As I expected, Jacob, Jeff, and Ken have each made excellent points, and I want to thank them for taking the time to write such thoughtful posts. And, although they've made individual arguments (which I'll try to address in more specific posts later), I wanted to first tackle a theme or question that's run through each of their posts (as well as through a number of comments, like Don Bacon's). That is, is "conservatism," as I've defined it, really so different from other traditions in American foreign policy, or is it, in essence, just a recent version of a centuries-old American exceptionalism? The answer, I think, is both: yes, it is a form of American exceptionalism, but, yes, it's also distinct from other ideological camps that have battled over U.S. foreign policy for the last 50 years.

As I write in my introduction, the American separation of the world into good versus evil began at the beginning: when the first settlers arrived here, they did so to found a "New Israel" physically and spiritually distinct from the sins of the Old World. They believed they had a covenant with God making them a vanguard of political and religious liberty on earth. During the 1700s and 1800s, this explicitly religious narrative gave way to a more secular one in which the forces of liberty fought the forces of tyranny, but America's tendency to see the world in dualistic terms remained. Americans continued to see the world in terms of us-versus-them in no small part because it really was the U.S. versus everyone else: the new America was surrounded by enemies--unfriendly natives and competing European imperialists. The colonists had to rely on themselves; and neutrality--that is staying apart from European intrigue rather than becoming a part of it--was the safest course.

These foundational influences--an exceptionalism comprising both a moralism and a nationalism--represent enduring traditions in U.S. foreign policy. And, because they do, they've affected not only the right but also the left and center. However, I would argue that beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, as the world was growing more interdependent, liberals and pragmatists began to adopt a less oppositionalist framework and instead started to call for a more interactive U.S. foreign policy. On the left, the most obvious example of this is Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations, a first attempt at collective security that represented the polar opposite of an us-versus-them worldview. But even centrists--Republican internationalists like Henry Stimson--recognized the importance of our ties to Europe. By contrast, the right, represented at the time by men like Robert Taft, was distinct in clinging to the older dualistic worldview, and essentially advocated isolationism.

That's the tradition that William F. Buckley came out of--as a boy he opposed U.S. intervention against Nazi Germany--but the strength of his anticommunism after World War II was so great that he believed the United States had to fight the Soviets and others abroad. At the same, the underlying us-versus-them dynamic that helped draw him to the right did not change; rather, conservative isolationism was basically flipped inside out to form unilateralism. According the right, the United States would engage with the rest of the world but only on our terms (think NATO). And this dualism was once again imbued with religiosity, so that Buckley and others spoke of the Soviet Union as evil, of communism as satanic, and of the Cold War as a battle toward Armageddon.

The problem--one realized by Democrats and internationalist Republicans alike, but not by conservatives--was that the nuclear revolution had rendered the binary way of looking at the world inoperable because it led to extraordinarily dangerous conclusions. Conservatives did not believe the United States should coexist with evil, and therefore that we could not coexist with the Soviet Union. They opposed containment because it implied coexistence. And they opposed negotiation because what exactly did we have to negotiate about with evil? And they opposed the deterrent notion of mutual assured destruction because MAD was essentially just nuclear coexistence stabilized via negotiations. Instead, they leaned toward or outright embraced a nuclear war-fighting posture.

These are big and scary differences with the bipartisan approach to the Cold War. While I would agree with Ken that there was a fair amount of continuity in U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, I'd also that there's was very little conservatism in the White House during those years. Nixon, who signed major arms control agreements with the Soviets and opened relations with communist China, cannot qualify as a conservative. Reagan behaved like a conservative for the first few years of his presidency, but radically changed gears in 1984, partly because his aggressive nuclear stance nearly triggered a nuclear war in late 1983. And when he did change tacks, signing a treaty eliminating an entire class of nuclear weapons, conservatives were horrified (just as they had been with Nixon). National Review ran a cover dubbing the agreement "Reagan's Suicide Pact."

I'd also disagree with Jacob that there's a consensus view that we're obliged to spread democracy and freedom around the globe. Both liberals and neoconservatives have espoused that view, though with differing intensity at different times and usually through different means. But conservatives have not. During the 1990s, conservatism was marked by distaste for humanitarian interventions. And John Bolton, a wonderful example of conservatism, has disparaged the idea of nation-building and democracy promotion. Last year, he explained to me how he would have managed the invasion of Iraq: "My thought was--and this is exaggerating--we hand 'em a copy of the Federalist Papers, say good luck, and then we're out of there." As Iraq has become a quagmire, conservatives have thus turned on neoconservatives as having been too utopian, too idealistic, of committing the mortal sin of overestimating our ability to improve the human condition. But this misdiagnoses the underlying problem shared by both camps: their insistence on dividing a complex world into only two halves, an insistence that I'd argue not only led us into Iraq but hampered our ability to deal with North Korea, Iran, and a variety of other nuclear problems.

More to come later on the specific points made by Jacob, Jeff and Ken!