Dr. John C. Hulsman is President and Managing Partner of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a global political risk consulting firm. A life member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, his most recent book is “The Last Best Hope: A History of American Realism.”

You can read part 1 of John Hulsman’s short series here, and part two can be found here 

As we have seen, Jacksonians and Jeffersonians are surely not the same.

Yet they are more than similar enough—and together unquestionably have both the intellectual and political heft to dominate the Republican Party far into the future—to form an alliance as the new preeminent foreign policy force on the conservative right in the United States. And the glue that unites them, despite their real differences, is realism.

It has often been said that realism is not really a coherent man-made philosophy. More accurately, it is a set of enduring precepts and impulses, arrived at through the study of history, that have made sense of the world since the dawn of time.

First, most realists think states act internationally primarily based on questions of security and survival.

Second, they act primarily on the basis of their specific national interests, rather than due to utopian, universalist principles.

Third, the international system, never having had a world government, is defined by anarchy as states perpetually jockey for power relative to one another.

Fourth, realist foreign policy initiatives are defined by pragmatism, the art of the possible, rather than grand and doomed otherworldly ideological crusades.

Fifth, whereas the Wilsonians who dominate the Democratic Party believe that (somehow) states can rise above conflict and power politics—whether through the magic alchemy of trade, international institutions or international law—all realists categorically reject such a transcendence as possible.

Sixth, and finally, because of this basic nature of the world, most realists emphasize prudence as a policy-making virtue above all others.

This general depiction of realism takes us a long way down the road toward a fundamental Jacksonian-Jeffersonian alliance, as both major schools of thought can effortlessly (unlike their Wilsonian and Hamiltonian rivals) get behind these basic realist precepts. But if this is generally what realism is about, there needs to be another layer of specificity in order to understand the grand Jacksonian-Jeffersonian bargain: how have realist impulses played out in America’s own history as it has actually been lived?

For it is applied history—looking at the specific history of America to find the basic organic realist building blocks cementing this fundamental conservative alliance—that takes us through the looking glass to understanding.

The precepts of American realism are:

Alliances should only be entered into when they advance specific and primary American interests. This precept can be gleaned from the fraught circumstances surrounding the Jay Treaty between the US and Britain and Washington’s Farewell Address as the template for the country’s astounding foreign policy success of its first 100 years.

“No more stupid wars.” Fighting wars of choice, from Humanitarian Interventions on the Wilsonian left (recently in Somalia, the Balkans, and Libya) to nation-building exercises on the neoconservative right (Iraq and Afghanistan), is ruinous to America’s overall position in the world. Instead, US military power must be husbanded for use only when primary American national interests are at stake. This was the case made throughout the long and distinguished career of John Quincy Adams, who led the charge in the nineteenth century in opposing promiscuous interventions.

Sovereignty is real and everything. Be the issue managing America’s borders, energy independence, trade policy, or not outsourcing US decision-making to unaccountable international institutions, American must preserve its agency, its freedom to act on its own as it chooses to in the world. This can be seen in the underrated Senator William Borah’s successful opposition to Woodrow Wilson’s deeply-flawed League of Nations after World War I.

The ‘Roosevelt Rule’ details when American should intervene and when it should not. FDR’s masterful preparation of his skeptical country for World War II is well-trod history; the geostrategic rationale for his thinking is just as important and far less well-known.

The dominant Eurasian landmass, with the lion’s share of the world’s people and resources, stands to dominate the rest of the planet if either its European or Asian portion is controlled by any one great power. America, dominating the peripheral Western Hemisphere off the coast of Eurasia, will continue to be the world’s dominant power only as long as neither Europe nor Asia is controlled by any other power. This is the realist yardstick for military intervention, and (equally importantly) non-intervention.

Furthering the immediate and specific interests of only the American people must be the never-forgotten touchstone of any successful US foreign policy. Here President Eisenhower’s warning about a military-industrial complex, a permanent war party, must be heeded, as today’s center-left American foreign policy establishment often seems to care more about the sufferings of others than the real calamities befalling the American people.

The US must be ruthlessly prepared to cut deals with the devil, coming to terms with less than savory countries if doing so furthers US interests. This precept is derived from Nixon’s masterstroke in going to China, even at the height of the lunacy of the Cultural Revolution, which mightily contributed to the west’s overall victory in the Cold War.

 The US must be a ‘shining city on a hill,’ and not be in the foolhardy business of trying to impose democracy on the rest of the world. Here it pays to examine the wildly successful career of Ronald Reagan, who understood better than anyone that America-as-example is a great source of its power.

Next week, in my final installment of this series, we will put all these organic precepts gleaned from applied history to work, using the new Jacksonian-Jeffersonian fusion to look afresh at the world of today, assessing the overall realist foreign policy that flows from this new, yet old, way of looking at the world.

The post John Hulsman: What the MAGA base actually believes (Part 3): Realism as the glue appeared first on Conservative Home.