DERRY, N.H. — The hawkish consensus on national security that has dominated Republican foreign policy for the last decade is giving way to a more nuanced view, with some presidential candidates expressing a desire to withdraw from Afghanistan as quickly as possible and suggesting that the United States has overreached in Libya.I noticed this, and I wondered a bit about Michele Bachmann on foreign policy. She hardly sounds like a neocon, but I think that's good. We've been in Afghanistan for almost 10 years, and that's hard to sustain politically. Look for a lot of folks to declare victory and advocate a rapid drawdown.
The shift, while incremental so far, appears to mark a separation from a post-Sept. 11 posture in which Republicans were largely united in supporting an aggressive use of American power around the world. A new debate over the costs and benefits of deploying the military reflects the length of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the difficulty of building functional governments and the financial burden at home in a time of extreme fiscal pressure.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Candidates Show G.O.P. Less United on Goals of War
At New York Times:
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Not only were the candidates surprisingly antiwar, they were even more anti-immigration -- in other words, turning their backs on the entire Neocon agenda.
Too little, too late, perhaps, since we're saddled with the growing tabs for both their wars and de facto open borders policies, but reality has finally slapped most Americans awake.
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