Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

Hillary Clinton, after her wide-ranging foreign policy interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg roiled both the White House and the anti-war left, reached out to President Barack Obama to tamp down speculation of a rift between the two.

She may have hugged it out with the president, but she has not done the same with the anti-war left.


Clinton does not seem terribly concerned with MoveOn.org scolding her to “think long and hard before embracing the same policies advocated by right-wing war hawks.” Or with The Nation slamming her for “hawkish, even neoconservative-influenced views.” Or with The New Republic warning that her “blunder” could open the door to a strong primary challenge. Her lack of interest in winning over these critics suggests this is a fight she is comfortable waging—and is not worried about losing.

If so, then 2016 might feature an unusually grand bipartisan foreign policy debate, with an interventionist Clinton squaring off with her party’s dovish wing, while the isolationist-leaning Sen. Rand Paul sparks a parallel debate with the militaristic hawks that have long dominated the Republican Party. In some ways, the discussion recalls the one that occurred in each party three quarters of a century ago before World War II, with Clinton cast as the interventionist Franklin Roosevelt facing down cautious Democrats and Paul playing the part of the isolationist Robert Taft, who took on Wendell Willkie, a more internationalist Republican rival, in the fight for the 1940 GOP nomination. Taft lost that battle to Willkie, moving the country away from its post-World War I isolationism and freeing up Roosevelt to take the controversial step of compulsory military service without jeopardizing his campaign for an unprecedented third term.

Today, the friction between the Clinton and Obama camps has attracted most of the recent media attention. But while Clinton and Obama have their differences, they only represent different strains within the liberal interventionist school. Syria, for instance, may highlight Obama’s relative reluctance to use force, and Iran may indicate the limits of Clinton’s confidence in diplomacy. But their views converged on the Libyan intervention and presumably the recent strikes in Iraq, because they both believe America should play a leading role on the world stage expanding freedom and protecting human rights beyond our borders. And they believe that role can include the use of military force, even though liberal interventionists don’t turn to it as quickly or as unilaterally as their neoconservative counterparts.

Neither takes the view that America should generally stay out of other nations’ affairs, an increasingly prevalent view across the partisan spectrum. As the Pew Research Center found in its December poll, “Majorities or pluralities of Republicans (52%), Democrats (46%) and independents (55%) think the U.S. does too much to try to help solve world problems, and agree that the U.S. should mind its own business internationally (53%, 46% and 55%, respectively).” The distance between Clinton and these poll numbers is probably far bigger than the distance between her and Obama.

Yet Clinton’s interview blows past such poll-driven concerns and practically dares a fellow Democrat to try to seize an opening on her foreign policy left. That may seem like a foolish risk for a frontrunner to take so soon in the campaign season, but her remarks are only a “blunder” if she can’t defend them from attacks by a yet-to-materialize primary challenger.

She may sense she has history on her side, as Democratic interventionists have usually held the upper hand over their intraparty opponents despite the party’s anti-war reputation. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson won a major legislative battle over military preparedness with William Jennings Bryan, his former secretary of state-turned-isolationist antagonist, allowing Wilson to lead a unified party in his successful re-election campaign. In 1946, President Harry Truman took the dramatic step of firing Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace, FDR’s former vice president, after Wallace delivered a high-profile speech breaking with Truman’s anti-communist foreign policy. Truman was reluctant, worried that he would cause a party split. But the fear was unfounded as Wallace’s third-party challenge fizzled two years later.

More recently, President Bill Clinton’s bombing campaigns in Bosnia and Iraq passed without causing a rift with the left, nor did Obama’s first-term intervention in Libya and protracted involvement in Afghanistan complicate his re-nomination for a second term. In fact, when the foreign policy objective is in the compassionate global interest, and not raw national interest, a considerable portion of the left is routinely willing to shelve its reluctance to use the military.

But is Hillary Clinton going against a current tide of rising isolationist sentiment? Not necessarily in her own party. The “blunder” argument from the New Republic’s Noam Scheiber is based on the notion that “opposition among Democrats to overseas interventions, particularly in the Middle East, remains so strong and raw” and “polling overwhelmingly shows the country, not just Democratic voters, to be weary of foreign-policy interventionism.”

There may, however, be more to the polling numbers than the top line. True, the Pew numbers showing support for America “mind[ing] its own business” are at a striking 50-year high. But the recent spike is driven almost solely by Republicans and independents (a group that leaned right of the political center in 2012), not Democrats. The percent of Republicans and independents that want America to mind its business more than doubled from 2002 to 2013. Among Democrats, the number ticked up only six points, remaining under 50 percent.

In other words, foreign policy attitudes among Democrats haven’t changed much. Absolutely—there was and is a significant anti-intervention wing. It’s just not necessarily dominant. Nor is it as rigid as you might think: Some intervention skeptics will likely give a deeply respected Democrat such as Hillary Clinton ample latitude in explaining the nuances of her positions. If she chooses to take the intra-party foreign policy debate head-on, following the path of Wilson, FDR and Truman, she could earn a firmer mandate.

Meanwhile, the massive and abrupt shift in attitude among Republicans presents an opening for Senator Paul to revisit a debate on Republican foreign policy principles that hasn’t been seriously engaged since the interventionist General Dwight D. Eisenhower swiped the 1952 presidential nomination from—once again—the isolationist Taft, then known as “Mr. Republican.”

Paul would probably bristle at the comparison to Taft, but he has been pushing his party to rethink its worldview, though rapidly moving events have complicated his task. In February, a few days before Russia forcibly seized control of Crimea, Paul told the Washington Post, “Some on our side are so stuck in the Cold War era that they want to tweak Russia all the time and I don’t think that is a good idea.” Soon after Crimea, Paul’s tone shifted, urging sanctions and other measures intended to hurt Russia economically, such as building the Keystone pipeline.

In June, Paul wrote an oped for the Wall Street Journal titled, “ America Shouldn’t Choose Sides in Iraq’s Civil War,” one week after Islamic State militants took over key Iraqi cities. Paul chastised Obama’s favoring of the Syrian rebels, saying it “indirectly aided al Qaeda and ISIS [the Islamic State] in Syria—the very group some now propose to counter with U.S. troops [in Iraq].” And he questioned the value of airstrikes, though stopping short of ruling them out: “What would airstrikes accomplish? We know that Iran is aiding the Iraqi government against ISIS. Do we want to, in effect, become Iran’s air force?”

That sparked an op-ed skirmish with potential 2016 rival Gov. Rick Perry, who replied in the Washington Post: “Paul’s brand of isolationism (or whatever term he prefers) would compound the threat of terrorism even further.” Paul gleefully engaged, taking to Politico Magazinelast month to tweak Perry’s call for ground forces in Iraq: “[In 2012] Perry urged the United States to return troops to Iraq to act as a balance against Iran … Does Perry now believe that we should send U.S. troops back into Iraq to fight the Iranians—or to help Iran fight ISIS?”

But after Obama launched airstrikes against the Islamic State last week, Paul refrained from criticizing the move, saying on Monday he has “mixed feelings about it” while reiterating his claim that the United States “protected” ISIS in Syria. Now, instead of debating the merits of the military action, he is focusing on another one of his foreign policy principles: asserting Congress’ authority to declare war under the Constitution and demanding a vote.

Paul’s hesitancy to criticize Obama over Iraq tracks the latest Fox News poll, which found that 65 percent of Americans support the air strikes, including 73 percent of Republicans, a stunning turnaround from the disastrous polling that greeted Obama’s September 2013 threat to strike Syria. These numbers should hearten Hillary and make Paul pause. America’s isolationist moment may be just that—a moment—if voters conclude that specific global threats and humanitarian crises require an American response. Moreover, the rapid rise of Republican isolationism in the Pew poll may prove to be a knee-jerk reaction against Obama, not a fundamental shift away from the hawkish foreign policy that has defined the party for 70 years.

Of course, the uncertainty of future events cuts both ways. For example, Clinton’s vocal skepticism of a nuclear deal with Iran may look myopic if such a deal is struck and helps reduce tensions throughout the Middle East. If military operations in Iraq drag on and test American voters’ patience, Paul remains better positioned than any other Republican to take advantage. The festering crisis of Syria could develop in a myriad of different ways – the fight with the Islamic State could expand and enmesh Obama into the Syrian civil war, a friendlier Iran could push the Assad government toward a settlement – and however Syria looks in 2016 will be stacked against Clinton and Paul’s past statements.

The volatile nature of foreign policy, along with its lack of direct impact on voters’ wallets, often prompts presidential aspirants to de-emphasize the subject. That is one reason why the provocative remarks by Clinton and Paul are so unusual. The other reason is that for decades neither party has had a presidential frontrunner challenging its own fundamental foreign policy principles.

For one party to pursue such a debate risks driving the losing faction into the arms of the other ( Sen. John McCain has already hinted he may prefer Clinton to Paul; Ralph Nader vice-versa). For both parties to pursue it simultaneously raises the possibility of a partisan realignment, with Democrats claiming Ronald Reagan’s mantle of “Peace Through Strength” and Republicans adopting George McGovern’s call of “Come Home, America.”

That might seem strange to imagine. But Democrats’ comfort with military action in pursuit of liberal ends has long been part of their history. And if military action is increasingly perceived as intertwined with liberal ends, and government incompetence, the Republican Party may reconnect with its isolationist past. That didn’t work out so well for Robert Taft. But Rand Paul can hope that Rick Perry is no Wendell Willkie, and Hillary Clinton is no General Eisenhower.