W. James Antle: Grand Old Peaceniks ... Will Austerity Turn Republicans Away From War?

W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator. 

Fairly or not, Mitt Romney’s approach to national security during the 2008 presidential race can be captured by a single phrase: “Double Guantanamo.” When asked about the U.S. prison camp for terror suspects, the eager-to-please former Massachusetts governor’s first instinct was to propose super-sizing it like a McDonald’s value meal for hungry Republican primary voters.

That was when Romney was trying to compete with John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, both more natural national-security hawks than he. But even as he launched his second campaign in 2010 with the release of his book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, Romney endorsed in its pages what William Kristol and Robert Kagan described in a 1996 Foreign Affairs essay as “benevolent global hegemony”—the idea that if the United States is not the world’s dominant military and ideological power, the void will be filled by countries advancing values that are much worse for peace and human freedom.

So it was surprising when at a June GOP candidates’ debate in New Hampshire, Romney said of the war in Afghanistan, “It’s time for to us bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can.” With this pale imitation of “Come home, America,” Romney found himself drawn into a critique by his former rival McCain and other hawks that the Republican Party was becoming too “isolationist.”

“There’s always been an isolation strain in the Republican Party, that Pat Buchanan wing of our party,” McCain lamented, irritated by Republican diffidence over Afghanistan and Libya. “But now it seems to have moved more center stage, so to speak.”..