A conservative continuum.

• Author: Keene, David
• Position: Essay

THE SOVIET Empire had just collapsed and Americans were giddily wondering what might be next. Some were talking of a peace dividend that Democrats might spend on social programs dear to their hearts or Republicans might send back to the taxpayers who had financed the Cold War.

Others, however, were arguing that the world's sole remaining superpower should consider imposing Pax Americana on an unruly world. Even many conservatives who should have known better were beginning to contemplate a far more robust and aggressive foreign policy than they ever had supported before.

It was in this atmosphere that a number of neoconservative intellectuals, led by the pre-Weekly Standard Bill Kristol, began articulating something they called "national greatness conservatism." During this time, I remember attending a small private dinner where Bill argued that with the defeat of the Soviet Empire, the United States "needed" a new crusade to engage our nation's energies and interests, because, as he put it, a nation's "greatness" is measured not by the prosperity of its people, but by its actions on the world stage.

I challenged him, suggesting that while Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House may have thought the Great War was about redrawing the map of Europe and creating a "new world order", those who filed into the trenches fought to defend their nation, homes and families against our enemies' alleged desire to impose their vision on us. We went to war not to make a dangerous world safe for democracy, but to protect our own democracy.

Two decades later, we reluctantly became involved in another global war, when it was clear that events half a world away posed a real threat to us. And many Americans resisted the idea of going to war absent a direct threat to the U.S. homeland; it took the bombing of Pearl Harbor for families to throw themselves into the effort to defeat our enemies. When the war ended, they breathed a sigh of relief and soldiers came home to farm and take their places on our factory floors and in our executive suites. They were eager to marry, have families and return to what they considered important about their country.

During the Cold War, their sons and daughters responded when they believed our values and allies--and therefore our own security--were at risk. They paid for the Cold War without complaint. They went to Korea, Vietnam and most recently Iraq, not to seek glow, or to help establish their country as a hegemon or to remake the world in our own image, but because they felt it was in danger.

I told Kristol that if he thought the young men and women who fought our wars returned home to pine for new foreign crusades or adventures, he was wrong. They came home happy to trade their guns and uniforms for the way of life they believed, not inaccurately, that they had been called to defend.

THE FOUNDERS and their successors believed firmly that the nation they were creating was indeed John Winthrop's shining "City upon a Hill" that Ronald Reagan liked to describe. Others would emulate the freedom and limited government that characterized the new nation. Few of them believed, however, that it would be either proper or prudent to force others to copy the system they had created.

This view began to lose favor with the advent of the Hearst papers in the late 19th century, the aggressiveness of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and the emergence of the United States as a world power after World War I. Still, it wasn't until World War II, and the subsequent Cold War, that Americans began to accept the fact that, like it or not, they were going to have to play a permanently active role on the world stage and that this might well entail the use of force even absent a direct attack on us. While virtually all conservatives admired and continue to admire Bob Taft, most today would agree with the late Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg's decision after the conclusion of World War II that conservatives and Republicans could no longer afford to remain isolationist in an increasingly dangerous world.

Conservatives accepted this reality with...