Dangerous Isolationism From The Far Left And Far Right

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter has started taking talking points from keffiyeh-wearing protesters shouting "end the occupation of Afghanistan! USA Imperialists out!"

Of course, she comes at it from a different perspective than those who fraudulently cast the Taliban as a popular resistance movement. No high-minded words about national determination or human rights for her: “Everyone knows it’s not worth the trouble and resources to take a nation of rocks and brigands.” Yeah, that's the Coulter we know and lo... I mean, that's the Coulter we know.

Ron Radosh gets into it in Pajamas Media:

One can disagree, as do most conservatives who write for the Weekly Standard, including military expert Max Boot, defense writer Gabriel Schoenfeld, and Frederick Kagan and Kimberly Kagan, who make the case that Afghanistan is actually a winnable war. Coulter and others certainly have the right to disagree. Polls show that the majority of Americans have their doubts that it is winnable. But in her concluding remarks, Coulter went way beyond arguing for a change in policy on this particular war: “I thought the irreducible requirements of Republicanism were being for life, small government and a strong national defense, but I guess permanent war is on the platter now, too.”

However, because Republicans like Kristol argue that Afghanistan is a just and even winnable war does not mean that they favor a permanent war. And by demanding facetiously that Kristol and Liz Cheney “resign,” (from what?) Coulter comes dangerously close to the paleocons and right-wing isolationists of the Buchanan and American Conservative camp. So it did not come as a surprise to find Pat Buchanan enthusiastically praising Coulter the morning after her column appeared on the Morning Joe TV program on MSNBC, before going on to say to fellow panelist Dan Senor that “you people have brought us into Iraq and now Afghanistan.”

The dangers of this were spelled out brilliantly by writer John Avlon in a recent Daily Beast column titled “The War That Will Split the GOP.” Avlon may be exaggerating the threat that such a split might occur, but I think he is correct that “this latest distraction was deeply revealing. It exposed the growing influence of a grassroots neo-isolationist movement that is springing up as a backlash to both Presidents Bush and Obama, while reviving an old debate thought long-dead within the Republican Party between the isolationists and the internationalists.”

America cannot, should not, must not turn its back on the world. Pundits the world over are debating the speed of the USA's relative decline as a world power. Isolationism will only exacerbate this branding problem.

Jonathon Narvey is the Editor of The Propagandist.