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Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. By Patrick J. Buchanan. New York: Crown Publishers, 2008. 518 pages. $29.95. Reviewed by Professor Jeffrey Record, Department of Strategy, Air War College.
Isolationism has been a spent force within the Republican Party ever since Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated Robert Taft for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952. Within the party, however, isolationist voices remain, including Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul. Buchanan,who opposed both theGeorgeH.W. BushAdministration's war to liberate Kuwait in 1991 and the George W. Bush Administration's war to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003, has insisted that the United States is a republic, not an empire, and therefore should drop the role of international policeman.
Buchanan is an Anglophobic, "Old Right" conservative who despises the neoconservative agenda of foisting democracy on foreign states, waging preventive war to forestall challenges to US global military supremacy, and promoting Israel's interests in the Middle East. He also inveighs against the neoconservatives' adulation of Winston Churchill, an admiration shared by much of America's political leadership. "There has arisen among America's elite a Churchill cult," whose acolytes believe that "Churchill was not only a peerless leader but a statesman of unparalleled vision whose life and legend should be the model for every statesman," Buchanan contends in Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. "To this cult, defiance anywhere of US hegemony, resistance anywhere to America's power becomes another 1938. Every adversary is 'a new Hitler,' every proposal to avert war 'another Munich.'"
The author believes that Churchill was both a...