The New York Times-20080127-The Isolationist- -Review-

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The Isolationist; [Review]

Full Text (877  words)[Author Affiliation] Chris Suellentrop is an editor for the Op-Ed page of The Times. With Tobin Harshaw, he writes The Opinionator, a blog for The New York Times on the Web.

DAY OF RECKONING

How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart.

By Patrick J. Buchanan.

294 pp. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press. $25.95.

For the first time since Bill Clinton's initial term in office, Patrick J. Buchanan seems as if he could plausibly compete for the Republican presidential nomination. In Iowa and elsewhere, an economic populist and Christian conservative has threatened to topple the party establishment's preferred nominees. Online, in what is sometimes called the money primary, a foreign policy noninterventionist is breaking fund-raising records. And in the national popularity contest, if those two men (Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul) could have been combined -- in a dubious but nonetheless irresistible exercise -- to form a single Buchananite candidate, that person would have acquired a front-running 25 percent of the vote in a recent New York Times/CBS News poll.

Of course -- and many people are surely grateful for this -- Buchanan is not running for president, and certainly not for the Republican nomination. He just seems as if he were in his new book, Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart. The book is less a coherent argument than a meandering hodgepodge of what Buchanan happens to believe on a host of issues, from immigration to pre-emptive war to free trade to the threat of China. The format should be familiar to anyone (and there must be at least one of you out there) who has read a presidential campaign book or a political party platform.

The self-serving nature of the book begins with its epigraph, a quotation from one of Buchanan's previous books, to which the title Day of Reckoning alludes. (Yeats gets second billing, atop the introduction.) Buchanan titled one of his earlier books Right From the Beginning, and he's eager to prove his prescience once more throughout this new book. By the time he's done quoting, in blogospheric fashion, the wisdom of his earlier works (he cites A Republic, Not an Empire, State of Emergency and Where the Right Went Wrong in the first 33 pages alone), including articles in political journals like The American Conservative and The National Interest, Day of Reckoning has begun to feel like a cross between a greatest-hits anthology and The Patrick J. Buchanan Reader.

This is not to say, however, that the book is awful. Buchanan can write, and he knows how to provoke. His foreign policy prescriptions -- withdraw from NATO, abandon our commitments to Taiwan and South Korea and pretty much everywhere else in the world -- are not likely to be adopted by the nominee of either major party in 2008, but he presents them forcefully and often persuasively. They deserve a wider hearing in American politics than they are currently given, if only to challenge the adherents of the prevailing orthodoxy to question their assumptions (although it doesn't bolster Buchanan's bona fides as a terrorism expert when he twice refers to Peter Bergen, the author of Holy War Inc. and The Osama bin Laden I Know, as Peter Burger).

In fact, if the book's second, third and fourth chapters were distributed in isolation (no pun intended) to Democratic primary voters, Buchanan might find himself with a surprising chunk of support. Most Republicans, as Ron Paul has discovered, do not warm to statements like this: The 'cataclysmic terrorism' of 9/11 was an unpardonable atrocity. But it was not unpredictable. For terrorism is the price of empire. They were over here because we were over there.

Unfortunately, the worthwhile provocations Buchanan offers are overshadowed by his views on race and ethnicity. He believes that diversity is America's weakness, not its strength; that because of its multiethnic nature and because of an invasion from the south, America is indeed coming apart, decomposing, and ... the likelihood of her survival as one nation through midcentury is improbable; and that racial differences are inherently divisive.

It is one thing to assert that America is not an abstract idea or a political science experiment or a philosophical creed, but an actual country with a shared culture and homeland. It is quite another to imply, very strongly, that American culture is the genetic inheritance of the descendants of white Europeans. (Buchanan opposes the mixing of all tribes, races and peoples and suggests he would support an immigration policy that would keep the United States predominantly Christian and European.) It is one thing to assert that America has the right to police its borders and to regulate immigration however it sees fit. It is quite another to blame diversity for the Virginia Tech massacre.

Buchanan apparently thinks his views on these matters are more important than his desire for a less warlike and imperial foreign policy, which is why he refuses to keep quiet about them. And Americans, it turns out, agree with him about the significance of these opinions. That's one large reason the nation's voters -- in 1992, 1996 and 2000 -- put a pitchfork in his presidential ambitions. And if the time comes, they will no doubt gladly bear that burden once more.