Monday's announcement of Sen. Marco Rubio's foreign policy team could not have been better timed. Not because it will save Rubio – his string of second- and third-place finishes, coupled with his collapse in the polls, signals a campaign on its last legs. Rather, the reveal of Rubio's "neocon dream team" makes clear that his campaign isn't the only thing disintegrating. So too is the GOP's neoconservative establishment.

One of the most confounding political developments of the past decade has been neoconservatism's grip on the Republican Party. The catastrophic Iraq War should have driven its architects into the wilderness. But the party's blanket opposition to the Obama administration gave them a way back in. Since Obama governed as a pragmatic realist, Republicans granted the neocons a reprieve.

Which is not to say neoconservatives had an iron-lock on the GOP. For a brief period after the 2012 election, the party experienced a libertarian moment, one that extended to foreign policy. Two 2016 candidates, Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, capitalized on the shift in public opinion to push hard for Republican non-intervention. When Paul launched his 13-hour filibuster of American drone policy in 2013, Cruz was there by his side – a partnership that caused Sen. John McCain to dismiss them as "wacko birds."

But with the rise of the Islamic State group, the Republican affection for nonintervention dissolved overnight. The neocon consensus came roaring back: boots on the ground in Syria, the silent treatment in Tehran, sanctions against Russia. Better reckless than feckless.

No candidate exemplifies the neocon resurgence better than Rubio. He proudly called for "a new American Century," the guiding vision of neoconservatives since the 1990s. As I wrote last April, "That he can openly embrace the ideas that led to the most disastrous decade in U.S. foreign policy history shows how little the GOP has learned from the failures of the last decade, and how calcified its foreign policy thinking has become." At the time, it was difficult to imagine his foreign policy hurting him. Paul's campaign was clearly a non-starter. And former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a liberal interventionist, would have difficulty scoring points off his hawkishness.

Enter Donald Trump.

Now, Trump is not what anyone would call a foreign-policy savant. He hews to no consistent ideology. (Consistency is not his strong point.) But he does have preferences. Thomas Wright sifted through decades of Trump's statements for Politico to try to suss out a set of policies, arguing the Republican front-runner does in fact have "a remarkably coherent and consistent worldview." While I wouldn't go that far, it is clear that Trump offers a challenge to both noninterventionism and neoconservatism. It may not be an -ism, but it is an alternative.

Trump is all about bluster and strength, but has no real attachments to intervention or democracy. He readily labels the war in Iraq a "mistake" and attacks the foreign-policy establishment for its error-laden intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. He wants a strong military, but wants NATO allies to pay for it. He promises to bully adversaries, bill allies and buddy up with dictators.

And his supporters love him for it.

Neocons, on the other hand, are teetering on the edge of full-scale panic. Two weeks ago, Robert Kagan announced his support for Clinton, arguing that the rise of Trump had left the Republican Party unfit for habitation. "The party cannot be saved," he concluded, "but the country still can be." As Rubio flounders, other neocons will surely follow.

Not that they will find the Democratic Party, the original home of the neoconservative movement, a welcoming place. While they might find Clinton's interventionism more palatable than Trump's big-talk-small-stick philosophy, today's Democratic Party was forged in the antiwar fires of the 2000s. Neocons might momentarily roost on the fringes of the party, but it seems unlikely they could make a home there.