Dr. K. is wrong on this. Democrats (as Jonah points out) in the 1930’s were just as isolationist as Republicans. I do agree with him though that taking back the Senate and the presidency is the only way to go and shutting down the government would  be a bonanza for Obama and that closing down the government would be suicidal.

by Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON — A combination of early presidential maneuvering and internal policy debate is feeding yet another iteration of that media perennial: the great Republican crackup. This time it’s tea-party insurgents versus get-along establishment fogies fighting principally over two things: national security and Obamacare.

National security

Gov. Chris Christie recently challenged Sen. Rand Paul over his opposition to the National Security Agency metadata program. Paul has also tangled with Sen. John McCain and other internationalists over drone warfare, democracy promotion and, more generally, intervention abroad.

So what else is new? The return of the most venerable strain of conservative foreign policy — isolationism — was utterly predictable. GOP isolationists dominated until Pearl Harbor and then acquiesced to an activist internationalism during the Cold War because of a fierce detestation of communism.

With communism gone, the conservative coalition should have fractured long ago. This was delayed by 9/11 and the rise of radical Islam. But now, 12 years into that era — after Afghanistan and Iraq, after drone wars and the NSA revelations — the natural tension between isolationist and internationalist tendencies has resurfaced.

[……..]

The more fundamental GOP divide is over foreign aid and other manifestations of our role as the world’s leading power. The Paulites, pining for the splendid isolation of the 19th century, want to leave the world alone on the assumption that it will then leave us alone.

Which rests on the further assumption that international stability — open sea lanes, free commerce, relative tranquility — comes naturally, like the air we breathe. If only that were true. Unfortunately, stability is not a matter of grace. It comes about only by Great Power exertion.

In the 19th century, that meant the British navy, behind whose protection America thrived. Today, alas, Britannia rules no waves. World order is maintained by American power and American will. Take that away and you don’t get tranquility. You get chaos.

That’s the Christie/McCain position. They figure that America doesn’t need two parties of retreat. Paul’s views, more measured and moderate than his fringy father’s, are still in the minority among conservatives, but gathering strength.  […….]

Obamacare

The other battle is about defunding Obamacare. Led by Sens. Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, the GOP insurgents are threatening to shut down the government on Oct. 1 if the stopgap funding bill contains money for Obamacare.

This is nuts. The president will never sign a bill defunding the singular achievement of his presidency. Especially when he has control of the Senate. Especially when, though a narrow majority (51 percent) of Americans disapprove of Obamacare, only 36 percent favor repeal. President Obama so knows he’ll win any shutdown showdown that he’s practically goading the Republicans into trying.

Never make a threat on which you are not prepared to deliver. Every fiscal showdown has redounded against the Republicans. The first, in 1995, effectively marked the end of the Gingrich revolution. The latest, last December, led to a last-minute Republican cave that humiliated the GOP and did nothing to stop the tax hike it so strongly opposed.

Those who fancy themselves tea-party patriots fighting a sold-out cocktail-swilling establishment are demanding yet another cliff dive as a show of principle and manliness.

But there’s no principle at stake here. This is about tactics. [……]

As for manliness, the real question here is sanity. Nothing could better revive the fortunes of a failing, flailing, fading Democratic administration than a government shutdown where the president is portrayed as standing up to the GOP on honoring our debts and paying our soldiers in the field.

How many times must we learn the lesson? You can’t govern from one house of Congress. You need to win back the Senate and then the presidency. Shutting down the government is the worst possible way to get there. Indeed, it’s Obama’s fondest hope for a Democratic recovery.

Read the rest –  On healing the GOP

Jonah demolishes the myth that the GOP alone was isolationist in the run up to World war II.

by Jonah Goldberg

They’re back! The isolationist poltergeists that forever haunt the Republican Party. Or so we’re told.

In July, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had a set-to over American foreign policy. Christie clumsily denounced “this strain of libertarianism that’s going through parties right now and making big headlines I think is a very dangerous thought.” It was clumsy in its garbled syntax but also in its ill-considered shot at “libertarianism.” What he meant to say, I think, was “isolationist,” and that is the term a host of commentators on the left and right are using to describe Paul and his ideas.  [………]

I’m not so sure. Last week, Paul introduced a measure to cut off foreign aid to Egypt. After some lively and enlightening debate, Paul’s amendment went down in flames 86 to 13. And, as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank noted, that margin was misleading given that six senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), sided with Paul only when they knew he would lose the vote. […….]

[………]

In other words, rumors that the GOP is returning to its isolationist roots are wildly exaggerated.

In fact, rumors that the GOP’s roots were ever especially isolationist are exaggerated too.

Republicans first got tagged with the isolationist label when Massachusetts Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge led the opposition to the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. But his opposition to a stupid treaty in the wake of a misguided war wasn’t necessarily grounded in isolationist sentiment. Lodge was an interventionist hawk on both WWI and the Spanish-American War. Lodge even agreed to ratify President Wilson’s other treaty, which would have committed the U.S. to defend France if it were attacked by Germany.

Or consider the famously isolationist Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio), a role model of former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). As a presidential candidate, Paul routinely touted Taft’s opposition to U.S. membership to NATO as proof of the GOP’s isolationist roots. But Taft also supported the Truman Doctrine and, albeit reluctantly, the Marshall Plan. He promised “100 percent support for the Chinese National government on Formosa [Taiwan],” and wanted to station up to six divisions in Europe. What an isolationist!

Meanwhile, countless leading liberals and Democrats embraced isolationism by name in the 1930s and deed after World War II. J.T. Flynn, the foremost spokesman for the America First Committee, for example, was a longtime columnist for the liberal New Republic.

The self-avowed isolationist movement died in the ashes of World War II. But while it lived it was a bipartisan cause, just like interventionism. Similarly, the competing impulses to engage the world and to draw back from it aren’t the exclusive provenance of a single party; rather they run straight through the American heart.  [……..] Even most hawks preferred a cold war to a hot one with the Soviet Union. And most doves supported striking back against al-Qaeda after 9/11.

Many supposedly isolationist libertarians are for free trade and easy immigration but also want to shrink the military. Many supposedly isolationist progressives hate free trade and globalization but love the United Nations and international treaties.

Krauthammer is absolutely right that the GOP is going to have a big foreign policy debate — and it should (as should the Democrats). I’m just not sure bandying around the I-word will improve or illuminate that debate very much.

Read the rest – Isolation versus intervention is a bipartisan debate