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competent in foreign policy than it was in domestic policy. In both cases it was the same institution, with the same people, operating under the same incentives.
    A recent article in
Modern Age
, the conservative journal founded by Russell Kirk, illustrated this point. Felix Morley, for example, was one of the founders of
Human Events
, the oldest conservative weekly in America. In 1957 he wrote an essay called “American Republic or American Empire.” There Morley warned, “We are trying to make a federal republic do an imperial job, without honestly confronting the fact that our traditional institutions are specifically designed to prevent centralization of power. . . . At some time and at some point, however, this fundamental conflict between our institutions and our policies will have to be resolved.”
    In
Freedom and Federalism
, Morley quoted Adolf Hitler as saying that “a powerful national government may encroach considerably upon the liberty of individuals as well as of the different States, and assume the responsibility for it, without weakening the Empire Idea, if only every citizen recognizes such measures as means for making his nation greater.” Morley then elaborated on what Hitler meant:
    In other words, the problem of empire-building is essentially mystical. It must somehow foster the impression that a man is great in the degree that his nation is great; that a German as such is superior to a Belgian as such; an Englishman, to an Irishman; an American, to a Mexican: merely because the first-named countries are in each case more powerful than their comparatives. And people who have no individual stature whatsoever are willing to accept this poisonous nonsense because it gives them a sense of importance without the trouble of any personal effort.
    The phenomenon Morley describes could not be further removed from the ideas of republican government, which have grown foreign to us after decades of military overstretch.
    Russell Kirk was one of the chief founders of American conservatism, and his book
The Conservative Mind
has been one of its most influential texts. And he, too, was suspicious of militarism: he was a critic of high military spending and opposed the Vietnam War, albeit privately. By the 1990s he was an outspoken opponent of his government’s military interventions and was concerned that they were making his country unnecessary enemies. “Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson were enthusiasts for American domination of the world,” Kirk said in 1991 at the Heritage Foundation. “Now George [H. W.] Bush appears to be emulating those eminent Democrats. . . . In general, Republicans throughout the twentieth century have been advocates of prudence and restraint in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
    As for wars for “democracy,” Kirk—being the traditional conservative he was—could hardly take the idea seriously. “Are we to saturation-bomb most of Africa and Asia into righteousness, freedom, and democracy?” Kirk wondered. “And, having accomplished that, however would we ensure persons yet more unrighteous might not rise up instead of the ogres we had swept away? Just that is what happened in the Congo, remember, three decades ago; and nowadays in Zaire, once called the Belgian Congo, we zealously uphold with American funds the dictator Mobutu, more blood-stained than Saddam. And have we forgotten Castro in Cuba?”
    In his book
The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft
, which he wrote with James McClellan, Kirk noted his subject’s aversion to war. (Taft was the great exemplar of the old Right in the Senate in the 1940s and 1950s.) “War, Taft perceived, was the enemy of constitution, liberty, economic security, and the cake of custom. . . . Though he was no theoretical pacifist, he insisted that every other possibility must be exhausted before resort to military action. War would make the American President a virtual dictator, diminish the