Pub foreign-policy divide: not between hawks and doves, but among hawks

Philip Klein, in the course of a Washington Examiner piece on the absurdity of calling Ted Cruz an isolationist, makes a noteworthy point about the internal dynamics of the range of GOP foreign-policy views :

As I outlined in my April column (and in a separate piece back in 2013 during the Syria debate), the divide in the Republican party isn't so much between interventionists and non-interventionists, but among hawks. During the Iraq War debate, anybody who supported the invasion was lumped into the same ideological camp and described as "neoconservative," even though some war supporters were more about democratization and others backed a more limited mission of removing the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

In the Obama years, two things happened. One was that some supporters of the Iraq War did soul searching and looked at the foreign policy consequences (the absence of weapons of mass destruction, democracy evaporating, Iran gaining influence) and the domestic political consequences (the 2006 and 2008 elections that brought Obama to power with massive Congressional majorities), and concluded that it was a mistake. Another factor changing the debate was that the nature of the foreign policy challenges made it less clear that regime change was in America's best interest.

In the case of the protests against the Iranian regime in 2009, conservatives were fairly united in criticizing the Obama administration for being slow to recognize the uprising. The reason is that Iran is the worst of all worlds: authoritarian, Islamist, and anti-American.
But when the Arab Spring took hold of Egypt, it was more complicated. Hosni Mubarak was authoritarian, and no saint, for sure, but U.S. interests aligned more closely with his than with the Muslim Brotherhood. And the two different camps of conservative hawks started to go their sepearate ways.

As John Bolton said to me in a 2013 interview: "Neoconservatives thought the Arab  Spring would move the region in a positive direction, whereas the more (national) interest-oriented conservatives believed it might not work out because the conditions weren't right and because the abstract emphasis on democracy doesn't necessarily comport with the actual circumstances around the world."

In Libya and Syria, again, the situation was more complicated — Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar Assad are bad dudes, everybody agrees, but at the same time, rebels and terrorists have been all mixed together.

It's a tough one. Leaving Assad alone, for instance, seems prudent, given the multiple layers of the Syrian civil war. On the other hand, Russia, but more to the point, Iran, have a strong vested interest in seeing him remain in power.

I do think there's a strong case to be made that the approach W took, to earnestly endeavor to bring the cultural, economic and political institutions of the West to Middle Eastern lands where treachery and tyranny have been the norm for centuries, was badly misguided.

But again, once you've gone into a country and rooted out the elements posing a threat to the security of the US and its allies, are you responsible for the mess left behind? Is there not a precedent of power vacuums in war-ravaged countries breeding yet another wave of very bad actors?

I think Bolton sizes up the basic dichotomy well. And LITD is inclined to side with those who say, defeat enemies, period. Don't look for "positive directions" where they have never manifested themselves.