This profile of antiwar Republican Walter Jones in the New York Times is pretty interesting.
Some foreign policy analysts now see Mr. Jones, 68, Representative Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, and a small coterie of Tea Party stalwarts as the leading edge of a conservative movement to rein in American military power — a break from the muscular foreign policy of President George W. Bush.
“They reflect a growing discontent within the Republican Party about the wars and a growing feeling that they don’t want to spend money on them anymore,” said John Isaacs, executive director of the Council for a Livable World, an advocacy group that promotes arms control. “They are military noninterventionists.”
Mr. Jones agreed, saying: “We can’t police the world anymore. We’re not the world power. It’s China. Our economy is in chaos right now.”
The piece adds that voters in Jones’ district, which includes the Marine Camp Lejeune, are starting to come around to this view, at least with respect to Afghanistan. And the cost issue seems to be driving a lot of this. I don’t believe that an economic crisis which is being felt by the entire world connotes that we are somehow no longer a world power. But I believe that, in order to keep that status, we need to stop inflaming the world by engaging in imperial adventures.
And I don’t think Jones believes this either; he willingly admits that the Bush Administration lied to him to get him to support the war in Iraq, and that his opposition to wars now flows from that betrayal. Moreover, if you look at Jones’ recent record, he has split with party orthodoxy on much more than matters of war.
But if the cost issue is what it takes to sell conservatives on the idea that we need to be much more humble in our foreign policy, I’ll take that over the neocon push for endless war, and persistence of will standing in place of an actual strategy.
And indeed, the Jones argument about wasting money in pointless wars has broad applicability. It applies to Iraq, where extending our military presence would just cause a mass uprising, collapse the government and put US troops at grave risk (imagine the sad spectacle of five US deaths today in a rocket attack on an operating base being multiplied many times over). It applies to Libya, where Sen. Richard Lugar, who’s moving to the right on most other matters to stave off a Tea Party primary challenge, felt comfortable to write an op-ed castigating the President for denying Constitutional principles in seeking a rubber stamp to continuing military operations. That’s very much in the vein of the isolationist, Jones-ian impulse, rather than the neocons who put together the Senate resolution of approval for the conflict in Libya, which Lugar wants canceled. Here’s what Lugar has to say:
The Founding Fathers gave Congress the power to declare war for good reason: It forces the president to present his case in detail to the American public, allows for a robust debate to examine that case and helps build broad political support to commit American blood and treasure overseas. Little of that has happened here.
This marks a turning point away from the muscular, unilateralist foreign policy of the Bush years, characterized by executive decision making, and toward a more cautious, more circumspect policy view. That is still a minority view in the Republican Party, but it’s growing.