ONE of the striking features of the debt-ceiling deal is its cuts to defence spending. As part of the first round of deficit reduction, the White House says the Pentagon will be cut by $350 billion over the ten years to 2014 (about 7% a year, compared to current spending levels). That may be slightly less than what Barack Obama had proposed in April, but it is still a lot for any hawk to swallow. And if the bipartisan commission doesn't get its act together—that is, if they fail to come up with a new plan, triggering an additional $1.5 trillion in cuts—the Pentagon and its cohorts will lose around $500 billion more. This is provocative. It represents a break from the longstanding tradition wherein Republicans refuse to entertain the idea of cuts to defence.

It may be that Republicans realised the first round of cuts was unavoidable. If they were insisting on making up for increased federal borrowing via cuts to the discretionary budget, they could hardly get there without finding some of the savings from defence. And Democrats expect that the Republicans can't stomach the idea of further cuts. That's precisely the incentive that is meant to guarantee Republican cooperation on the bipartisan commission.

Still, this strikes me as significant. There has always been an isolationist streak in the Republican Party. It's been suppressed in recent decades, particularly during the administration of George W. Bush. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were priorities for Mr Bush, and his presidency was polarising. This gave rise to a situation where support for those military interventions was conflated with support for Mr Bush, and the odd Republican (or Democrat, such as the hawkish Joe Lieberman) who broke rank would end up marginalised. Now the lines are a little blurred. It is unsurprising that Republicans would be less likely to rally round military interventions initiated by a Democratic president, which partly explains their tepid support for Barack Obama's intervention in Libya. But it does seem that there has been a general uptick in isolationist sentiment throughout the Republican Party. In 2004, for example, a Pew poll found 58% of "conservative Republicans" saying that for the future of the United States, it is best for the country to be active in world affairs, with slightly more than a third taking the opposite view, that Americans "should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems here at home." By June 2011, the ratio had flipped: 55% in favour of concentrating on our domestic problems, 33% advocating for engagement with world affairs. This might be cyclical—a Democratic president, an economic downturn, a result of tea-party Republicans having stormed the dais.

Or it might be a harbinger of a coming reorientation. Taking the historical view, America looks like more of an isolationist country than an interventionist one; its modern history of meddling began with need rather than ambition—Europe's need as much as America's, in the aftermath of the second world war. In the decades since then American foreign policy has been, at times, self-interested, excessive and hubristic. But it's not really imperialist, and it's typically normative, at least in its framing. (Try to imagine an American president calling for a foreign intervention without foregrounding the benefits to peace, prosperity, freedom or human rights.) Many Americans would be fine with a more modest role in world affairs.

That may be too much extrapolation from one provision of the debt-ceiling deal, but it's significant that the loudest Republican complaint is that the deal makes no provision for entitlement reform, rather than its cuts to defence. We'll see whether the Republicans on the bipartisan commission have been adequately incented to avoid further cuts in this area. If not, it would be a sign that the isolationist element is more than just ascendant.

(Photo credit: AFP)