Capitol Ideas/Pat's Answers
Bethell, Tom
Pat's Answers by Tom Bethell One week after announcing his presidential candidacy in New Hampshire, Patrick J. Buchanan held a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington. Standing...
...It's better than some of the other names I have been called...
...My view is the first thing you've got to do is restore that with tax cuts, and the lifting of regulations...
...Welcome to the club...
...It's a golden opportunity to respond...
...Buchanan's opening statement, relevant to the "isolationism" charge, was not mentioned in the papers I saw the next day...
...he asked...
...And so I'm going to make that an issue...
...Does anyone now care whether New Zealand excludes U.S...
...We are losing jobs across this country because dynamic Asian capitalism is eating our lunch," Buchanan said at his press conference...
...Also, I suggested to Hallow, Buchanan has been around Washington' for years and has many friends in the press corps, even among those who disagree with his views...
...Board-game" conferences to discuss choke points and sea lanes will become harder to fund, and those who used to attend them will have to find another line of work...
...In truth, the labels "interventionism" and "isolationism" misrepresent the real foreign policy disagreement between Bush and Buchanan...
...Maybe Pat read that...
...Buchanan differs from protectionist Democrats, who seem to recognize that extracting resources from the productive on behalf of their nonproductive clients can only work if foreign goods are kept out, or kept expensive by tariffs...
...Hands off Yugoslavia" has also been the position of the Bush Administration...
...A dozen TV cameras were rolling, quietly waiting for potential gaffes...
...Look, we've got laws on the books against illegal immigration, and I would enforce the laws...
...This is the kind of stuff that is not going to go on...
...And they take these dollars and they're buying up American business and industry...
...Still, Buchanan's rhetoric can only encourage others (including Bush) to embrace protectionism, which could lead to a deterioration in world trade...
...The Washington establishment has been urging Bush to take up the challenge and attack isolationism...
...We're going to play hardball with you...
...New Hampshire was "the big roll of the dice," he said...
...He replied: "That's right...
...Buchanan added: "Bush...
...This time, he did object to the protectionist label...
...The isolationist seemed to be urging a greater degree, of foreign-policy activism upon the President, and he went on to urge the U.S...
...Lurking behind feeble calls for more negotiation, more time for the feckless European Community to do something, we see a patent nostalgia for the old Yugoslavia, long regarded by U.S...
...What is President Bush waiting for...
...Which is to say, there is precisely an anti-fascist tendency...
...Shortly before the Gulf conflict, Kristol questioned the time-honored news priorities of the New York Times (foreign news before domestic) and proclaimed his indifference to developments in Liberia and Myanmar (Burma...
...It is an absurdity to suggest that the reemergence of small and independent nations with diverse cultures and customs is the harbinger of fascism...
...As he was leaving the room at the end of the press conference, I asked him how he felt about being called a protectionist...
...recognition of Croatia...
...You've got to have secure borders," he replied...
...The Germans...
...But the twentieth century's wars, hot and cold, have followed hard on the heels of the unification of many ethnic fragments into new entities, e.g., Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union...
...The truth of the matter is that we just can't bear to see it break up, and are nudged with dire warnings of "fascism" if it does...
...You notice Pete's toughening up on welfare...
...With the end of the Cold War, an era of foreign policy has come to a close," Kristol wrote...
...And unlike our Regulatory President, ever eager to implement the liberal agenda, Buchanan would halt the punishment of the productive and tell the recipient classes to get to work...
...Congress already imposes over 8,000 such tariffs, as James Bovard details in his book The Fair Trade Fraud...
...In fact, I think the British decline coincided with the adoption of collectivist legislation and trade unionism and so on, which America remained relatively free of...
...The most important charges against Buchanan are isolationism and protectionism...
...warships with nuclear weapons, or remains in ANZUS...
...If we think that you folks are going for economic hegemony in the twenty-first century . . . we Americans have not yet begun to fight...
...But Buchanan certainly isn't guilty of it...
...A peculiar asymmetry of American politics is that, whereas liberals have no enemies to the left, conservatives have no friends to the right—which helps explain the "conservative crackup" that our editor-in-chief has been documenting for a book to be published this spring by Simon and Schuster...
...Clearly, the media had been expecting a dull horse race in '92, and may have been grateful to Buchanan for spicing things up...
...I like Bush calling me that because it gives me a chance to talk," he said...
...He thinks the Japanese are doing to us what we did to the British in the late nineteenth century...
...The Wall Street Journal reported that California Democrats compared Wilson to David Duke and Hitler for saying that he wanted to cut welfare by 25 percent," I said...
...Buchanan favors "reciprocity"—basically the same message that George Bush and his CEO crew delivered recently to a Japanese audience...
...Buchanan said...
...If he were able to accomplish this, the U.S...
...They are using it as a pejorative term," he said, "to suggest that I am terrified of the United States's inability to trade with the rest of the world...
...Reviving the idea of `national interest' and giving it national substance ought to be at the top of our national agenda...
...has stayed for too long with Deng Xiaoping—he is not the future...
...On the other hand, those who think we still need 30,000 troops stationed at the Korean DMZ, and even larger numbers "defending" Western Europe and Japan, should be made to defend their position, which looks nostalgic at best...
...Finally, his views on immigration...
...cized Buchanan's "very protectionist views on trade...
...There must have been fifty journalists present when the candidate entered the Press Club ballroom...
...Within 30 seconds of the appointed hour, the whispery voice was on the line...
...We have stayed with Gorbachev too long—that is not the future...
...A couple of days before Buchanan's press conference, the Washington Post published an editorial strenuously opposing Germany's impending recognition of Croatia and Slovenia...
...With what he has done with small business, and the rules and regulations and taxes he's imposed on business across the country, he has made it extremely attractive for manufacturers to leave the United States...
...Fine...
...refusal to recognize Croatia, and to give moral support to that beleaguered people...
...Even under the leadership of Old World Order enthusiast George Bush, the U.S...
...n one of his last columns before launching his run for President, Buchanan asked where the Americans were in the Serbian assault on Croatia—a war neoconservatives have remained remarkably silent about...
...Ignoring the factitious plan to unify Western Europe, which has proceeded as far as it has only through bureaucratic stealth (and will The American Spectator February 1992 13 either lead to disaster or, more likely, fall apart when the Germans realize that their government has agreed to give up the Deutschmark), there is today a strong decentralizing tendency in many parts of the world, notably Yugoslavia and (the former) Soviet Union...
...He is responsible for damaging the competitive position of the United States...
...As Buchanan put it later in the press conference, Bush's so-called New World Order amounts to little more than a sentimental affection for a time when centralization was unquestioned?the retention of the Old War Order...
...They treat General Motors and Ford fine, we treat them fine...
...is already withdrawing from arenas of conflict once thought important in the Cold War: Zaire, Ethiopia, several other spots...
...The British practiced free trade, "and the Americans had a high tariff wall and a huge domestic market, honed all our manufacturers and kept foreign goods out, and made American steel and all the rest of it superior...
...It's fair to say that Buchanan's candidacy has' exposed a considerable rift among conservatives—I was about to use the cliché "the conservative movement," but I'm not sure that there is any such thing, and it's certainly not moving anywhere right ROW...
...wouldagain become hospitable to capital and enterprise, and protectionism would die on the vine...
...Compared him to Duke and Hitler...
...His voice had that familiar hoarse, whispery, quality, conveying a sense of fires banked, of indignation controlled, and sometimes, of patience wearing thin: "Instead of being thirty-seventh in line—as we were in recognizing the republic of Lithuania—the United States should recognize Russia today, and Ukraine today, as free and independent states," he said...
...It's worth recalling that the writer who first drew a distinction between liberal internationalism and the national interest was not Pat Buchanan but Irving Kristol, who supported the latter and founded a magazine of that name in the mid-1980s...
...My objection is to the fact that the only enterprise zone that George Bush has ever created is Mexico...
...Why is there no room at the inn"—here he looked up at the cameras, the tension increased, the whispery voice hardened—"Why is there no room at the inn of Mr...
...He concluded by observing that it was time for the Sixth Fleet to show up in Dubrovnik...
...I think one of the reasons [California Governor] Pete Wilson is having a hard time is a lot of folks come in [illegally], and they're putting their kids in the schools, and the tax burden is rising dramatically...
...Vice President Dan Quayle told the Washington Post, "I take strong exception that a conservative foreign policy is one of isolationism, protectionism, 'Fortress America,' `Come Home America.— Republican National Committee Chairman Clayton Yeutter has critiTom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...At the same time, of course, Buchanan has been less than favorably received by many conservatives...
...Standing near the coffee urn was Ralph Z. Hallow, who has been covering the campaign for the Washington Times...
...We are retreating from the Philippines—at last...
...Buchanan said he was "all for" free trade with "a compatible industrial democracy that is dealing with you fair and square, like Britain and Canada...
...I told Pat that the good news is that the Japanese send us useful things like cars and computers, and are content to accept pieces of paper in return—so what's the problem...
...Is Buchanan guilty of these charges...
...1:71 14 The American Spectator February 1992...
...foreign policy elites as the prize jewel in the Communist bloc...
...And he's also complaining about the illegal immigration...
...I am a trade hawk, rather than a protectionist...
...B uchanan is much more vulnerable on the issue of protectionism...
...Later Buchanan called from New Hampshire to discuss the issue further...
...Referring to "the war of aggression in the Balkans," Buchan-an characterized as "shameful" the U.S...
...Bush's New World Order for the infant states of a new Europe, when there is plenty of room for Deng Xiaoping...
...He said that, on the whole, Buchanan had been given a better reception by the mainstream press than might have been expected...
...And that's not correct...
...This is a problem for Pete...
...I think we had a terrific first week...
...And he has stayed with this crowd in Belgrade—that is not the future...
...He would abolish the capital gains tax, and so on...
...To a Japanese journalist who asked what his policy toward Japan would be, Buchanan responded: "You and I may be friends, but we're not going to tolerate dumping of computer chips, which take out a couple of American industries, and then sudden shortages...
...Today, of course, Japan is less collectivist than the U.S...
...Why is the liberation of autocratic Kuwait more important to the West than the liberation of democratic Croatia from Stalinism...
Vol. 25 • February 1992 • No. 2
