Jacob Heilbrunn has an interesting essay up at Foreign Policy that's about how nutty and extreme the GOP has become on foreign policy, which we all knew, but he adds a lot of historical texture and makes this interesting observation:

Perhaps [Mitt] Romney truly thinks that the new START is a sellout to Moscow, but he appears to be less an avatar of the right than its most prominent hostage. He might even be suffering from a kind of Stockholm syndrome. The treaty, after all, has won the enthusiastic endorsement of a host of Republican foreign-policy eminences, including Brent Scowcroft, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and James Baker. Much of President Barack Obama's foreign policy, in fact, adheres to the prescriptions laid out by that generation of Republican realists -- relying on diplomacy in dealing with Russia and Iran, cultivating good relations with China, and recognizing the limits of U.S. power. But these moderate conservatives all have one big thing in common: They're in their dotage. Nor is there a successor generation in sight to uphold their legacy. The result is that despite the bungled Iraq war, the right remains on the offensive. An insurrectionist movement, it not only opposes liberal elites, but also the quisling patricians in its own ranks.

In other words, in significant measure, Obama's foreign policy is indeed reminiscent of a centrist-realist kind of foreign policy one would have associated with Republicans from, say, Arthur Vandenberg to George H.W. Bush. And with Democrats in the Dean Acheson mold. Heilbrunn describes the history well.

Vandenberg, for those of you across the sea, was a crucial figure in US foreign policy history. The GOP chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after the war, he was well to the right of Truman and Acheson, but he decided to work with them and support the Truman Doctrine for Greece and Turkey and help get it through Congress. It was he who coined the famous phrase that politics "stops at the water's edge."

I will not, Lord knows, defend everything done in the name of that bipartisan consensus. Or even maybe most things. The build-up of the national security state. Vietnam. Iran, Guatemala, Congo, et cetera.

I will say, however, that at least we often had occasions in this country when there were cross-party coalitions in Congress on foreign policy, and an understanding that prevailed more often than not that partisanship should be muted when discussing foreign policy. Of course, the GOP insisted on that in 2001-2002, when if you opposed the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld agenda you were against America, but now we have the Cheneys hurling partisan Molotov cocktails and ensuring that in the event of an attack or some kind of crisis, the country will tear itself apart.

Which would be one thing if Obama's foreign policy were out of Chomsky. But as Heilbrunn shows it's more like Jim Baker.

