Just Interests
Just Interests
A FreeConversation on foreign policy and national defense
Among the 259 signatories to the Freedom Conservatism statement are leaders, activists, scholars, and public intellectuals with a range of views on policy matters.
FreeCons share a devotion to free speech, free enterprise, free trade, fiscal responsibility, equality under the law, federalism, and the essential role of civil society — including families, religious institutions, and civic associations — in cultivating virtue and fostering true self-government.
That doesn’t keep us from disagreeing about how best to apply these principles to specific issues or situations.
Take foreign policy, for example. Here’s the relevant section of the FreeCon statement:
“American foreign policy must be judged by one criterion above all: its service to the just interests of the United States. Americans are safest and freest in a peaceful world, led by the United States, in which other nations uphold individual liberty and the sovereignty of their neighbors.”
How do signatories apply these principles to America’s current foreign-policy challenges? Today, we offer two contrasting views on the subject in a new feature we’re calling FreeConversation.
Realism, Restraint, and Freedom Conservatism
By John Byrnes
I am a veteran of three conflicts—Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I spent two weeks after September 11, 2001, at Ground Zero with the National Guard. I’ve seen bloodshed, death, and destruction firsthand.
In 2003, while studying international relations at CUNY, I mobilized to Iraq. The September 11 attacks convinced me that our interventions there and in Afghanistan were “realist” policies needed to keep America safe. American soldiers want to believe our cause is just.
Since high school, my beliefs in liberty, limited and defined roles for national government, and aggressive foreign policy, especially towards countries like the USSR, defined my conservatism.
War, however, changes you, mentally, physically, and even intellectually.
Revisiting realism in 2018, I realized foreign interventions, meant to ensure American security by “spreading democracy” or “securing stability,” were flawed. The point hit home for me that year when my niece graduated high school, suddenly eligible to fight in a war that started when she was an infant.
My idea of realism had turned into a restrained realism, one that I believe still fits my own conservatism.
Restraint’s critics, interventionists and neoconservatives derogate “restraint” as “isolationism.” That is just not true.
Pundits and the foreign policy establishment recently commemorated NATO’s 75th anniversary and are still considering what the future may hold for the alliance. It’s as good a time as ever to share what a foreign policy of realism and restraint would look like in practice.
To restrainers, military intervention should be a last resort, not a handy tool. Restrainers pursue trade and diplomacy, and we believe in maintaining a powerful U.S. military capable of defeating rivals and securing the global commons. These are beliefs most often espoused by libertarians and national conservatives.
With these beliefs in mind, I signed the 2023 Freedom Conservative letter. Its “strong central government, dedicated to securing liberty,” truly describes my conservatism, the sweet space between libertarianism and hard conservatism I sought.
As I scrutinized the paragraph on foreign policy, I realized that it could fit into the restraint paradigm:
“The shining city on a hill. American foreign policy must be judged by one criterion above all: its service to the just interests of the United States. Americans are safest and freest in a peaceful world, led by the United States, in which other nations uphold individual liberty and the sovereignty of their neighbors.”
Core principles of restraint include acting as an example, prioritizing US interests, peace, liberty, and respect for sovereignty. Restrainers mainly question “how” America should lead, preferring leadership that sets an example in domestic and foreign conduct.
President Ronald Reagan described his vision of America as a shining city on a hill: “She’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness towards home.” This vision is magnified, not diminished, when America practices restraint.
Per Machiavelli, it is impossible for nation states to follow simple moral idealism while interacting with other states. Thus, America must sometimes exercise raw power. Restraint reminds us that when we do, our example as a shining leader can dim, at least a little. Therefore, we should be scrupulously cautious in choosing to exercise such power.
Convincing other nations that we are the shining city is easier if we live our values.
I’ve witnessed the damage of military intervention. I’ve been fired upon, and fired back, even while delivering humanitarian relief. I’ve seen the toll on American soldiers, treated the wounded, and carried the dead. I’ve lost comrades to the suicide epidemic raging among global war on terror veterans. While more than 7000 Americans have died in combat and supporting operations since 2001, over 30,000 post-9/11 veterans have killed themselves.
The damage doesn’t end there. James Madison noted: “Of all the evils to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops every other. War is the patent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes, are the known instruments for bringing the many under the dominion of the few.”
Today, conservatives recognize debt, taxes, and governmental overreach as evils. War not so much.
Permanent war persisted from 2001 through 2021. Residual engagements, leftover from our global war on terror, leave young American service members at risk. The debt created by our overseas interventions is enormous. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost an estimated $8 trillion, nearly a quarter of our national debt. We are still spending both blood and treasure in distant lands with no impact on real American security interests.
This year in Jordan, three American soldiers were killed in one of dozens of weekly drone, rocket, and mortar attacks on our over-deployed, over-dispersed troops in the Middle East. These were US Army reservists called to active duty to support a mission no one has explained to the US public.
Here lies a central problem with interventionism: more than two decades of war have stripped the military’s ability to sustain its global footprint without depending on its reserves.
The Pentagon depends on young part-time soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen to support our interventions. Why? Because they can’t convince Americans to expand the military and thus spending, and they cannot convince enough young Americans to serve; our recruiting crisis is real. Yet the foreign policy establishment insists every deployment prevents an existential threat. So, they call on police, firefighters, students, and Americans who signed up to defend our country as the force of last resort, disrupting and risking their lives.
This is not the path to liberty.
As a restrainer and Freedom Conservative, I see alignment and common values. Most right leaning restrainers are libertarians or national conservatives. Freedom Conservatives are emerging as restrainers as well. Not all Freedom Conservatives will accept restraint, nor will all restrainers choose Freedom Conservatism. But there is natural overlap.
John Byrnes is strategic director of Concerned Veterans for America and a combat veteran. This piece was originally published in The American Conservative. Follow him on X: @JohnByrnes13
Deterrence, Alliance, and Freedom Conservatism
Disagreements about aims, scope, and methods of US foreign policy are as old as the nation itself. In 1793, President Washington decided to stay out of a war between France and other European nations, arguing that America’s “duty and interest” requires a “conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent powers.”
Less than a decade later, the United States found itself at war — off the coast of North Africa no less. Even advocates of restraint, not least Thomas Jefferson, saw the threat of Barbary pirates to US commercial interests as significant enough to justify a naval build-up and an intervention in a faraway land.
Today, as the United States faces unprecedented polarization, its basic foreign policy commitments are being questioned again.
For far too long, US foreign policy has been overstretched; a common argument goes, delivering little to Americans and serving as a source of international instability. Washington needs to “restrain” itself: focus on our national interests instead of using our military might in the pursuit of lofty but elusive goals, such as promoting democracy and upholding a “liberal international order.”
The Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles, which I was happy to co-sign, seems to be making a nod in the same direction by insisting that our “foreign policy must be judged by one criterion above all: its service to the just interests of the United States.”
However, contrary to a naïve version of ‘realism,” the idea of national interest is not some uncomplicated, freestanding criterion that easily separates the chaff from the wheat of US foreign policy.
As most international theorists recognize, there is a massive difference between a narrow, “irreducible,” understanding of national interest — quite literally limited to the nation’s physical survival, preservation of its system of government, and economic subsistence — and its broader vision, which does not exist outside of political deliberation.
No country on earth limits its foreign and defense policy to the pursuit of its “irreducible” interests. For the United States, doing so would mean an abandonment of all alliances and a complete indifference to essentially any depravity happening outside of our borders.
Given America’s size and the protection afforded by the two oceans, it is hard to imagine that we would ever have a reason to act in the international realm — whether to defend our allies or enforce international norms.
A broader understanding of national interest, which informs foreign policy choices in the real world, presents a more complicated picture. Obviously, there is no objective or scientific way to aggregate the often-conflicting preferences and interests of 342 million Americans. Insofar as our national interest exists, it involves complicated trade-offs between different material interests and deeply held beliefs — including a sense of justice, solidarity, and generosity.
As a result, restraining US foreign policy to the pursuit of our “national interest” is not a silver bullet that would somehow downsize US foreign policy to its limited role supposedly intended by its founders.
There is nothing inherent in the concept that prevents US policymakers from pursuing a robustly internationalist approach, in which the United States does pay attention to the upholding of international norms, basic human rights, or democracy by countries around the world.
Indeed, the manifesto notes, “Americans are safest and freest in a peaceful world, led by the United States, in which other nations uphold individual liberty and the sovereignty of their neighbors.” That, of course, is an empirical, falsifiable claim — but it is also one that is in line with an overwhelming body of evidence supporting the “democratic peace” hypothesis and with the experience of the post-1945 international system, which has reduced conflict and brought unprecedented levels of prosperity to countries around the world, including the United States.
Specifics matter and the United States makes mistakes. Sometimes, it acts when it shouldn’t. Yet, at other times, it doesn’t act when it should.
However, the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan do not erase the successes of “nation-building” in West Germany, Japan, or Korea. Similarly, such failures tell us little about the value of US-led alliances and tripwires that have brought lasting peace, freedom, and prosperity to large swathes of the world — most importantly NATO and our partnerships with Israel, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
More importantly, in 2024, the real danger no longer lies with America’s hubris and overreach. A more realistic threat is that our overcorrection to past sins of commission, underway since the Obama presidency, will erode the strength of our commitments, including military ones, that once deterred our adversaries from bad behavior.
From the Iran- and Russia-sponsored horrors in Aleppo, through Bucha, Irpin, and Kfar Aza, to the South China Sea, the world is seeing a cumulative failure of Western and US deterrence. In the Red Sea, Iran-backed Houthi pirates have successfully disrupted international shipping and, in an eerie echo of the Barbary Wars, the United States had to dispatch a naval coalition last year to restore freedom of navigation.
A diplomacy unbacked by military might, as practiced frequently by Democratic administrations, is not enough to reverse the current slide to international anarchy. Peace through strength does not come without a price tag, however, and rebuilding America’s hard power will require making different and more sustainable fiscal choices than the ones that both Democrats and Republicans have embraced in recent years.
If the intellectual core of America’s conservative movement, moreover, becomes a part of the problem rather than of the solution by shrugging off these alarming developments, it is quite possible that our irreducible, fundamental national interests will be at stake soon.
Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. Follow him: @DaliborRohac.
In the mix
In The Wall Street Journal, FreeCon signatory Jason Hayes and co-author Joshua Antonini predicted that the radical energy policies of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz could well leave his state in the dark. “While there’s no chance Mr. Walz will abandon his signature climate policy during a national campaign, no state should endanger its economy and residents by pursuing net zero.”
At RealClearMarkets, freelance writer Matt Cookson criticized Republican officeholders who’ve strayed from free-market principles in trade policy. “If the GOP continues down this road of overregulation, they will betray their conservative principles, most clearly articulated in the Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles,” Cookson wrote. “When Congress does things like pass tariffs and other taxes, it not only raises the costs of living, it makes us less free.”
At PowerLine, FreeCon signatory Steve Hayward argued that progressive bias in the mainstream media can work against the interest of the favored party. “It shields Democrats from true public opinion, and leaves them vulnerable to effective Republican attacks.”