Left/right anti-war alliance forming on Afghanistan?

Now, polls show that isolationist sentiment is growing rapidly and resonates especially with some conservatives. At last year’s CPAC conference, the John Birch Society was welcomed as a sponsor, and the forces of Ron Paul combined with them to create a new antiwar bloc. Long forgotten, Robert A. Taft and those who adhere to his views have suddenly made a return to the conservative ranks. The Old Right view, Avlon writes, “is fueling grassroots conservatism with an ideologically coherent critique of both Bush and Obama, against foreign wars and the growing federal debt.”

The reason such a development is dangerous? Go back and ask yourselsf what would have happened had the Taftites and the Old Right won over the Eisenhower center-right coalition. The answer is simple. The United States would have not helped create NATO; the Marshall Plan might have been defeated; and with the support of the pro-Communist Left, Joe Stalin and his minions would have had an American government willing to follow a policy of appeasement that would have allowed Stalin to take over not just Eastern Europe, but countries like France and Italy as well. Now the new neo-isolationists are promoting a policy that stands at odds with that which under Truman, Eisenhower, and later Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. It also opposes the steps taken by George W. Bush during his administration to fight radical Islam and the War on Terror.

This return to isolationist prescriptions once again echoes the views and outlook of those on the political anti-war Left. As I wrote in my old Boston Globe article, the Buchananites promise to “champion a number of causes that also find support on the political left: protectionism to keep workers’ wages high in America, opposition to globalism (‘we will point to the pitfalls of the global free trade economy;); and the struggle against ‘global hegemony.’ Noam Chomsky probably would not put it differently.” And that is why when readers picks up The American Conservative, they might be excused for wondering if they had accidentally picked up The Nation.