Pat Buchanan: America first

Unless American honor, vital interests or citizens were at risk or have been attacked, U.S. policy should be to stay out of war.

But you supported the Vietnam War.

I supported the Vietnam War as I supported the entire Cold War. I supported every single military action taken during the Cold War except for the intervention into Lebanon [in the early 1980s]. I didn't see the purpose of sending U.S. troops into a civil war among the Syrians, Lebanese, the Israelis and all the militias there. It had nothing to do with our interests. It had nothing to do with the Cold War. And sure enough, the Marines were soon blown up there.

And the reason I opposed that was that I had been to Israel in '82 or '83. And the Israelis were going to take us to Beirut and at the last minute they canceled the trip. They said it wasn't safe. And I wondered, if it's not safe for us how is it going to be safe for our troops?

I favored every other action in the Cold War related to conflict. My conviction was that during the Cold War war had been declared upon the U.S. by the Soviet Empire. We followed the right policy in the Cold War. When we watched Czechoslovakia go under, we did not try rollback. We had a much more conservative policy -- deterrence and drawing a red line, telling them not to cross it. But now we seem to be following the British Empire; we're running around on these moral crusades.

I completely support what we're doing in Afghanistan, by the way. It's being morally done in a just way. I back the president in what we're doing. But I urge him to be cautious in Phase 2.

That fits with the Buchanan doctrine in that clearly vital interests are at stake, being that we were attacked on our own land.

Exactly. And if we find that Saddam Hussein is behind this attack and had a hand in the massacre of Americans, I'm in favor of going in and killing him -- after we figure out a way to do it. But only if Iraq had a hand in this thing. In every argument I've seen the Iraqis don't have nuclear weapons. So I question the wisdom of an all-out attack on Iraq. The military is a half-million smaller than the one we had before. It would dynamite our coalition. We would have no support -- we couldn't use Saudi bases.

When the Cold War was over [we should have] become a normal country, and returned to the foreign policy that had served so many presidents in such good stead. And that's a foreign policy where the U.S. retains superior military weaponry on land, sea, air and space, and we stay out of wars in which American vital interests are not engaged. It also means dissolving Cold War alliances, pulling up the trip wires we have all over the world, bringing home troops from places like Korea and Bavaria where they're no longer needed. Let those governments be responsible for their own defense. Let the U.S. become an arsenal for those countries but not their protector.

I wrote this in the front of my book, this is the way all empires end -- whether Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, British, French, Japanese. They're all finished because they got themselves overextended. I'm working on a book right now on how empires perish. From 1914 to 1944, Britain went from the superpower of its day to living off American food stamps. The decisions taken in those two World Wars are subject to question.

You were criticized for supposedly arguing in that book that the U.S. fought on the wrong side in World War II, but that's not at all what you wrote, is it?

No, I didn't. Though our allies -- Stalin -- left something to be desired. But we had no choice. And once Nazi Germany declared war upon us, you don't get to pick and choose your allies. And the Russian army was magnificent, if brutal.

What was the larger argument you were trying to make with that book? You didn't seem to think that the U.S. did the right thing by fighting Germany, that we should have let Germany and Russia fight each other.

Next page: "The whole thing can be summed up in two words: Reform Party"