Many on the mainstream Right are now increasingly beginning to question American foreign policy. This is not only long overdue, but absolutely necessary before genuine conservatism can ever take root.
"Unlike the Right’s past tax revolts, the Tea Party is animated by opposition to the exorbitant level of federal spending and indebtedness. With their rejection of Republican bailouts and “compassionate conservatism,” they have turned away from the neoconservatives’ social-democratic roots. By applying their frugality to foreign policy, they could make a clean break from neoconservatism.
"Although the Tea Party has an identifiable antiwar wing—one poll found that the elder Paul was the group’s second-most admired politician, after Sarah Palin—by and large the Tea Partiers’ instinctive patriotism makes them a tough audience for criticism of U.S. intervention. To them, the relevant question is whose side are you on? They know they are on America’s.
"But there is a limit to their willingness to spend American blood and treasure, especially as the nation teeters at the brink of insolvency. Many of them are tired of paying for the defense of Europeans they regard as fairweather friends and freeloaders, propping up foreign welfare states that serve as the model for everything they oppose at home. Neither do they want their tax dollars spent indefinitely in Middle Eastern countries whose populations don’t greet us as liberators and whose governments look more like the sharia states we claim to oppose than the democracies we are supposed to be creating..."
