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Entry: To Hell with Joe Klein! Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/to_hell_with_joe_klein#32694 Post contents: Well said, Mr. Gottfried. I picked up the large Modern Age anthology not too long ago and was struck about how little was written regarding foreign policy over the years. It's easy to forget considering today's division of populist hypernationalism and strong anti-war paleoconservatism, but there was not always such disagreement on these matters. Indeed, until 1989, the right's consensus view was on of various degrees of "roll back" with respect to the Soviet Union. But these views are all ephemeral and rightly shifting. Conservatism does not yield strict direction in foreign policy, which ought to be concerned with age-old prosaic goals like self-defense and preservation of the necessary conditions for commerce, and thus the field yields a multitude of practical and debatable considerations. Conservatism may leave certain extreme sensibilities off the table, particularly revolutionary (neoconservative), utopian (globalism) or disloyal (fixation on foreign nations) ones, but it does not absolutely require an isolationist or interventionist view in a particular case, as I argued in my two recent pieces on Iran. It's obvious that frustrations with the almost uniformly liberal American Jews have compelled certain unbalanced souls on the Right to wax poetical about the Palestinians, a la, Noam Chomsky. But this viewpoint can become a farce. For many--as we've seen among some of the more unhinged commenters here--in their ideal foreign policy, we would withdraw from NATO and South Korea and remain aloof from Iraq and Iran only to wage a full scale diplomatic offensive in support of the stalwart Palestinians. Is this sane? They in an isolationist ideal world devoid of NATO, the UN, and US oversight, Israel could ethnically cleanse or otherwise eliminate the Palestinians. Is this what they want? I don't believe Israel is strictly speaking part of the West, a natural ally, nor an actor always proceeding in good faith, nor someone whom we should be bribing every year with foreign aid. Our relations with them undoubtedly complicate our relations with the oil-rich Arab states, and these relations are more important for what should be obvious reasons. That said, Israel is a nuclear-armed power and its people don't generally blow themselves up to make political points, and in an ideal world we should be on friendly though more distant relations with them just as we are with the Turks and Egyptions. That should not consist of constant badgering and interference and peace negotiations like we saw under both Bushes and the Clintons. Obviously, we should ignore disloyal domestic forces that counsel romantic foreign attachments, whether in Cuba, Greece, Bosnia, or Israel. But other than that, foreign policy is tricky and should not consist of so many nonnegotiable commitments by conservatives. Sent at: 2008 12 01