Gideon Rachman ponders what it would look like:
But I do think that the easy assumption that the Tea Partyâ??s foreign policy would simply be George W.Bush on steroids may well be wrong.As this interesting piece on the Foreign Policy web-site makes clear, there is a deep division on foreign policy within the Tea Party movement. On the one hand, Sarah Palin clearly has embraced the musucular militarism of the neo-cons. On the other hand Ron and Rand Paul, who are also idols of the movement, are basically old-fashioned isolationists, whose talk of an â??American empire of more than 700 military bases in more than 120 countriesâ? could easily come from Noam Chomsky or Chalmers Johnson.
Thatâ??s a pretty important division. And, interestingly, Glenn Beck seems to be moving gradually away from the neo-cons and towards the isolationists. In fact, he has called for American troops to move out of Korea, Japan and Germany.
I honestly don't know anything about Glenn Beck's preferred policies, foreign or domestic, so instead I'll pick a very inconsequential but still irksome nit with Rachman's argument: the equation of military footprint with international engagement. I mean, would we call China "isolationist" because it has not built a series of military bases across the globe? Obviously not. So why - all else being equal - would changing the number of U.S. forward deployments and overseas military bases immediately qualify as an "isolationist" foreign policy?
(AP Photo)
