Politico: Why the ‘America First’ Politicians Aren’t Convincing Most Republicans

April 7, 2022 Hunter Wallace Alt-Center, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics 25

I like the hand we are holding.

Here are five reasons why “neo-isolationists” should look on the bright side:

1. Over a month into the war in Ukraine, the latest polls show that 39% of Republican voters (Quinnipiac) want the United States to withdraw from NATO. In early February, 28% of Republican voters (Gallup) wanted to decrease our commitment to NATO and 22% wanted to withdraw entirely from NATO. Two months later, 43% of Republican voters (Pew) don’t believe the U.S. benefits much from being a member of NATO and 42% have an unfavorable view of NATO. Conservative Republicans are split 45/53 on NATO. Clearly, the idea that “everything changed” on February 24 is utter nonsense.

2. It is clear who in the Republican Party has become more hawkish on Russia and more pro-NATO and more willing to intervene in Ukraine. It is educated professionals and the Reaganite crowd. Those people made up their minds about Russia decades ago. Those Americans who “came of age during the Cold War” aren’t growing in number. They are rapidly shrinking as part of the Republican electorate.

3. America’s wars haven’t grown more popular over time. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya all became less popular over time. Those wars are largely seen as mistakes now. Unlike the Global War on Terror (GWOT) crusade, America hasn’t been attacked by Russia. There was no catalyzing event like 9/11 that enraged Americans unless you are a diehard Russiagate shitlib who believes that Russia stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. Unlike our other recent wars, this war in Ukraine is sustained only by the famous American attention span and is going to cost the American working class and middle class a fortune in gas prices and inflation. How long can outrage porn and altruism sustain our war effort?

4. Yes, it is true that the Republican leadership in the House and Senate has strongly supported Ukraine and is as hawkish as ever on Russia. It is also true that the Republican gerontocracy in the Senate is famously out of touch with their base across a wide range of issues. Perhaps there is a disconnect on foreign policy between a bunch of Republican senators in their 70s and 80s and their base nearly half of which wants to withdraw from NATO over a month into the war?

5. Finally, there is obviously a strong education polarization effect in attitudes toward NATO with post-grads being by far the most supportive of our foreign policy and high school graduates being the most lukewarm on Ukraine. Which sector of the GOP is growing and which is shrinking?

Just focus the mind on the impact that the war in Ukraine has already had on gas prices and inflation and relative importance of the economy compared to the war in Ukraine a month into the war. We’re also headed into a recession because of this. What are the long term consequences of this war?

Politico:

“Neo-isolationism has potential leaders in the Republican Party, but the Ukraine crisis shows it doesn’t have nearly enough followers.

The reaction of the vast majority of the GOP to the Russian invasion has been to agitate for more support for Ukraine and criticize a Democratic president for being dilatory and weak — which isn’t much different than it would have been to a similar event any time over the past 30 years.

Now, obviously, much has changed in the party since then, most importantly the rise of Donald Trump and of his allies in the pundit class who are outspokenly opposed to, or skeptical of, the GOP’s traditional hawkishness.

These realists or restrainers, as they call themselves, tended to stoke doubts about the U.S. intelligence predicting a Russian move against Ukraine and to blame NATO for provoking a misunderstood and maligned Vladimir Putin into acting to defend his country from creeping Western expansion. …”

Maybe I am wrong.

Maybe “everything changed” on February 24.

Things appear to have changed for the worse though for Emmanuel Macron in France where the price of gas has gone up by something like 50% over the past year. Macron’s regime had already provoked an uprising by the Yellow Vests over high energy costs before this happened.

Anyway, we’re going to continue to pound away with our argument: NATO is an obsolete relic of the Cold War and expanding it has only succeeded in miring us in ethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe and harming the American working class. The communist threat no longer comes from Russia. The official state ideology of the Kremlin has done a 180 since the days of the Soviet Union. Putin’s Russia wants to be a “civilization state” or a kind of deglobalized island that fosters Russian identity and traditional values.

Why should conservatives join forces with progressives who want to raise the Pride flag over the Kremlin? Why should we support the belligerent foreign policy of Joe Biden and the Democrats who see us as “domestic enemies” of democracy? Why are we fighting Russia over Donbas anyway?

Ron Paul tried to shake up our foreign policy a decade ago. The demographics weren’t ripe back then. Generational turnover is poised to accelerate through the 2020s.

Note: BTW, we are the Jacksonians.

About Hunter Wallace 12394 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

25 Comments

  1. There is a nucleus to this: do you believe there is a power higher than man? It correlates well with support for Russia.

        • Hannity is an Irish Roman Catholic clown. The biggest conservative assholes are always Irish, Italian and other Roman Catholics. That’s a fact of life.

        • “Conservatives” conserve nothing. They are phony opposition keeping the left in power. They are frauds.

    • Hannity is just an entertainer. He doesn’t care about any of us or the future of the US. He is just getting ratings. He’s not some “leader”. I don’t care for him at all. He is the quintessential liberal conservative.

  5. Nationalism? None of those in the Senate, not one. 100 globalists. On the Court? No. Nine globalists. That is it. All they need. QED.

    All they need, that is, to keep stealing the elections. Which is exactly what they will do.

    If someone were to secede, that might hasten the fall of the Empire of Lies. The petrodollar is in ruins. Millions are sick from the experimental gene therapy, and that will just get worse.

    Secession offers some hope. The only hope.

    Sorry to hear about Zhirinovsky. He was the real deal. The greatest troll in the world.

  6. You are wrong in that the war there doesn’t affect gas prices here, They were going up intentionally before the war in Eurasia and the cover of a war is the next crises to ram an agenda (green new feudalism) that actual democratic processes would never allow. Just more federal hostile takeover of America to put it very mildly. Who is Shitpants’ energy secretary and climate “czar” (just to name a few) and why must her/his/it’s/theirs/zeds GNF investments be subsidized by the supposed so-called treasury?

  7. I’m a late Boomer, born 1960. I have never fit any stereotype that so-called Boomers (people born 1946-1964). catch hell for in the dissident right.

    • You can’t really be considered a boomer if you weren’t old enough to hitch a ride to the Woodstock music festival or get drafted to fight in Vietnam. Even our own RamZpaul is too young to be classified as a boomer using that metric.

      • If you like Stevie Nicks and Steely Dan you are a boomer. Ram-z is on the edge but I call boomer. If your parents were not involved with Vietnam you are not an x-er.

    • The boomer-bashing is ultimately counter-productive. Yes, I’ve done some myself, but the entire notion of youthful rebellion against parents and grandparents – giving names to different generations – is really something created by (((Wall Street))) and (((Madison Avenue))) in the early decades of the 20th century. The boomer cohort was the first to be sold in a major way on these lies, but later generations are blind if they think they’re immune to the definitions and mass-formation psychosis generated by the lie machine. This generational division was unknown on a societal level in the 18th century – before popular culture was manufactured and published by Jews.

      Being the first generation to have been so completely gaslighted by the usual suspects, boomers often still fall for the shit they were sold back in the day. Thus Russia = Soviet Union and China = Red China. Ukraine is viewed as a people wanting to escape USSR and Putin is viewed as combo of Hitler and Stalin. As with Iraq and Afghanistan, the American regime had no legitimate business in Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a false-flag and the war’s purpose was to destroy the fabric of American society – mission accomplished, as an infamous boomer draft-dodger remarked many years later.

    • TW, You a a thirteener, america’s thirteenth generation, small, but fills the gap between, the real boomers and the gen X’ rs, as I am a thirteener also, I wear my 13 with pride, we are the wild card, in all of this…………..

    • Boomer is not an age it´s a state of mind

      being here TW i´m pretty sure you don´t qualify, sorry but you think for yourself and no “boomer” ever did

  8. If the U.S. Government gets in a big war in the Near East or over Taiwan they will find out how well their multi-cult, GloboHomo military works. They will quickly learn they need lots more smart White guys to make it function properly, especially systems like THAAD, Patriot and AEGIS in the Navy. The U.S. Government will try to institute conscription again, which ended in Jan. 1973 with the end of the Vietnam War to get the White guys they need in the military. Good luck with that.

    All the opinion polls showing %40 this, %50 that are all based on theoretical things that haven’t happened or the people answering the questions have no power over. Once it becomes personal like conscription there will be massive opposition on the ground with people refusing conscription orders, opinion polls be damned. Perhaps after the November elections the geniuses in Congress will try out conscription and find they have stirred up the biggest hornet’s nest in a generation. They will resurrect the ghosts of Fr. Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh before they know it.

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