Republican Presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty is staking out the most Wilsonian, interventionist, hawkish position on foreign policy. Here’s a choice excerpt, quoted by Jon Ward at the Huffington Post:
Seriously? The Democratic Party, a majority of whose senators voted to preemptively invade Iraq, is “devoted to … retrenchment”? The Democratic Party, whose president sent us unblinkingly to manage a civil war in Libya, is devoted to withdrawal?
It’s a standard Republican talking point that the Democrats — and particularly Obama — want American greatness to diminish. But to drag anti-interventionist Republicans into this little smear is rare.
It may be the Dougherty Doctrine at work in my mind, but I don’t think this sort of globo-cop talk will play well among the GOP electorate.
Ward, at HuffPo, quotes some unimpressed conservatives, but he also quotes one smitten neocon, Max Boot.
