And as a general election strategy running to the left of Obama on foreign policy and the right on domestic policy might be tempting. In his brief pre-campaign campaign, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour seemed inclined to go down that path. Sarah Palin has now discovered her inner Robert Taft. And most distressingly, the otherwise highly capable and thoughtful Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is suggesting, much like Obama, that the Pentagon could use some chopping and, like the liberals in Congress, that we need to pare down our overseas commitments, not for national security reasons but simply on the basis that they cost too much.

A nominee sporting such an outlook, I would suggest, will tear the GOP asunder. Religious conservatives (who take seriously the unique role and obligation of the United States in the world) and defense hawks would be aghast to hear a Republican nominee trying to match (or even outbid) Obama’s defense reductions. And those Republican lawmakers who are bravely resisting the drumbeat in favor of slashing defense would be undercut by their party’s standard-bearer, leaving them vulnerable to attack by Democrats eager to throw the presidential nominee’s positions up in their faces. ~Jennifer Rubin

It is tedious to have to keep repeating this, but there are no isolationists in the Republican Party (nor anywhere else in America, for that matter)*. There are people calling for an end to prolonged foreign wars and voicing opposition to new, unnecessary wars, and there are some who regard bloated military spending and outdated, superfluous foreign commitments as burdens that the U.S. does not need and cannot afford. Isolationism is a meaningless pejorative term, but if it did mean anything it would have to mean that its adherents favor cutting America off from the rest of the world. It is only by labeling all these things as isolationist that one can say that any of the candidates, including Johnson and Paul, can be counted as isolationists.

Sarah Palin wasn’t channeling Robert Taft in recent days. She was offering a rehashed version of the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine that her new advisor gave her. Thus we have the spectacle of contemporary Republicans labeling isolationist a doctrine on the use of force originally created by Reagan’s Secretary of Defense. As ever, so-called “neo-Reaganites” have no use for the actual foreign policy of Reagan when it doesn’t suit their aggressive instincts. All that Haley Barbour asked, as far as I can tell, was why the U.S. was in Libya. As I said before, if that is all it takes to make one an isolationist there must be tens of millions of “isolationists” in the country. Daniels has opened the door to reevaluating U.S. commitments around the world, but he has yet to outline which commitments he thinks are necessary and which are not. Much to the irritation of impatient militarists, he hasn’t said much of anything on this subject. It is telling that simply raising questions about new, unconstitutional wars and the mere suggestion or slightest hint that reducing military spending at all invite the derisive application of the isolationist smear. We can just imagine what these critics will say if any of the candidates proposes reducing military spending to something more in line with what it was before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Of course, it is inevitable that militarists would want to raise the alarm about non-existent isolationists as a way of defending their preferred policies from any criticism or challenge. There is an element of panic in all this that is somewhat encouraging. Republican militarists are looking at the current and prospective GOP field, and they are not finding very many candidates they can easily accept. When Rubin says that a more skeptical or realist nominee would tear the party asunder, what she is saying is that she and those who share her views will do their best to tear it asunder if there is such a nominee.

* To be precise, the supposed inter-war “isolationism” that gave us this annoying term didn’t involve much in the way of international isolation:

The interwar years were in fact marked by intense American extraversion: cultural, economic, and political. A quarter-million American tourists spent over $300 million traveling Europe in 1929, while Ernest Hemingway, Joseph ine Baker, and T.S. Eliot took their acts abroad. Overseas missionary activity exploded. By 1930, the United States had more foreign direct investment than France, Holland, and Germany combined. Even with the Smoot-Hawley tariff, trade between the U.S. and Latin America tripled in the decade before 1941. The United States, emerging from the Great War as the world’s largest creditor nation, negotiated British, French, and German war debts with the Dawes Plan in 1924 and the Locarno Convention of 1925. This is isolationism?

One of the ironies of this legend is that those interwar senators retrospectively tagged as isolationists—known in their time as “Peace Progressives”—were among the most outward-looking politicians of their era. The Peace Progressives were mostly Western and Midwestern Republicans, most prominent among them Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, William Borah (“The Lion of Idaho”), and Hiram Johnson of California. They successfully rolled back longstanding U.S. military occupations in the Caribbean and Central America, and their efforts arguably averted war with Mexico in the 1920s. Borah took the lead in forging multilateral arms-reduction treaties with Great Britain and Japan.

Update: There is something grimly amusing about Rubin’s description of a restatement of the Weinberger Doctrine as isolationist, since Weinberger’s original statement of the doctrine was overflowing with warnings about the supposed evils of so-called isolationism. The point here isn’t just that the use of the isolationist smear is wrong in this instance, but that the smear has been deployed for decades as a useful foil for whatever position the person using the smear wants to advocate.