On foreign policy, the Ohio senator was able to harmonize competing impulses — the same impulses driving debate today.
On foreign policy, the Ohio senator was able to harmonize competing impulses — the same impulses driving debate today.
S eventy years ago today, Ohio senator Robert Taft died. The paradigmatic conservative Republican, Taft started out as a lawyer and went on to an epic career in public service. Unable to join the Army in World War I, he went to work for the Food and Drug Administration and then as legal adviser for Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration, distributing food in post-war Europe. He campaigned for Hoover in the 1920 GOP primary; that year, Taft was elected to the Ohio house of representatives, and ten years later to the Ohio senate. His early political career was distinguished for fighting the Ku Klux Klan and opposing prohibition. In 1939, he was elected to the U.S. Senate and served three terms. The culmination of his legislative career was the Taft-Harley Labor Relations Act, which banned “closed shops” and imposed 80-day cooling-off periods if a strike threatened the national interest. He established himself as the leading spokesman for the conservative faction of the Republican Party. In his unsuccessful runs for the GOP presidential nomination, he lost to Wendell Willkie in 1940 and Thomas E. Dewey in 1948.
He went into the Republican convention in 1952 leading Dwight D. Eisenhower in delegates, but the imperative to stop conservatism was just as strong as in the previous contests, and the other factions combined to defeat him. Still, his final campaign pointed to a more conservative future. Although he was an anti-racist, he believed a conservative message could begin pulling southern states away from the Democratic coalition. In 1968, Richard Nixon would prove the theory correct, winning Tennessee and the Carolinas, while segregationist George Wallace took the Deep South.
What’s striking about Robert Taft when one looks back at his political career is the fundamental consistency between his conservatism and the one we have today — most notably, how it is torn between competing impulses in foreign policy. Taft arrived in the U.S. Senate committed, like the majority of Americans, to not joining the war engulfing Europe. Like that majority, he changed after the Pearl Harbor attack.
Taft laid out his views in a 1951 book, A Foreign Policy for Americans, which criticized the drift of Democratic foreign policy since America’s entry into World War II. Taft betrays no excitement about the birth of any “American-led post-war liberal order” — a cliché heard often today. That’s understandable, given his vantage point: We can look backward knowing that we won the Cold War, but what Taft saw was the competition with the Soviets just beginning and America on the back foot. Like many Republicans, he was alarmed that the Marxist world order led by Joseph Stalin had gone from tyrannizing 150 million souls in 1941 to nearly 800 million by the time he was writing.
In the book, Taft rails against former vice president Henry Wallace for calling it “criminal” to suggest that the aims of the Soviet Union and the United States were irreconcilable. He denounces the decisions that prevented General George Patton from arriving in Prague before the Soviets and the U.S. army from taking Berlin before Moscow did.
Taft begins with an allegiance to what he calls America’s “traditional” policy of peace and nonintervention, building on George Washington’s farewell address. “War should never be undertaken or seriously risked except to protect American liberty,” he writes. Although he held out some hope for multinational organizations aimed at fostering peace, Taft viewed the United Nations as fatally flawed in its construction.
Taft holds up America as an exemplar nation, not as an international charity. “We can take the leadership in proclaiming the doctrines of liberty and justice,” he wrote, “and in impressing on the world that only through liberty and law and justice, and not through socialism or communism, can the world hope to obtain the standards which we have attained in the United States.”
And then in a line that could have been written 60 or 70 years later, he accuses Democrats of being ashamed of America’s position and success: “Our leaders can at least stop apologizing for the American system, as they have been apologizing for the past fifteen years.”
But Taft viewed the Cold War as a kind of state of exception from America’s more modest foreign policy. On the one hand, he was against committing, through NATO, to fight another land war in Europe. But he counseled a military buildup, especially of the Air Force, and, as a temporary policy, extending economic and military aid to those countries that could productively use it to stop the spread of Soviet-led communism. And yet, this buildup had to be limited as well, lest it impinge on America’s political and economic liberty, the very things that give it prosperity enough to be a world power. Even in 1951, Taft complained that the level of economic and military assistance to Western European nations whose economies had recovered from the war was excessive, and that Europe needed to pull its own weight.
Taft also was committed to defending Formosa (Taiwan) from communist aggression and castigated Democrats in the State Department for waffling on what was then an easy call. The nationalist government in Taiwan was a fresh ally, and China had very little prospect of taking the island from a United States even modestly committed to defending it. In a line that prefigures many Republican complaints today about U.S. priorities, Taft was desperate for a pivot to Asia: “My quarrel is with those who wish to go all-out in Europe, even beyond our capacity,” he wrote, “and who at the same time refuse to apply our general program and strategy to the Far East.” The line connecting Taft then to Republican foreign-policy experts like Elbridge Colby today is obvious.
Taft, like Republicans today, was torn between his competing impulses. On the one hand, he wanted America to be the vindicator only of her own liberty. He truly believed that war — both in itself and in the excessive preparation for it — was injurious to freedom at home. On the other, when the threat was communist in nature, he saw how the liberty of other nations related to our own. The impulses that animated Taft’s A Foreign Policy for Americans over 70 years ago drive different factions of Republicans today. His great gift was to harmonize them. Courage and moral clarity are perfected by prudence.