During the 1988 presidential race, columnist George Will praised
former Delaware Gov. Pete DuPont for exhibiting “the highest
substance-to-blather ratio” of any of the candidates in the field.
That same observation may be made in this presidential cycle about
Pennsylvania’s former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, who last Thursday
gave yet another in what is turning into a series of major
addresses both thoughtful and philosophically right on
target.
DuPont was squeezed out from the start in that race, with
Jack Kemp already occupying the first rung in the supply-side
sweepstakes while the elder George Bush, as vice president, enjoyed
pre-eminence among the set of hereditary elites and business
leaders on the East Coast. Santorum, despite his apparent long-shot
status in the 2012 campaign, enjoys a far better chance for his
substance to be rewarded because this field is devoid of true
political heavyweights.
Although the media continue to try to paint Santorum as a
social-issues one-trick pony, the truth is that he dedicated even
more time in office to matters of defense and foreign policy, and
that since leaving office he has focused heavily on “The Gathering
Storm” of dangerous international challenges. His speech
at the National Press Club last week, entitled Americans and
the World: Resetting Our Course, amply demonstrated the
efficacy of that focus — and, amazingly enough, received decent
coverage from major media.
One of the most impressive things about Santorum’s remarks
was how he integrated foreign policy into an overall worldview
rooted in American domestic political traditions, rather than
speaking of the subject as if it is a separate and distinct, even
rarified, realm of concerns. The very reason the United States is
pre-eminent on the world stage, he said, is “because we were great
from our birth.” Consider this: “Unlike President Obama, I believe
we were a great country even before the Great Society programs of
the 1960s.… Americans were not born to be servants of the state;
the state existed to keep men free. What does this have to do with
foreign policy? Everything…. By establishing ourselves as a nation
on this basis, we have inspired and actively aided those around the
world who aspire to our ideal — and, unfortunately, at times we’ve
had to confront those who not only reject those fundamental rights
and freedoms, but threaten ours.”
Santorum clearly advocates muscular foreign and defense
policies, especially against Muslim jihadists. “We should have no
illusions about the extent of this threat. Radical Islam is
extending its tentacles from Africa to America. And at the heart of
the threat is Iran, which is aggressively pursuing a nuclear weapon
while at the same time it continues to fund Jihadist organizations
like Hezbollah and Hamas. In the past two years, has ignoring or
appeasing this threat been successful? Have offers of talks and
negotiations deterred the threat? Did our willful abandonment of
the terms relating Sharia doctrine to violence produce a less
virulent and less aggressive enemy? No. No. And absolutely
not.”
Yet he is no Wilsonian adventurer. He understands that
liberty requires the rule of law, institutions to nurture it, and a
culture that will value it. Tacitly rebuking part of the G.W. Bush
approach, he said: “Too often we have erred in thinking that
liberty’s first order of business is a vote. Elections should be a
consummation and not a commencement to democratic processes. We
have reaped nightmares when we get that backwards, from 1930s
Germany to Hamas in the Gaza Strip to what looks to be the case in
Egypt.” For instance, he considers Libya “a morass.” Egypt is “a
power vacuum being filled by the Muslim brotherhood.” If, and only
if, our intelligence is good enough to assure us that the rebels
are trustworthy, then we should have acted decisively “by
recognizing and arming the rebels and immediately enforcing a
no-fly zone. Decisive action against Kaddafi would have been the
end of him. [Instead,] because we have abdicated our leadership,
NATO has been put in disarray.”
He didn’t say it expressly, but it sounded to me as if
Santorum agrees with a version of the Weinberger
Doctrine, with Santorum possibly being slightly more willing to
use force than old Cap was, but still insisting on clarity of
objectives and on a hard-nosed assessment of U.S. security
interests. The key Weinberger point: “U.S. troops should
only be committed wholeheartedly and with the clear
intention of winning.”
In a word, Santorum’s foreign-policy approach comes across
as Reaganesque. Reagan himself was a useful melding of
idealist with cold-eyed realist, semi-Manichean (good-vs.-evil
worldview) with nuanced negotiator. Above all, it seems, Santorum
is insistent on strength and clarity. Blasting Barack Obama
repeatedly, he said: “Now we have caused two very dangerous things
on the world stage: confusion and doubt. We now have a confused
foreign policy in the hottest spots in the world, especially in the
Middle East. And we have allies and freedom fighters all over the
world who doubt our time-tested and time-honored commitments to
them.”
About our traditional alliances, Santorum asked (while
taking post-speech questions), “Are any of them better
today [than before Obama took office]? Pick one. You can’t.”
Meanwhile, we fail to nurture potential new friendships that could
be valuable, such as those of the Iranian protesters in 2010 who
truly did seem pro-Western and who sought to undermine the Iranian
mullahs who have sworn themselves enemies of the United States.
“Let us make no mistake about what happened there,” he said. “We
sided with evil, because our president believes our enemies are
legitimately aggrieved and thus we have no standing to
intervene.”
Again, though, please read the whole speech for yourself,
via this link.
It’s solid stuff. Pro-Israel. For missile defense. For a realistic
humanitarianism. For promotion of free markets. For domestic
fossil-fuels production. For insisting on good teaching of American
history in schools — a history that portrays the truth of American
decency and well-merited patriotism.
Against Sharia law. Against international socialists.
Against deep cuts in our military. Against moral equivalence.
Against apologies to the world for imagined American failures or
misdeeds.
“We have an obligation to speak for what makes America
exceptional,” Santorum said in answer to a question. And in his
speech: “America is truly a moral enterprise.”
Yes, it is. Santorum strikes a conservative listener as a
man who understands what makes us moral, why that morality is a
light to the world, and when — and, importantly, when not
— to use force to safeguard that light of freedom. Nobody else in
the race so far has even come close to putting forth such a
comprehensive, well-integrated template for how to restore
America’s place in a dangerous world.
