioner: "Everything I undertake is directed against Russia. If the West is too stupid and too blind to comprehend that, I will be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians, to smash the West, and then after its defeat, to turn against the Soviet Union…"

This, writes Henry A. Kissinger, "was certainly an accurate statement of Hitler's priorities: from Great Britain, he wanted non-interference in Continental affairs, and from the Soviet Union, he wanted Lebensraum, or living space. It was a measure of Stalin's achievement that he was about to reverse Hitler's priorities..."

Yes, and an equal measure of Britain's blunder.

Challenging my contention that the U.S. faced no strategic threat after 1940, critics cite Nazi plans for an "Amerika-Bomber." Berlin, they say, had "embarked on a campaign to obtain bases in Africa and the Canary Islands as part of what... foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop called a 'huge program...of an anti-American character.'"

But this is comic-book history. Not only did the Royal Air Force achieve superiority in 1940, the Royal Navy had never lost it, as the French learned, when Churchill ordered his ships to sink the French fleet at Mers el-Kebir in mid-1940, to keep it out of Hitler's hands.

In November, 1940, the Italian fleet was smashed at Taranto. "By this single stroke," exulted Churchill, "the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean was decisively altered." In early '41 Hitler's mighty surface raider, Bismarck, was sunk on its maiden voyage; the Graf Spee had been scuttled off Montevideo in 1939.

By Pearl Harbor, Hitler was overextended and blocked at the Channel and Atlantic by the Royal Air Force and Navy, and at Moscow and Leningrad by the Red Army. By 1942, he was finished in Africa.

The idea that Hitler, with no surface navy or fleet of transport ships, no landing craft or seamen who had even served on a carrier, could construct in Africa or the Canary Islands ships to threaten the U,S., on the other side of an ocean the U.S. and British navies had ruled since Trafalgar is a proposition too absurd to require rebuttal.

Mr. Buchanan, author of A REPUBLIC, NOT AN EMPIRE is a candidate for the Republican nomination for President.