The Limits of Pat Buchanan’s Post–Cold War Prophesying

E arlier this month, a vast crowd descended upon Washington, D.C. But unlike some such crowds, it came peacefully, and with noble intent: to stand against the antisemitism that has snaked through the world in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, and to stand for the state of Israel amid its struggles. Mostly Jewish, the crowd also welcomed allies and well-wishers. It was a heartening affirmation of the widespread support Israel rightly enjoys among the American people.

In the U.S., much of the antipathy toward Israel exists in academic and other elite circles. Overwhelmingly left-wing, the denizens of such circles have shoehorned Israel into their oppressor–oppressed intersectionality matrix, helping unleash a tide of fury against it that is difficult to disentangle from the outbreak of antisemitism it has accompanied. As Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts noted in a recent speech, international elites “spend much of their time and budgets” condemning, among others, “our Jewish brothers and sisters.” Roberts further contended that aid to Israel is of paramount importance, part of a series of issues that will set “America’s trajectory.”

In light of this commendable stance, however, there is little justification for Roberts, in this same speech, to have praised Washington, D.C., native and longtime Beltway fixture Pat Buchanan as a prescient and noble voice. Buchanan, he says, made his “mark in the world by being a thorn in the side of elites who badly deserved one.” As America’s leaders “sold out our republic’s Cold War triumph for a mess of globalist pottage,” Buchanan was there, warning against such follies as excessive American overseas intervention. (And Roberts was there as well, as a Buchanan presidential-campaign volunteer.) Ignored or even lumped in with a group of “traitors” for questioning the Iraq War, for example, Buchanan has, in Roberts’s view, only been vindicated over time.

There is some truth to this. Conservatism after the Cold War, having lost its principal overseas antagonist, the Soviet Union, endured a period of aimlessness. Causes, such as the Iraq War, that seemed to provide momentary righteous energy in this environment became litmus tests. As I have written, this “was a foolhardy judgment not only in hindsight but even in the moment.” Making a debatable foreign conflict the primary criterion of one’s conservatism ejected from the conservative movement some malicious people but also others who were well meaning and (as it turned out) perceptive. Subsequent developments tarnished those who did the casting out while seeming to vindicate those who had been sidelined. Buchanan was one such figure in the latter group.

But Pat Buchanan has had other foreign-policy views during this period. His views on Israel are especially worth recalling at this moment. In the debate leading up to and during the Gulf War, Buchanan emerged as a prominent dissenting voice. He went further than asserting that the war was not in the U.S. interest. Rather, he argued that Israel and its influence operation in the U.S. were luring it into war. “There are only two groups that are beating the drums . . . for war in the Middle East,” Buchanan said. “The Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” He criticized the Democratic Party for being the “diapered poodle of . . . the Israeli lobby.” But it wasn’t just Democrats: All of Capitol Hill is “Israeli-occupied territory.” It was “a Parliament of Whores incapable of standing up for U.S. national interests, if AIPAC is on the other end of the line.” Israel learned long ago, in his estimation, that the U.S. would even go so far as to cover up Israel’s mistakes, citing Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War. Buchanan in his objections to the Gulf War portrayed Israel as a malign force in our politics, subverting popular will through domestic interference.

His views on this matter outlasted the Gulf War. In 1999, he professed to “know the power of the Israeli lobby,” which is the “most powerful of ethnic lobbies.” In 2001, he declared that, “so long as the United States provides Israel with the weapons and money to crush intifadas, expand settlements and postpone the coming of a Palestinian state, our reputation in the Middle East is in the custody of Ariel Sharon,” then Israel’s prime minister. In 2003, he accused neoconservatives of seeking “to conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel.” In Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, he stressed that “America needs a Middle East policy made in the USA, not in Tel Aviv, or at AIPAC or AEI.” Referring to Israel’s ruling party and again to Sharon, then its prime minister, he described “a war between America and Islam” as designed to benefit “one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.” He accused his critics of harboring a “‘passionate attachment’ to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what’s good for Israel is good for America.” In 2004, he called George W. Bush’s “blind solidarity” with Sharon “among the greatest crosses we have to bear in the war on terror.”

Near the end of the George W. Bush administration, he accused “Israel and its Fifth Column in this city” of trying “to stampede us into war with Iran.” In reference to Israel’s next prime minister, Ehud Olmert, he called the U.S. “Ehud’s poodle” for its apparent willingness to do Israel’s bidding.

During the Obama and Trump administrations, Buchanan continued to evince a wariness of Israel and of U.S. warmness to it. In 2012, he claimed that Benjamin Netanyahu was trying to get “America to fight Israel’s war” against Iran by threatening to attack Iran itself if the U.S. did not provide assurances that it would destroy Iran’s nuclear capability if it ever reached that point. He commended Barack Obama for having “called Bibi’s bluff, assuming it is a bluff,” and urged him to “stand his ground.” In 2018, after Donald Trump withdrew from the Iranian nuclear deal, Buchanan wondered: “Is the foreign policy that America Firsters voted for being replaced by the Middle East agenda of Bibi and the neoconservatives?” His answer: “So it would appear.” In 2019, after Trump designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, Buchanan ran through the record of Trump’s pro-Israel policies: “Previous ‘requests’ to which Trump acceded include moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, declaring Jerusalem Israel’s eternal capital, closing the Palestinian consulate and cutting off aid, and U.S. recognition of the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967, as sovereign Israeli territory.” His conclusion: “What Bibi wants, Bibi gets.” Buchanan’s preoccupation and perspective have been consistent.

A possible reply to this is that Buchanan’s past behavior makes the conclusion that he has some particular animus against Israel untenable. One could cite the assurance of former president Richard Nixon that, during the Yom Kippur War, when he “ordered a huge airlift which Golda Meir said saved Israel,” Buchanan was “the strongest supporter within the administration” for that action. But that was a step taken during the Cold War, after the Soviets had abandoned Israel and it had become a U.S. ally against international communism. With the Soviet Union gone, Buchanan appears to have concluded that U.S. support for Israel was part and parcel of the globalist “New World Order” he condemned and that Roberts disdains.

On October 6, Intercollegiate Studies Institute president John A. Burtka IV praised Roberts for steering the Heritage Foundation toward the “non-interventionist conservative/libertarian tradition” of, among others, Pat Buchanan. But Buchanan’s foreign policy throughout the post–Cold War period has also included reflexive hostility toward Israel. To stand with the crowd that assembled on the Mall, and with most conservatives, and indeed most Americans, is, on this subject, to stand against Pat Buchanan.