The Inspiring Legacy of Anti-War Conservatism
America Firsters have long challenged U.S. interventionism in the Middle East and questioned the alliance with Israel.
Amid continued American entanglements in the Middle East, neoconservative commentators seek to shore up the tired status quo by delegitimizing foreign policy dissent. Nowhere is this more evident than on the ever-radioactive issue of the U.S. relationship with Israel. Fearing an above-board debate, these gatekeepers have marshaled obscurantist phrases such as “Code Pink Republicans,” a guilt-by-association tactic meant to negatively polarize the conservative base in favor of staying the course on U.S.-Israeli relations. Add to the mix old classics like the “isolationist” slur and the conspiracist obsession with the “Soros-Koch” complex, and neoconservative hawks are working overtime to stigmatize long-standing and legitimate bodies of conservative foreign policy critique.
Despite the rhetoric of modern neoconservatives, there is a long history of conservative skepticism about cheek-by-jowl U.S.-Israel relations. Throughout the early Cold War, conservatives in Congress—including Republicans—opposed American entanglements in the Middle East, drawing on an earlier noninterventionist consensus that valued restraint overseas and fiscal prudence at home. Conservative Republicans presented a vocal bloc of opposition to the Eisenhower Doctrine, which expanded American influence in the Middle East, ostensibly to counter Soviet influence and fill the vacuum left by the ignominious departure of the European colonial powers. One such dissenter was Iowan Representative H.R. Gross, one of the most fiscally conservative congressional members in history.
Gross was among the 28 mostly conservative House Republicans who opposed the doctrine and its legislative iteration, House Joint Resolution 117. As an inheritor of the America First tradition, Gross believed that the measure afforded the president undue unilateral authority to issue foreign assistance and wage war without congressional authorization or oversight. Contrary to consensus opinion, he further argued that communism was not the source of instability in the Middle East, the real culprit being the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Excoriating the “hypocrisy of the internationalists” in the United States, Gross highlighted the “934,000 Arab refugees who were chased out of Palestine when the state of Israel was carved out in the Middle East.” Gross and his fellow dissenters resisted the prevailing Cold War orthodoxies, including the incremental involvement in a new front in the Cold War.
Dissenting Republicans voiced similar critiques during the American response to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Citing concerns over expanding executive authority, burdens to the taxpayer, and the threat of American entry into the conflict, 28 House Republicans (joined by 36 House Democrats) opposed House Resolution 11108, a bill that provided Israel with over $2 billion in security assistance in the wake of that war. Gross, again, was among those leading the dissent. On the House floor, he attacked President Nixon for his unilateral actions during the height of the crisis and the bill itself for affording the president sole authority to turn loans into grants. He invoked the costs of the Vietnam War and warned that the upcoming bill was another example of “a spineless, irresponsible Congress [that] delegates its powers to a President.” Gross’s stand alongside 27 Republican colleagues demonstrated that it was far from impossible for conservatives to take a principled stand in defiance of a Republican president and in support of nonintervention in the Middle East.
Freshman Congressman Steven D. Symms joined the veteran Gross in opposing the measure and the deepening involvement in the Middle East. During the height of the crisis, Symms asserted that the “United States has no more business interfering in Middle Eastern policy than we had entering Vietnamese politics 12 years ago.” As chairman of the National Taxpayers Union, Symms commissioned a full-page newspaper ad challenging the bill on fiscal, moral, and strategic grounds. With Vietnam fresh in American memory, the ad asserted that the U.S. had “already paid grave costs in terms of American lives and American economic stability because of our involvement in other people’s wars” and added that “[w]e cannot afford more lives or the inevitable further deterioration of our economy which involvement in the Mideast conflict could bring.”
These principled strains of conservative opposition to U.S.-Israeli relations and hawkish Middle Eastern policy generally, despite their long pedigree, were snuffed out by the political turmoil of the mid-1970s. While Symms enjoyed a long, if troubled, congressional career, half of the Republican opponents of American involvement in the Yom Kippur War were ousted in the Watergate-fueled wipeout of the 1974 midterms or declined to seek reelection. Into this vacuum flowed the subsequent “New Right”. This nascent political movement held a tight line on U.S. support to Israel and obscured these earlier strains of conservative dissent.
In the wake of the Global War on Terror, the insights of individuals like Gross and Symms and the noninterventionist tradition they drew upon have regained traction, including within the base of the Republican Party. Conservative opinion, particularly among young people, is changing, reverting to earlier norms of dynamism and debate. Disillusioned by direct military intervention and regime changes by proxy, younger Americans, including conservatives, have soured on the stale logic of existing American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.
On U.S.-Israeli relations specifically, younger conservatives, like their progressive peers, are less supportive of Israel. In addition to general critiques about bilateral relations and Israel’s conduct of their war in Gaza, noninterventionist conservatives increasingly point to Benjamin Netanyahu’s advocacy for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a war that looms large in the conservative consciousness. As the U.S. flirts with another major Middle Eastern war, this time against Iran, the veterans of the last one remember when Netanyahu boldly asserted that it would “have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” For a generation of Iraq War veterans who skew conservative, such failed predictions are not forgotten, especially considering Netanyahu’s latest push for war with yet another Israeli adversary.
It is in this landscape of shifting opinion that an embattled neoconservative establishment seeks to dismiss critiques as meritless or un-American. These gatekeepers go so far as to call conservative opposition “baseless” and “out of step with the president’s ‘America First’-style realism,” turning America First’s history of opposing foreign entanglements and unilateral executive authority on its head.
The growing conservative critique of unquestioning U.S. support for Israel and continued entanglement in the Middle East reflects a broader rejection of neoconservative orthodoxy, echoing the principled stands of past dissenters. Given the track record of the neocons, it would be wise to ignore their latest attempts at gatekeeping and listen to the voices of restraint.
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