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MrRodgers -> More succinctly.....The Neocons vs. Donald Trump (3/10/2016 6:43:05 PM)
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.....neocons such as Mr. Cohen and Robert Kagan, as well as more traditional Republican foreign policy figures like the former World Bank president Robert B. Zoellick, announced they were “united in our opposition to a Donald Trump presidency.”
.....Indeed, in the magazine Commentary, the neoconservative historian Max Boot wrote, somewhat hyperbolically, that Mr. Trump is “the No. 1 threat to American security” — bigger than the Islamic State or China.
But they are wrong in asserting that he is somehow a danger to the traditional principles of the Republican Party. On the contrary, Mr. Trump represents a return to the party’s roots. It’s the neocons who are the interlopers.
Going back 1919 and the 20's (League of Nations)
.....entering the league, the Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge argued that intervening abroad would undermine American security: “If you tangle her in the intrigues of Europe, you will destroy her power for good and endanger her very existence.”
.....So-called mossback Republicans supported the punitive Immigration Act of 1924, which included provisions barring Asians and restricting African immigrants.
.....The party also backed protectionism: In June 1930 Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which worsened the Great Depression and stoked nationalism around the world. (I disagree about Smoot-Hawley but that's another thread)
.....The party’s embrace of outright isolationism culminated in opposition to aiding Britain once World War II began in 1939. Liberal Republicans like Henry Stimson and Frank Knox were drummed out of the party at the 1940 convention for joining the Roosevelt administration, the first as secretary of war and the second as secretary of the Navy.
.....After World War II, the right remained suspicious of militarism. It denounced Harry S. Truman’s sweeping alliances in Europe. In 1950, Herbert Hoover created a national uproar when he declared that America had to acknowledge limits to its power. Meanwhile, Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio proposed constitutional amendments aimed at destroying the president’s ability to conclude foreign treaties. And in 1951, another Ohio senator, Robert A. Taft, announced, “The principal purpose of the foreign policy of the United States is to maintain the liberty of our people.”
On Trump:
.....In fact, as Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution first pointed out in Politico, Mr. Trump has a “remarkably coherent and consistent worldview.” Mr. Trump, you could even say, is a spheres-of-influence kind of guy: Europe should take care of Ukraine, Russia should handle Syria. “When I see the policy of some of these people in our government,” he said on MSNBC this month, “we’ll be in the Middle East for another 15 years if we don’t end up losing by that time because our country is disintegrating.”
.....He’s demanding that countries like Germany, Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia pay more for the United States to defend them.
.....he’s ready to slap high tariffs on Japan and China — something that could trigger a global depression.
Once George W. Bush and the neocons led us into Iraq, it was probably only a matter of time before the neocons were called to account. Maybe the surprising thing isn’t that the party is starting to morph back into its original incarnation, but that it took this long.
HERE
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