But now let us direct our gaze toward the non-hypocrites. At least, it is often said of the isolationists, they are operating according to principle. Fine. But it’s a morally bankrupt principle, and an idiotic one, and one that will only hasten the advent of the kind of darker and more dangerous world that most conservatives are constantly trying to terrify the rest of us about. It’s hard to call anything worse than neoconservatism, but if there is one foreign-policy impulse that just might be worse, it’s leave-us-alone isolationism.

The foreign-policy history of the Republican Party is a history of the battle between the nativist isolationists and the bellicose internationalists. I’ve always found it interesting that the GOP should encompass both frothing extremes, while the Democrats have tended to occupy the saner (not always so sane, admittedly) middle ground. Historically, I would argue, the GOP defaults toward isolationism, because that was the natural reflex of many of the party’s key constituent elements in the early 20th century (Southern and Midwestern agrarians, self-made capitalists)…

That is what will happen in the Middle East if we aren’t engaged. Iran will have the run of the place. Assad will butchers tens of thousands more people. Hezbollah will control Lebanon and arm itself to the teeth for the next war with Israel. Put humanitarian concerns—for example, that we should step in to stop the slaughter of innocents—completely to the side. There’s a hard-headed argument against isolationism, and it’s precisely this: A world without the United States military and United Nations peacekeepers would in fact be an operatically more violent and ruthless world than the one we have, and one in which blowback would be much more likely to hit us where we live one day.