The prudent Irishman: Edmund Burke's realism.

• Author: Bolton, John R.

One of the many consequences of Soviet communism's collapse is disarray in the conceptual structures of American foreign policy. Left without a clear focal point, one-time hawks now flap like doves, while erstwhile doves behave like birds of prey. Both the strategic role and the moral purposes of the United States in the world are disputed. For conservatives it is a matter of special concern that confusion exists with particular starkness among those who once held common views as "anti-communists."

Today, Cold War-era anti-communists argue among themselves - and the disagreements are not about tactics. Let us be frank: some have become near isolationists. Others enthusiastically espouse Woodrow Wilson's view that the world needs to be made safe for democracy and its family of values. Some of the latter seem to long for a new crusade to keep America at the top of its game, if nothing else. Then again there are those who see the world as still dangerous, but far more opaquely so than it was during the clearer days of the Cold War. They seek an interests-based foreign policy grounded in a concrete agenda of protecting particular peoples and territories, defending open trade and commercial relations around the world, and advancing a commonality of interests with our allies.

Finding myself in this third school, I often turn for guidance to that political philosopher whose understanding of the interplay of interests and values remains unsurpassed. Edmund Burke's insights into civil society seem strikingly apposite today to American foreign policy. Among those are his reliance on the accretion of experience and reasoning from empirical reality, his abhorrence of elevating abstract principles into a theology, and his fear of driving policy on the basis of metaphysics.

Burke's writings rarely cause the pulse to race, which perhaps explains his consistent lack of popularity among both the college-aged and those who stay that way intellectually while otherwise growing older. Moreover, Burke refused to conclude too much from existing evidence, and that makes him hard for the more passionate former anti-communists to swallow. Burke would have welcomed Irving Kristol's assertion that "no modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals." He was humble enough to believe, "Please God, I will walk with caution, whenever I am not able clearly to see my way before me." Burke had the sense as well to be humble for his country:

Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take one against our own. I must fairly say I dread our own power and our own ambition. I dread our being too much dreaded.... Sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin."(1)

While Burke's speeches and writings are generally considered a guide to domestic policy (as we understand that term), much of his thinking and active politicking dealt with America, Ireland, India, and, most famously, France. The first three, of course, can properly be understood as imperial concerns, mixing both domestic and foreign policy. Burke's larger political struggle for individual rights against concentrated government authority - a tenet central to his party, the Rockingham Whigs - infused all of these foreign and imperial issues. Since America today finds itself grappling with issues of imperial maintenance - though we call it something else - and with the impact of that task on the philosophy and future of government at home, it may be that an examination of Burke's writings has something useful to teach us. That, in any event, is the premise of what follows.

The Americans

On this side of the Atlantic, Burke is often seen as a friend of the American Revolution, which he most certainly was not. He argued not on behalf of Americans seeking independence, but as a Briton striving, vainly as it turned out, to preserve his country's choicest asset from the foolishness of his own countrymen.

In the first place, Burke argued that it blinked reality for British policymakers to ignore what had happened in America, where "a fierce spirit of liberty has grown up." Not only was Burke undisturbed by the American love of liberty, he feared that London's efforts to reduce that liberty threatened his own:

... in order to prove that the Americans have no right to their liberties, we are every day endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself.

Here is the confluence of interest and ideology so typical of Burke. He was not celebrating America's "spirit of liberty" as a pure value, but because his government's threat to America directly and tangibly threatened him.

Second, Burke was appalled at the arguments advanced by the parliamentary supporters of King George III, who seemed determined to justify policies such as taxation of the Americans solely on the basis that they had a sovereign right to do so. In the context of the period, the drumbeat in London about British sovereign rights was nearly an absolute, and would not tolerate objections based merely on practicality and history. Burke, however, disdained the "sovereign right" argument: "I am not here going into the distinctions of rights, nor attempting to mark their boundaries; I hate the very sound of them."

Burke stressed that trade had bound the colonies to England before, and could do so again; taxation had not previously been deemed necessary, and that was reason enough to abandon it now. "These are the arguments of states and kingdoms", he said. "Leave the rest to the schools; for there only may they be discussed with safety." Burke saw correctly that endless disputes with Americans over the abstract concept of sovereignty would "teach them ... to call that sovereignty itself in question." He warned that "If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. Nobody will be argued into slavery." To Burke, the theory of sovereignty was manifestly secondary to the practical need of keeping the Americans in...