POLEMIC

It is not true that the main thesis of "A Republic, not an Empire" offers a "chilling and forbidding" alternative to the critics of present-day American foreign policy.

The most serious objection to annual US interventions around the world is not that they are based less on its stated ideals, and more on its own self-interest, but that they are aggressive.

No mainstream balancing act, between ideals and self-interest, can address agression as a means to American foreign policy end. It is simply not a matter of balance, but a matter of means.

It is here that Buchanan offers a very important alternative, eloquently summarized in the title of his book. The alternative is not in the way he proposes America choose its friends and foes, but in the way it should execute its policy.

This alternative cannot be more chilling and should not be more forbidding than the human death toll resulting from the principles of modern American foreign policy, regardless of whether these principles drive ideals or national interest.

As far as other ideas Buchanan promulgates in his book, they are as controversial, but in those cases, and in my opinion, rightly so. I will not go into that here.

Mr Byrne is right. Pat Buchanan has no chance of becoming a US President any time soon, and that is probably a good thing. But this is not because Buchanan would be any more an "international ganster" than anybody else in late twentieth century US presidential politics. In this, Michael Drier is right.

Let's know bury ideas because their most vocal proponent is flawed.

Nikola Stankovic
San Francisco

I thank Nikola Stankovic for the response to my article.

It is very easy to make a case against many particular applications of the awesome international power that is wielded by the United States at the dawn of the 21st Century. (Colombia being the most recent and potentially pernicious.) It is equally easy to make a case against the United States' unwillingness to use its power to stem genocide and poverty. (American policy in Africa is a signal case in point.)

Mr. Stankovic believes that Patrick Buchanan argues for a United States that does not intervene with aggression in any foreign conflict or conundrum. I believe that this is a misreading of Buchanan. The author of A Republic, Not An Empire would not intervene in conflicts such as Kosovo or East Timor. That is true. Instead, Buchanan would use the financial and military resources of the United States to coddle dictators who "agree" with the United States, prop up their economies artificially and exterminate their enemies. That is the chilling and forbidding choice he offers.

Should the United States funnel its vast power into world institutions to effect moral and humanitarian changes that it desires? Certainly. Buchanan would abandon this as well for an increasingly unilateral U.S. foreign policy that ignores international institutions, picks at world scabs arbitrarily and opens fresh wounds when it deems them in its own interests.

That is chilling and forbidding.

Richard Byrne