Commenting on the weird internecine fighting between fiscal and social conservatives that leaves the neocons unscathed, Ross said:

It’s true: As in the Cold War, foreign-policy hawkishness has become the glue holding the fragile GOP coalition together, even as Iraq has made foreign policy a general-election liability for the Right, instead of the asset it was in the Reagan years.

One of the reasons why hawkishness held together the coalition during the Cold War was in part a shared belief in anticommunism, which animated all parts of the coalition for different reasons, but the coalition was also held together by the related fear of appearing “weak” towards the Soviets.  It was also an asset because the form of that “hawkishness” was significantly different from the hawkishness of today.  Then hawkish rhetoric served some rational purpose in helping to provide the leverage for the negotiation of bilateral disarmament agreements and the gradual de-escalation of the Cold War.  Today advocates of hawkishness are devoted very simply to riling up the country to start wars, rather than providing for a strong defense for the sake of deterrence and preventing the outbreak of conflicts.  Such are the things done in the name of a “neo-Reaganite foreign policy,” as some interventionists dub their monstrosity.  

No more do you hear of peace through strength, and instead you hear a great deal about “Strength Through Willpower” or “Showing Our Resolve” and other morally dubious, vitalist phrases.  It isn’t just because Iraq went badly that hawkishness has become a political liability, but that the militarism the new hawkishness has created is fundamentally unwise and dangerous.  Key parts of this problem for the GOP are the exaggeration of the threat and the general hysteria about the extent of the threat, which has induced a kind of panic-stricken bunker mentality among many conservatives, which in turn gives off a disquieting air of desperation and anxiety.  Where a foreign policy of containment and strong defense seemed both eminently feasible and reasonable, expressing steady, sober confidence in America’s endurance and success, and the threat seemed sufficiently great to most to justify the costs of the policy, the modern equivalent of rollback-through-perpetual-war seems crazy and unsustainable, and seems all the more bizarre given that the jihadi threat is nowhere near as dangerous as the Soviets actually were.     

Today, there is also more or less a shared belief in anti-jihadism, but the embrace of hawkishness has become a mechanism for policing the coalition as much as it is an actual stance on policy.  Your fitness to belong to the coalition is called into question if you do not jump through the requisite hoops of declaring your abiding support for the warfare state–even Mike Huckabee, who never misses a chance to mention suicide bombers when he talks about the culture of death, has been branded as being potentially too “soft” and “weak” on foreign policy (perhaps because he shows signs of having a brain).  Hence the increasingly common fashion among Republican leaders, including Huckabee, to bow before the stupid idol of the term “Islamofascism” and the use of rhetoric about an “existential threat.”  These are not things that you say when you wish to describe the enemy and his capabilities accurately, but when you wish to build yourself up as clear-eyed, anti-fascist saviours, instill fear of ideological deviation among your peers and breed loathing of the “unpatriotic” ones who oppose you.  Even more than during the Cold War, when it was still at least remotely possible to carry on an intelligent conversation about foreign policy, today hawkishness is part of a statement of political identity even more than it is an approach to policy.