Colin Dueck and Roger Zakheim offer an outline of “reform conservative” foreign policy that doesn’t seem to involve any discernible reforms. It is very short on new ideas and long on very familiar, tired arguments:

It is unacceptable to respond to these trends by saying — as the anti-interventionists do — that fortress America is the best guarantor of our security, and that we need to retreat even further. There will be no safety for Americans in retreat. It will only be read as weakness. And it’s deeply delusional to think that authoritarian adversaries will not take advantage of this weakness.

It doesn’t say much for this “reform conservative” approach that its adherents have to rely on misrepresentations from the start. Non-interventionists don’t argue for a “fortress America” position, but they do call for getting rid of redundant and unnecessary U.S. deployments overseas. Wealthy allies ought to be providing much more for their own defense, and the only way they will ever be motivated to do that is if they can’t keep counting on the U.S. to provide for it at our expense. Almost seventy years after the end of WWII and over twenty years since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. shouldn’t be expected to keep footing the bill for the defense of wealthy allied countries. Our major allies in Europe and Asia have the means to defend themselves, but the U.S. currently gives them every incentive to use those means for everything except defense. The so-called “reform” agenda being offered here would just increase U.S. military spending, and that would ensure that allied dependency continues even longer.

Dueck and Zakheim aren’t proposing anything that every other Republican hawk doesn’t already propose. “Don’t retreat and spend more on the military” could very easily have been the Romney campaign slogan in 2012. They spend a lot of time criticizing what they call “neo-isolationism,” but say almost nothing specific about what their “reforms” would involve. They say that their approach would “look to correct some of the most common foreign-policy errors of the post–Cold War era,” but except for droning on about the unacceptability of “retreat” they never identify what any of those errors are. I’m sure it is supposed to be reassuring that they want to “take great care before committing America’s armed forces to combat,” but then this is what everyone says. The claim that they would take “great care” would be more credible if they ruled out preventive war, but on this–and everything else except military spending–they have nothing specific to say.

In fairness, this is just one article and it is only the first one, but as a rule advocates for policy reform normally have a few proposals that are new or at least somewhat different from the usual arguments. There aren’t any of those here. As far as I can tell, Dueck and Zakheim aren’t recommending that Republicans make any changes to their current foreign policy agenda, and their one concrete proposal is to throw more money at the Pentagon. That isn’t Republican or conservative foreign policy reform. It isn’t even a very good imitation of it.