Rod Dreher: ‘Unpatriotic Conservatives’ 2022

[Kamaji]

‘Unpatriotic Conservatives’ 2022

By Rod Dreher
February 23, 2022

The other day, Pat Buchanan warned about the Realpolitik of Russia’s stance towards Ukraine:

Putin does not threaten any vital interest of the United States and does not want war with the United States. But, as a great power, Russia claims a right to secure, peaceful and friendly borders, free of military alliances designed to circumscribe, contain and control it.

And the protests Moscow is making are not without validity?

Now that the Soviet Empire is dead, the Soviet Union is dead. Communism is dormant, and the USSR has devolved into 15 nations; why did we move our Cold War alliance onto Moscow’s front porch?

Would we tolerate this?

For what is “NATO enlargement,” other than a lengthening series of U.S. war guarantees to fight Russia on behalf of nations farther and farther away from us, and of ever-diminishing importance to the United States?

On March 1, 1917, the story broke of a secret cable from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to his minister in Mexico City, to make an offer to the government.

If war erupted between Germany and the U.S., the Zimmermann Telegram read, and Mexico sided with Germany, a victorious Second Reich would support the return of “the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.”

Enraged at Germany’s offer to make Mexico its ally and to support the breakup of our country, the U.S., five weeks later, declared war on Germany.

Can we not understand the rising rage in Moscow as we convert all its former Warsaw Pact allies and ex-republics of the USSR into member states of a military alliance established to contain and control Russia?

Well. If you were paying attention in early 2003, on the verge of the Iraq War, you read this cover essay in National Review by David Frum, a Bush White House speechwriter, who advocated for the Iraq War by denouncing as “unpatriotic conservatives” Pat Buchanan, Bob Novak, and other prominent conservatives who warned against it. Excerpts:

From the very beginning of the War on Terror, there has been dissent, and as the war has proceeded to Iraq, the dissent has grown more radical and more vociferous. Perhaps that was to be expected. But here is what never could have been: Some of the leading figures in this antiwar movement call themselves “conservatives.”

These conservatives are relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large. They aspire to reinvent conservative ideology: to junk the 50-year-old conservative commitment to defend American interests and values throughout the world — the commitment that inspired the founding of this magazine — in favor of a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies.

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I’m not a paleoconservative, and though I thought at the time that Frum went too far, I agreed back then with the thrust of his essay. But I was a fool — a fool traumatized by 9/11, and willing to believe whatever I was told to justify the vengeance I wanted on the Muslim world. Whatever the manifold faults of the paleocons back then, they were right about the One Big Thing: the war. If we had listened to them, America would be in a much better place now. We wouldn’t have hemorrhaged blood and treasure and authority in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. But people like me in 2003 were willing to believe the David Frums and spite the Pat Buchanans. Now look.

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Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/unpatriotic-conservatives-2022/

[Kamaji]

It's a very long article, and it covers a lot of ground, but I think it's worth reading the entire thing (or, at least, skimming further down past what I excerpted).


Viz. Ukraine, Mr. Dreher sums it up as follows:

There’s a lot to be said about this. The people who need to hear it most are utterly incapable of listening. So I’m going to say it both to lay down a marker for the future (for when the talking heads puzzle over how things got to this disastrous point) and to encourage fellow conservatives who are thinking these thoughts, but are confused by them, because they’re new, and feel strange and even kind of dirty.

To repeat myself: I am opposed to Russia’s actions in Ukraine. I think Russia should leave Ukraine alone, but whatever happens, I am adamantly against following the US leadership into hawkish actions against the Russians. It’s not at all because I support Russia or in any way approve of what it’s doing. (I hope Russian families and Russian soldiers stop to think about what exorbitant cost is extracted from them so that Putin can restore Greater Russia.) It’s rather that I am sick to the point of puking of these people — the American elites — sh*tting all over so many of us, yet expecting us to send our sons (and daughters) to fight its damn wars. Especially when the goal is to extend American political and cultural hegemony over the world, to allow the Western-oriented elites in those countries to ruin the lives of the normal people in those places in the same way they have ruined ours.

Put another way, I adamantly oppose risking the lives of boys from Louisiana and Alabama to make the Donbass safe for genderqueers and migrants. If that makes me a reactionary troll, fine, I’ll own that. I love my country and would put my life on the line to fight for her against foreign invaders. But we are not the good guys I used to think we were. We can’t even protect schoolgirls in Louisiana and Alabama from this toxic ideology that is destroying their moral sense, but they expect us to gear up in case we are called to fight for Ukraine?