Fighting Enemies Foreign and Domestic: The Legacy of Angelo M. Codevilla
Edited by Ryan P. Williams.
Encounter Books, 2025.
Hardcover, 128 pages, $24.99.
Reviewed by Chuck Chalberg.
If the title of this collection of essays written in memory of and tribute to the late Angelo Codevilla is very much on target, and it is, the content of each piece is entirely fitting as well. Their collective punchiness is a perfect match for the punchiness of Codevilla’s prose—which is as it should be, especially when you know what he knew, namely that you’re fighting the good fight against enemies both foreign and domestic.
That much—and much, much more—Codevilla surely knew, and perhaps as only an immigrant to America could know. Or maybe that should be amended to read “perhaps as only an immigrant to America who quickly and permanently came to love America could know.” That love affair began when a not quite teen-aged Angelo Codevilla left Italy for America with his family in 1955. It never cooled, and it never ended.
In two ways Codevilla might be described as the Chuck Bednarik of public affairs. The last of the full time double-duty players in the NFL, Bednarik was a center and linebacker for the Philadelphia Eagles of long ago. Codevilla did Bednarik one better than that. While he, too, played offense and defense, Codevilla was also a two-way force in two different ways. At times an academic (and a Machiavelli scholar) and at other times in government service (whether as a naval intelligence officer or a foreign service officer or a senate staffer), he was alternately an outsider and an insider. An authority on international affairs, his concerns about domestic affairs drove him to write about America at home with authority—and punchiness—as well.
It’s no wonder then that Codevilla had enemies both foreign and domestic. It’s also no wonder that he had enemies on the right, as well as many more on the left.
To be sure, Angelo Codevilla was not without friends, allies, and family. Numbered among them in these pages are Thomas Codevilla, one of his sons and a Claremont Institute Publius Fellow; David Corbin, Emeritus Professor of Politics at Providence Christian College; David Goldman, Washington fellow of the Claremont Institute; Steven Hayward, Claremont senior fellow; Brian Kennedy, former president of the Claremont Institute; Robert Reilly, Director of the Westminster Institute; J. Michael Waller, President of Georgetown Research; and Ryan Williams, President of the Claremont Institute.
Rather than review each essay individually or compare and contrast their respective punchiness, this review essay will seek to make a case for the continuing relevance and importance of the Codevillan approach to foreign and domestic affairs. That case could be captured in a single sentence. More than that, it could be the basis for a new and lasting realignment on the right. (In his book The Ruling Class, published in 2010, he detailed his commitment to what he called a new American “country party,” an anti-elitist party that he thought would likely draw the support of three-fourths of current GOP voters, while gradually attracting independent and some Democratic support.)
And the sentence? Here it is: Angelo Codevilla advanced and argued for an anti-Wilsonian approach to both American foreign and American domestic policy. And here is Codevilla continuing to do double duty by attacking Wilsonianism on both fronts. What could be more pointed—and potentially punchier—than that?
To be sure, running against Wilsonianism better than a century after the fact would need to be updated and fleshed out. But Codevilla himself began to do just that with his study of John Quincy Adams and his version of an America first foreign policy. In it, Codevilla offered a restatement of Warren Harding’s call for a “return to normalcy.” That normalcy was neither hidebound isolationism nor crusading internationalism (on the order of Wilsonianism), but a return to a John Quincy Adams, interest-based foreign policy.
In essence, Codevilla long contended that the country began to take a serious wrong turn away from the founding principles of the country with the early twentieth-century progressive movement, especially the progressive movement at home and abroad when both were in the hands of Woodrow Wilson. And a wrong turn wasn’t the half of it. What Henry Luce regarded as the American century was for Angelo Codevilla a century of governmental growth and societal decline. As far as Codevilla was concerned, the fact that the former had aided and abetted the latter was both obvious and not at all an accident.
Of course, the American century did include the defeat of fascism, German, Italian and Japanese style. A muted Wilsonianism did echo the spread of democracy at the point of a gun. The same century saw victory in the Cold War—and the hubris of the “end of history” that accompanied it. Codevilla did not gainsay any of this, even as he worried about the continued growth of an American “leviathan state.”
And the twenty-first century? In 1997 Codevilla published The Character of Nations. Subtitled How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family and Civility, the book sought to explain the causes and consequences of America’s societal decline. More than that, Steven Hayward contends that in it Codevilla “outlined just how America was hardening into ‘another kind of country.’” Well, Hayward and his fellow essayists are largely in agreement that that other kind of country is now what America has become.
What to do? A few of the essayists in this collection are convinced that we have passed the point of no return. David Corbin is the most outspoken. As he puts it, “we must face the unfortunate truth that our constitutional republic is beyond repair.”
And Codevilla himself? According to Brian Kennedy, he was a “fierce critic” of America’s “turn away” from our founding principles. More than that, he remained “fiercely devoted to the recovery of the American idea” right up to his untimely death in a traffic accident in 2021. Why else would he have continued to write and teach within the sense of urgency that he routinely demonstrated?
In fact, it’s not impossible to imagine that Angelo Codevilla might have begun to be worried about America soon after his arrival in America. Kennedy speculates that this “contentious man” could have uttered something along these lines as a young lad when he came to these shores in 1955: “What a beautiful place. I must defend it. These people don’t seem to know how to do this. I need to teach them.”
By “these people” both a speculating Kennedy and a speculated-upon Codevilla had in mind American leaders rather than the American people. More than that, the two are in agreement that the American people are, by and large, a serious people, while their leaders all too often are not. Oh, the politicians and the bureaucrats may be quite serious about advancing their own careers and interests, but they are all too often insufficiently serious about defending America and American interests. Nor, for that matter, are they as serious as they should be about adhering to the founding principles of the country.
Here the Codevilla indictment was entirely bipartisan in that it was an indictment of the uniparty, meaning the dominant Democratic party and those Republicans who were content to serve as the subordinate junior partner in the operation.
Codevilla, whose “default mode,” according to Kennedy, was always that of an instructor, was very serious about both defending American interests and restoring the founding principles of the country. Once again, for Codevilla it was always all about the necessity of simultaneously playing defense and offense.
Both J. Michael Waller and Brian Kennedy focus on Codevilla’s work on intelligence and defense issues, both as a senate staffer in the late 1970s and subsequently in the Reagan White House. Each praises his efforts to advance a missile defense system (SDI) before expressing Codevillian foreboding over the ongoing failure to implement it.
Waller’s emphasis is on Codevilla’s work on the Senate Intelligence Committee where a then-thirtysomething staffer “gleefully terrorized” Democrats and Republicans alike at a time when his “bipartisan spleen” was on full public display. It was during these years that Codevilla also kept an increasingly suspicious private eye trained on both the CIA and the FBI, bureaucracies that he eventually would conclude had outlived their usefulness at best and had become entrenched obstacles to protecting and advancing American interests at worst.
Governmental bureaucracies, after all, are just that, bureaucracies. The original progressives regarded them as vitally necessary and potentially and actually, shall we say, progressive. Codevilla saw them as a necessary evil that had long since realized their potential to become, might it be said, actually deplorable.
If anything, Codevilla placed his faith in America in the hands of those American people whom too many members of the American elite have come to regard as “deplorable.” No named member of that elite is mentioned in the context of that term, so no name will be mentioned here. The name of a certain president who benefited from the votes of the aforementioned deplorables is mentioned if only to note, as Steven Hayward does, that Codevilla had “mixed feelings” about this president. (The only other mention of this particular president is by David Goldman, who thinks that if this president had not existed, then one Angelo Codevilla “would have had to invent him.”)
In any case, Angelo Codevilla did not have mixed feelings about much of anything or anyone. It’s also not likely that he would have had many mixed feelings about the direction and staffing of the second term of the incumbent president. This is noteworthy, given that more than one of these essayists notes that Codevilla’s voice and those of a similar mindset were essentially frozen out of the second Reagan administration. As David Goldman puts it, Codevilla and his “co-thinkers” were “pushed out of power” in Reagan’s second term.
To be sure, while Codevilla would not deny that the policies of the Reagan administration contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union, Hayward notes that Codevilla thought that the “proximate” cause of the collapse of communism in Russia was simply the regime’s “waning will to murder.”
Robert Reilly is also on hand to remind readers that Angelo Codevilla was an anti-millenarian thinker to his core. More than that, Codevilla’s writing remains on hand to remind us that the U. S. Constitution was an anti-millenarian document. If it was a statement of limited government, as it surely was, Codevilla was a believer in adhering to a sense of limits in both foreign and domestic policy.
Not so millenarians, whether they be American-style progressives or Soviet-style communists. To be sure, Codevilla was not so foolish as to equate the two. At the same time he was also not so foolish as to ignore the foolhardiness—and dangers—of “end of history” or “arc of history” or “right side of history” thinking and acting and policymaking on the part of American progressives.
This would be the same Angelo Codevilla who was appalled at Woodrow Wilson’s classically Wilsonian statement that the “interests of all nations are our own,” who would be “dumbfounded” (according to Reilly) at the millenarianism of George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, and who would give his twelve year old son Tom a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago to read and write a book report on.
Codevilla’s son Tom reports that his father then pointed to a passage in the book that led him to do that “crazy-eyed half-smile, half-snarl thing” he only did when he was really fired up: “Violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence.”
Yes, Angelo Codevilla was always the teacher. At the same time he was always competing fiercely against his enemies whether he was on offense or defense, even if his own fired up, snarly-faced ferocity was never quite in the same league as that of Chuck Bednarik.
John C. “Chuck” Chalberg writes from Minnesota and once performed as G. K. Chesterton.
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