Patrick Buchanan is one of the most controversial figures in American politics. Any conventional politician in the United States who held Buchanan's radical views on foreign policy and social issues would not be taken seriously as a White House aspirant. American presidential politics is a bitter fight for the nation's two great middles: the middle class and the middlebrow. Buchanan has always shunned those middle grounds. He is a political lightning rod, and a highly polarizing influence.
    Despite this considerable handicap, Buchanan has been a powerful force in presidential politics. In 1992 and 1996, Buchanan's strength among conservative voters pushed the Republican candidates (incumbent President George Bush and Senator Robert Dole) to the right; too far right, in fact, to beat the moderate Democrat Bill Clinton. Buchanan's fiery declaration of a "cultural war" in a major speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention is still blamed by many Republicans for President Bush's defeat.
    How did Buchanan attain such influence? Simple. He is a creature of Washington's media elite, and not its political elite. Buchanan has traded shamelessly on his journalistic connections in America's capital to evade harsh scrutiny. The best example of this soft treatment is easy to cite. After both unsuccessful campaigns, Buchanan eased back into his spot on CNN's influential show Crossfire. It is a powerful media position that is worth millions of dollars of free political advertisements.
    The year 1999 has proved to be a much different story, and there is considerable irony in the fact that Buchanan (an editorial and speech writer by profession) has met his downfall through his own written words. An expert in getting attention, Buchanan had garnered copious media coverage throughout the year by stretching out his eventual decision to leave the Republicans for the relatively new "Reform Party." But he squandered much of the positive coverage when he published a new book, A Republic, Not an Empire, as a preview of his 2000 campaign.
    Buchanan's new book fractured many of his old and cozy media relationships by presenting a revisionist view of the central myth of 20th century America: that the Second World War was an unavoidable crusade against absolute evil. Buchanan's reexamination of that myth resurrected charges that he was an anti-Semite, and forced him into the unfamiliar and uncomfortable position of media pariah. In short, Buchanan argues that the U.S. had no national interests at stake in the Second World War, and should have stayed out of the conflict.
    The critical battering that Buchanan received is deserved, and not only for his thoughts on World War Two. Buchanan's methodology in A Republic, Not and Empire is history via anecdote and quip. The book is studded with omissions that make it both smooth reading and highly inadequate scholarship.
    Buchanan's handling of a subject close to his heart (Ronald Reagan's presidency) is a good example. Reagan, writes Buchanan, "conducted the most successful foreign policy of the twentieth century." Yet Buchanan omits any discussion of Reagan's greatest foreign policy scandal: the trading of arms to Iran for hostages, and the funneling of that money to anticommunist fighters in Central America. This is history by grave omission.
    It may seem odd that Buchanan's statements about events five decades removed should stir more controversy than his theories on the Reagan presidency. It is odder still that Buchanan (who campaigns as a resolute moralist) should write so coldly about the weighty moral issues raised the Second World War. But it is Buchanan's view of America's foreign policy that is the most controversial aspect of his book. It is an aspect that has received far too little attention.
    Buchanan believes that the United States should return to the foreign policy priorities of its very first president, George Washington. Washington warned against "passionate attachments" to other nations, and prescribed a utilitarian aloofness as the best course for America. By this reasoning, Buchanan argues that America's post-Cold War foreign policy has been a failure. He recommends that America withdraw from world organizations, and return to a foreign policy that omits any moral tests for its allies in favor of their utility to American interests. "Whether a nation is democratic should be of less concern to us," writes Buchanan, "than how it views America. In the Cold War, autocratic Pakistan was a better friend than democratic India, which sided with Moscow in the Afghan war." Human rights, Buchanan argues, are just the kind of foolish "passion" from which the United States should detach itself.
    This is a view of America's future that is more chilling than any historical revisionism. Buchanan would abandon innovation in U.S. foreign policy for the comforts and certainties of its past errors. Instead of struggling to use its vast influence constructively, Buchanan envisions an America that would funnel the global economy's new wealth to dictators and plutocrats simply because they are our "friends." Buchanan's arguments are those of an international gangster, and not those of a statesman. Its principles, if one can call them that, are naked power and tribute. For those who already object to an American foreign policy that struggles to balance its ideals (world democracy, free trade) against its own aggressive self-interest, Buchanan's A Republic, Not an Empire offers a chilling and forbidding alternative.