It’s no surprise that Marc Thiessen misidentifies the GOP’s problem on foreign policy:

Republicans have a “squishy hawk” problem.

Most of the major GOP voices defending the National Security Agency and drone strikes, fighting Obama’s defense cuts and advocating strong U.S. leadership in the world — folks like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Buck McKeon and Peter King — are great on national security, but not exactly on the cutting edge of the fight for limited government. By contrast, many of those advocating isolationist retreat — such as Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Justin Amash — are conservative insurgents who came to office by challenging the GOP establishment.

In other words, the most vocal and aggressive hawks in the GOP today tend to be more trusting of the government on almost all issues, and advocates for restraint in foreign policy are more likely to be skeptics of government actions at home as well. This is not an accident, but relates directly to the latter’s readiness to criticize and oppose the expansion of government powers in a more consistent and principled way. These hawks aren’t “on the cutting edge of the fight for limited government” because their main concern is to justify increasing the government’s powers and to defend the powers that it already has. On some issues, these hawks equate limiting powers of the government with sabotaging their preferred policies. This is a problem for the “squishy hawks” themselves, and it is one of their own making.

Most of the hawks that Thiessen likes most supported the Bush administration in its fiscally irresponsible domestic agenda just as they supported its foreign policy blunders. If some post-Bush conservatives are now recoiling against both sides of the Bush-era agenda, the hawks are partly responsible for that, too. It is also not an accident that “fiscal hawks are foreign policy doves, while the foreign policy hawks are fiscal doves.” That is a product of the hawks’ refusal to consider any significant reductions in military spending.

Thiessen is concerned that conservatives might keep noticing that a costly and aggressive foreign policy and an expansive national security state aren’t consistent with support for limited and constitutional government:

The danger is that, as isolationist insurgents continue to clash with establishment hawks, the GOP grassroots will increasingly associate a robust conservative internationalism with establishment squishiness on the domestic issues they really care about.

It’s very likely that conservatives will associate these two things in the future, because the two have been and continue to be linked together. This isn’t something that the “squishy hawks” can fix, because they genuinely aren’t interested in the causes of limited government or fiscal responsibility.