There have been three issues on which debate on the right has been held in the post–Cold War years. The first is immigration. The Wall Street Journal has fitfully stood by its 1980s view that there should be an amendment to the Constitution: There shall be open borders. National Review has largely been on the other side, arguing for limited, vetted, and controlled immigration.
The second is whether free-market principles are a national or global agenda. One school has argued, with Paul Krugman, that “the economist’s case for free trade is essentially a unilateral case: A country serves its own interests by pursuing free trade regardless of what other countries may do.” Another school has held out that trade must be thought of not purely in economic terms, but in geopolitical terms. It has argued that a policy we loosely call “free trade” might in fact be conducive to the mercantile and geostrategic aims of rivals like China. It has revived the Hamiltonian wisdom that economic policy is necessary to achieve geopolitical independence and argued that in fact it does matter whether we make microchips or potato chips.
Third, and by far the most emotional of the issues that divide the Right, is foreign policy. I’ll delve into those divides in a subsequent column, but Vance has staked out his ground with those who preach “restraint” rather than those who insist on the constant expansion of America’s geopolitical commitments to other nations.
On all those issues I’m with Vance: controlled immigration, an economic strategy for America, and retaining our global position by husbanding our strength, not exercising it in paranoid fits. I’m with him on the importance of addressing other problems: the opioid epidemic and the rising cost of family formation in a birth-dearth world.
To those deeply despairing about this pick, I would only say this: History is a hard teacher. In some ways, the worst thing that happened to foreign-policy neoconservatives was having (or the appearance of having) a decisive share of influence over George W. Bush’s presidential administration. By 2006 we were well on the way to Trump’s repudiation of their legacy in 2016. In that sense, I think many neocons should be (ironically) celebrating this pick as a chance for reality to hit their ideological rivals in the face as hard as it hit them.