Conservatism no longer has room for those who, like Chamberlain, substitute "peace at any price" for actual policy and for national defense. If Islamofascism wants to wage war against us (it was in all the papers), then war it shall be with as much Islamobloodshed as necessary to discourage and demoralize the Islamolunatics once and for all.
As to communism, we ought not to have "recognized" as legitimate the soviet regime as FDR did. We ought to have sent a lot more than an American/English/Czech (?) "Expeditionary Force" in the immediate aftermath of WWI. Our troops were already in Europe and should have had the opportunity with full backing from pondscum like Wilson to strangle the soviet regime in its cradle. It would have saved us Korea, Vietnam, and very possibly WW II BUT, like PJB foolishly opines today, the war that is postponed (until the enemy is strategically equipped for war) is preferable to the war fought and won NOW when the enemy is weak. When we got one war behind by tolerating the USSR, we were then forced to choose reds or nazis when we could have next joined with a free Russia to crush the Germans. Liberals on the left and counterfeit conservatives (Chamberlain types) on the right set the stage for that choice. I would take Franco over most 20th century leaders. Just how was either Germany or Italy instrumental in the victory of Franco Spain over communism? If so, it was for their own purposes and certainly not for Spanish freedom from the reds and anarchists. See Warren Carroll's The Last Crusade.
Had we crushed communism in its soviet cradle, Eastern European nations would likely have escaped soviet domination because without a soviet union there would have been no Iron Curtain.
We are coming up on having to choose between red China and the Islamofascisti, another choice beloved of the Clinton left and the Chamberlainite phonycons.
Our safety lies not in imagining ourselves just another country no better and no worse than North Korea, Iran, Syria, etc., or to imagine our way of life no more entitled to prevail than Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Al Qaeda, or other Sharia lunatics. If they want to run their infernal pestholes according to their lunacy, that MAY be tolerable. When they decide that they are re-establishing a caliphate over all formerly Muslim geography (including Spain) and convert at the point of a sword and govern by Sharia, then there may well no be room on this planet for the US and for the Islamofascisti, then there will be room for us and not for them. Instead of our wringing our hands and weeping and wailing over what the Islamolunatics may think of us, let them worry about what we think lf them and, more importantly, what we are prepared to do about it.
Israel is not the Sudetenland and it is not going go be turned over by Chamberlainesque cowards, at least not with actually conservative applause. If the Islamofascisti imagine that blowing up school buses filled with Chassidic Orthodox grammar school children is a legitimate military tactic and that homicide/suicide bombing is the pathway to heaven and 72 virgins (who hopefully closely resemble Helen Thomas and Madeleine Notsobright), we should employ our superior technology to make the search for heaven and 72 virgins much, much more efficient, at least at the earthly end. Else, why did God invent Electric Boat and its missile submarines. We do NOT have to take their guff, much less their homicidal passions.
The conservative movement (what some people without a sense of history call "neo-conservatism") does not exist to turn over the world to our enemies on the installment plan. We are no longer (if we ever were) a movement characterized by isolationism. We are not a movement of internationalism. We are a movement of interventionism, effective intervention imposing unacceptable pain on enemies who strike at us or our allies. Robert Taft the Elder is not a model for conservatism. Religiously a Unitarian (as nearly none of us are), politically somewhat libertarian (as a minority of us are), foreign policy-wise (until Pearl Harbor) an enabler by delay of America's enemies counseling that we not stir them up while they armed to fight us in a four-year war for us and longer for others.
Barry Goldwater forfeited, by his enthusiasm for abortion and homosexual "rights" any claim to leadership as well. In the 1960s and 1970s, the New Right (not neo-conservatives but young people not superannuated ex-socialists but dedicated rightists) formulated interventionist foreign policy for a principled nation. We aren't going to go back to Chamberlainism.
If you don't like the analogy to Chamberlain, then chew on Cain as the ultimate paleocon trying to convince God by saying: "I am not my brother's keeper" for that is the essence of paleo foreign policy.
No sale. Now or ever.
Hmm, do you believe that American people in 1918 were ready for the war in the vast steppes of Eurasia? How many millions of soldiers could be sent for this purpose? How the logistical problems would be solved? What justification could be provided AT THAT TIME (without the hindsight derived from Solzhenitsyn)?
Do you know the future? Do you know from which direction new dangers will come ten years from now?
Did you read story about Cain and Abel? It was not about Cain refusing to look after his brother. Cain paid too much attention to his brother, so much that he murdered him out of jealousy.
Congressman Billybob