Hawks Are Standing in the Way of a New Republican Party
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A painful contradiction lies at the heart of the American right. Even as conservatives are breaking with some Cold War orthodoxies on domestic policy, Republican politicians remain wedded to that era’s violently expansionist foreign policy. They oppose liberal imperialism in the United States —the aggressive push to impose progressive values, often joined to corporate power — while still contriving to spread the same order to the ends of the earth.
It’s a contradictory vision, and for many members of the so-called new right who are pushing for a political realignment of the Republican Party, it presents a major stumbling block. We do not want to see this new vision of conservative American politics co-opted by hawkish ideologues more interested in posturing abroad than in reform here at home. Conservatives must make a clear break with neo-neoconservative foreign policy and instead emphasize widely shared material development at home and cultural nonaggression abroad as the keys to U.S. security.
Today’s nationalist hawks often speak of an obligation to defend democratic allies dotting the peripheries of revanchist powers like Russia and China. But if they had their way, the real-world effects would be little different from those of their hawkish predecessors: protracted and destabilizing conflicts that would distract us from domestic reform — not to mention imperil the lives of overwhelmingly working-class young Americans in uniform.
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