Roughly speaking, these groups can be described as the Jeffersonians, the Wilsonians, and the Jacksonians. Among rank-and-file conservatives, the Jacksonians are by far the largest group. In the postwar era, the Jacksonians have tended to align with the Wilsonians. But there is no reason why that conjunction is inevitable.
With the exception of Ron Paul and some Ron Paul Republicans, the Jeffersonians have no major political figure to speak for them. Yet the popularity of the Wilsonians was always greatly exaggerated. The invasion of Iraq and the mass conservative acceptance of the Bush Doctrine were made possible by al-Qaeda’s act of mass murder on 9/11.
Throughout the 1990s, Wilsonian neoconservatives called for regime change in Iraq, but they did not succeed in rallying the grassroots Right to the cause. The conservative base tuned out the PNAC crowd. Millions of conservatives voted for Pat Buchanan, who opposed even the first war with Iraq, in the 1992 and 1996 Republican presidential primaries—even as neoconservative commentators were writing essays attempting to purge Buchanan from conservative movement.
First: the United States is seldom going to pursue regime change without at least some form of nation-building. If you oppose the latter, you must be extremely reluctant to engage in the former.
Second: just as Islam cannot be reformed from the outside, the ancient religion of a billion people cannot be “rolled back” in the same sense as Soviet Communism — and rollback was not the main strategy employed in winning the Cold War. Militant Islam must be contained. A viable containment strategy cannot be sustained through prolonged occupations of Muslim lands.
Third: while U.S. support of dissidents in Muslim countries is to the good, we must proceed cautiously. We do not have the same level of knowledge about the internal politics of the Middle East as we did about Eastern Europe during the Cold War. We do not always know who our friends and allies are. There will also be cases where we discredit reformers by being associated with them.
