I like this Matthew Yglesias post, because it implies that the only reason he's even bothering to engage with a lightweight like Mark Krikorian is because he's branching out into topics beyond immigration (needless to say, his point remains inane).
Reading the post, I am struck by a wave of confusion as to whether conservative foreign policy means isolationism again. I mean, for a long time it did, but then we've spent most of the past seven years listening to the right tell us that no country is too small of a threat to be ignored as a potential invasion target. Maybe the pendulum is racing back to the old form of extremism? It's kind of like democratization -- neo-conservatism crashed headlong into decades of happily supporting thuggish dictators, and every once in awhile the right gets confused about which cliff they're demanding we jump off.
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Conservative foreign policy: only invade countries if we think they are a military threat to the U.S., even if the threat is pretty small. If they are merely committing genocide (Bosnia), or are having other internal problems like civil war and famine (Somalia), none of our business. So Iraq in 1988 (while Saddam was gassing the Kurds) was inappropriate, and in 1991 would have been inappropriate (which is why Bush Sr. didn't march to Baghdad and abandoned the uprising to Saddam's tender mercies), but in 2003 made sense. Admittedly, there are conservatives who now say that Bush Sr. should have gone ahead and overthrown Saddam back in 1991, but I don't recall that having been so popular at the time.
The Bush administration has thrown off everyone's political spectrum and the fact that the Right's foreign policy has so little substance means everyone is kept guessing. It's not just their side- we've got mountains of democrats who think the US shouldn't be promoting democracy (like, at all).
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