Alex Massie wrote a good rebuttal to Erica Grieder’s original post on “isolationism” and military spending last week, and this is part of her response. First, I have to repeat that the military spending reductions in the debt deal that will probably never materialize do not in any way represent a “return of isolationism,” so that’s just wrong.

On the larger question of whether the American public or the Republican Party rank-and-file would be willing to accept a less activist and interventionist foreign policy, I would say that there has been a significant shift in the public mood away from interventionist policies, but it is not all that large a shift. There are more elected Republicans willing to oppose military intervention than there have been in over a decade, and there are more presidential candidates calling for reductions in military spending and a faster conclusion to the war in Afghanistan than we’ve seen in other elections, but the party will still end up nominating one of the standard-issue hawks.

Grieder tries to find support for her argument by looking at the 2012 presidential field. She says this about Rick Perry:

Rick Perry has met with some neocons this summer, but in the preceding ten years he has rarely bothered to have a view on foreign policy, an indication of his disinterest in the subject.

If Perry has not been interested in the subject, this is probably because for the past decade he has been acting as governor. Governors have little reason to spend their time thinking or speaking on foreign policy issues. Perry had ruled out a presidential campaign in the foreseeable future, and he changed his mind only when a large opening appeared in the 2012 field. Perry’s previous interest in foreign policy or lack thereof is not nearly as important as his positioning now that he seems ready to launch a presidential campaign. Indeed, I would say that his lack of interest is probably matched by a lack of specific knowledge, and that is what will make it even easier for his advisers to mold his views to match theirs. Compared to then-Gov. Bush, Perry is already positioning himself as a much more aggressive interventionist than Bush did, and his previous endorsement of Giuliani’s doomed presidential bid suggests that Perry sympathizes with Giuliani on these questions.

Grieder concludes:

It’s possible that the eventual Republican nominee will be less interventionist than Mr Obama, if only for cyclical reasons.

Given the current state of the field, that doesn’t seem possible. If we take for granted that neither Jon Huntsman nor Ron Paul is going to be the nominee, that really just leaves Bachmann as the potentially “less interventionist” nominee, but on every other issue besides the Libyan war she is as hawkish and interventionist as any candidate in the field. Regardless, being “less interventionist” than Obama doesn’t count for much. Obama’s hyper-activity in bombing other countries makes that comparison almost meaningless. If the Republican nominee proved to be “less interventionist” than Obama by some measure, that just indicates how often Obama has opted to use the military abroad.

Update: Joshua Keating reviews Perry’s recent foreign policy statements and concludes that he is positioning himself as a “conventional Republican defense hawk.”