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The Spectacle Blog
Ross Douthat picks up on a theme I explored in a column last month: the intraconservative foreign policy debate, as personified by Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. He writes:
Rubio is the great neoconservative hope, the champion of a foreign policy that boldly goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy. In the Senate, he’s constantly pressed for a more hawkish line against the Mideast’s bad actors. His maiden Senate speech was a paean to national greatness, whose peroration invoked John F. Kennedy and insisted that America remain the “watchman on the wall of world freedom.”
Paul, on the other hand, has smoothed the crankish edges off his famous father’s antiwar conservatism, reframing it in the language of constitutionalism, the national interest and the budget deficit… In a recent address at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Paul presented himself as the real foreign-policy “moderate” - neither an isolationist nor a Wilsonian idealist, but someone who believes we should be “somewhere some of the time” without trying to be “everything to everyone.”
Even this moderate dissent from hyperinterventionism is too much for John McCain, who denounced the Republican presidential field as “isolationist” for what were, aside from Ron Paul, fairly mild criticisms of the Obama administration’s policies in Afghanistan and Libya.
But that’s exactly what bothers McCain. Under Bush, Republican skepticism of war would have been confined to Paul and a few other outliers. Now it is creeping into the mainstream of the GOP, reviving, as I wrote last week, a debate that broke out during the 1990s. Douthat concludes his piece by discussing Rubio’s “story of a great republic armed and righteous, with no limits on what it can accomplish in the world.”
“This is a story that many conservatives - and many Americans - want to believe. Once, I believed it myself,” Douthat writes. “But that was many years and many wars ago, and now I think Rand Paul is right.” Douthat isn’t alone.
View all comments (20) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by W. James Antle, III
http://spectator.org/blog/2011/06/20/republicans-debate-foreign-pol
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Wayne | 6.20.11 @ 11:54AM
All I can say is that we still have learned nothing from Viet Nam, nothing. The hawks from the Democratic Party, just migrated over to the GOP trying to produce a New World Order.
In the process we have lost tens of thousands of American lives and over a trillion dollars. And what exactly do we have to show for it?
Occam's Tool| 6.20.11 @ 12:06PM
What we have to show for it is a world less disastrous than would be otherwise. One can never discuss disasters avoided with any degree of precision.
That being said, I'm not a great believer in Nation Building---at least not until all dissidence is smashed, a la Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. But we are dealing with a hostile, aggressive philosophy in sharia.
Louis Tully| 6.20.11 @ 12:08PM
"a great republic armed and righteous, with no limits on what it can accomplish in the world."
This fantasy republic also requires a large, dynamic economy, hitting on all cylinders. We once had that, but no longer, thanks to Washington DC. Sorry Marco, we're broke. Suggest you rethink your foreign policy accordingly.
John Rambo| 6.20.11 @ 9:25PM
This^^^
steve in Ohio| 6.20.11 @ 12:36PM
The wrong Paul is running for President. I hope Rand is also more realistic (restrictionist) than his dad on immigration.
Siegfried X| 6.20.11 @ 12:45PM
The Rand Paul comparison is is unfair and inaccurate; in fact it is a smear. Rand Paul is a libertarian pacifist: most other Republicans aren't. There's nothing conservative about wanting to fight everyone everywhere at all times.
The real problem, as someone mentioned above, is that the bunch of Democratic hawks ("neo-cons") switched to the Republican Party. I'm talking about people like Charles Krauthammer, who worked in Democratic President Jimmy Carter's administration, and was speech writer for extreme left-wing Democratic vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale.
WilliamR| 6.20.11 @ 1:16PM
Rand Paul is no libertarian pacifist. That's a buffoonish statement.
Red Phillips | 6.20.11 @ 2:18PM
WilliamR, it is not accurate to call Rand a pacifist, but the way I read it Siegfried was, I think, actually trying to defend Rand.
WilliamR| 6.20.11 @ 6:00PM
Red you're right. Sorry Siegfried.
John Rambo| 6.20.11 @ 9:29PM
Wow great insight! There is NOTHING conservative about neocons. They along with the dems are all working for the same people anyway. Eachother and no one else.
WilliamR| 6.20.11 @ 1:17PM
I'm afraid Rubio is a lightweight.
Red Phillips | 6.20.11 @ 2:18PM
Rubio is worse than a lightweight. He is a fool.
ROLLTIDE| 6.20.11 @ 7:43PM
worse, Rubio is a crook. Such a waste.
PCC| 6.20.11 @ 1:42PM
Bin Laden is dead. Ten years in the AfPak toilet is long enough. Time to declare victory and bring the troops home.
The burden of proof rests with those who want to stay one minute more.
Derek Leaberry| 6.20.11 @ 1:57PM
Countries saddled with perpetual $ 1.5 trillion deficits can not play world policeman or slay every dragon on Earth.
Red Phillips | 6.20.11 @ 2:24PM
"a great republic armed and righteous..."
Conservatives, please ponder on that idea for a minute. That that IS NOT a conservative conception should require no explanation. It obviously isn't. It is rank Jacobinism.
Margie| 6.20.11 @ 8:55PM
Jacobin.. hmm. That anything like Jacobean? That lovely pattern on my drapes.
Sigh.
John Rambo| 6.20.11 @ 9:35PM
We have wasted the fruits of our forefathers and too much of the blood of our brothers an sisters on this neocon foreign policy disaster. The best thing we could do is kick these fools out of our party. Once we had a republic, now we have a slum.
"Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto."
Thomas Jefferson
Zbigniew Mazurak | 6.21.11 @ 1:19AM
Ha! Once again we see James Antle (along wit the usual paulbot trolls like John Rambo and Red Phillips) make a fool of himself, blathering nonsense about issues he knows nothing about.
In this case, these guys are STILL trying to deceive the very few Americans who read Antle's blogposts that the only alternative to the Paul foreign policy of isolationism and disarmament is a McCainiac neocon foreign policy of promiscous interventionism.
That proposition (although not explicitly stated here) is FALSE.
There is a third option, which is being argued by the REAL Constitutional conservatives, such as Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and (I know, I know, I'm not modest) myself. This third option is a policy calling for a strong military but also for strict guidelines on how the military would be used, and under such guidelines it should be used for interventions only if American interests are threatened, not if merely some dictator murders his own people. Specifically, Palin has called for the reinstatement of the Weinberger doctrine, which was formulated in the wake of the 1983 Lebanese fiasco and which George Shultz derided as an "all-or-nothing approach". This Weinbergerite foreign policy is what Ronald Reagan advocated. This is the REAL conservative foreign policy.
Cheap golf clubs | 6.21.11 @ 8:35AM
so nice post