UKIP leader creates a stir at CPAC -- the wrong kind

Farage’s speech Thursday night focused largely on critiques of the European Union and the euro currency—hardly crowd-pleasers at CPAC—but he really ran into trouble when he came out swinging against military interventions of all kinds, even those supported by the Republican Party. “We have been joined at the hip with America and we have been involved in an endless series of overseas engagements and foreign wars,” Farage said. “Every time we do these things we’re told by our leaders that it’s to make the streets of London and New York safer. I would claim that we’ve actually enflamed and stoked the fires of militant Islam.”

Farage’s tone was a marked contrast from most CPAC speakers, who have generally lambasted President Barack Obama’s foreign policy and employed a hawkish tone in blaming him for the rise of head-chopping Islamic State militants in the Middle East…

Even more disruptive to the CPAC narrative—which is largely about uniting conservatives under the GOP banner—is the story of Farage’s UKIP, which is a right-wing faction of a mainstream party that has broken away to become that party’s biggest electoral threat. In the UK, Farage’s party is often likened to a version of the Tea Party in the United States. But unlike its American counterpart, it has split from the party it once identified with, something many Tea Partiers often threaten to do if the Republican Party leadership doesn’t fall into line. Farage’s party was formed by discontented members of the Conservative Party who left after then-Prime Minister John Major decided that Britain would join the European Union, and Farage himself is an often-disruptive member of the European Parliament.

And today the UKIP has become precisely the sort of political nightmare that breakaway conservatives sometimes threaten to become for the GOP: It could soon cost the mainstream Conservative Party its majority coalition in Parliament.