It seems like only yesterday that the Beltway establishment was assuring us that the Tea Party had fundamentally transformed the GOP's approach to foreign policy and national security, paving the way for Rand Paul and perhaps some of the other more conservative Republicans to attract the anti-war faction to its side. Some even went so far as to say that the Robert Taft conservatives were back, referring to the famous Roosevelt-era isolationist. Never mind the fact that the Tea Party has never been the least bit isolationist, or that conservative Republicans are all unreconstructed hawks; it was taken as an article of faith among many that this was the path by which the Republicans would "moderate" and once again become the reasonable party the Beltway fantasizes could serve as the proper balance to the liberal hippies of the left.

If the last few month of bellicose GOP presidential hopefuls caterwauling about saving Western civilization didn't finally persuade the establishment that their narrative is no longer operative, the battalion of candidates' uniform reaction to this week's announcement of a nuclear agreement with Iran should get the job done. No one could have expected someone like Lindsey "stop them before they kill us all" Graham to be circumspect in his comments. But saying that the agreement was "akin to declaring war on Israel and the Sunni Arabs" was over the top even for him. And Rick "you will live by exactly the standards that the rest of us live by" Perry could have been expected to be opposed. Even still, his statement that the agreement is "one of the most destructive foreign policy decisions in my lifetime" went well beyond even his normal level of belligerence.

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Jeb Bush pretty much made a declaration demanding regime change in Iran, which shouldn't come as a huge surprise considering the family history in the region. Scott Walker, the man who once said that his historic battle with kindergarten teachers in Wisconsin made him the best prepared to face down ISIS, said that the deal "will be remembered as one of America's worst diplomatic failures" and then said that if he were president he'd sprinkle fairy dust on the world and make it all go away. (Well, to be precise, he said, "in order to ensure the safety of America and our allies, the next president must restore bipartisan and international opposition to Iran's nuclear program while standing with our allies to roll back Iran's destructive influence across the Middle East," which is kind of amusing coming from a guy who calls the president "breathtakingly out of touch with reality.")

Here's a little recap of the rest of the field's instant reaction (as gathered by the National Journal):

Marco Rubio: The agreement "undermines our national security" and "failure by the President to obtain congressional support will tell the Iranians and the world that this is Barack Obama's deal, not an agreement with lasting support from the United States" which is a very strange thing for someone who wants to be the president to say.

Carly Fiorina: The notoriously failed businesswoman said she's negotiated deals and "if you want a good deal, you've got to walk away sometimes." Ok.

Rick Santorum: He actually articulated the underlying assumption of all these critiques which is that the only acceptable "deal" is for the nation of Iran to beg the United States for mercy. He said it was "a catastrophic capitulation" by the president and then added that he would have "continued to put pressure on this regime to capitulate. What we have here is not a capitulation." Ok.

Mike Huckabee: "Shame on the Obama admin for agreeing to a deal that empowers an evil Iranian regime to carry out its threat to 'wipe Israel off the map. As president, I will stand with Israel and keep all options on the table, including military force, to topple the terrorist Iranian regime." Onward Christian soldiers.

Chris Christie: The president is "playing a dangerous game with our national security" and "the deal threatens Israel, it threatens the United States, and it turns 70 years of nuclear policy on its head." He didn't elaborate on how a nuclear arms agreement is different from 70 years of nuclear arms agreements but I'm sure he will eventually. He would have just told the Iranians to sit down and shut up and that would have been the end of it.

Bobby Jindal: For some reason he just trolled Hillary Clinton, demanding that she oppose the deal.

Ted Cruz: He must have had an off day. He was surprisingly prosaic, simply giving the boilerplate: "It is a fundamental betrayal of the security of the United States and of our closest allies, first and foremost Israel."

Ben Carson: Blah,blah blah "almost certain to prove an historic mistake with potentially deadly consequences."

But what of our avatar of GOP rationality on foreign policy, Sen. Rand Paul? Surely, he will break with his party on something of this significance, right?

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Credit where credit is due. His comments are not as blindly jingoistic as those of his fellow candidates. (And his social media team is simply awesome.) But he opposes the deal and has nothing good to say about it. It's pretty clear that the ghost of Robert Taft can go back to haunting his old memorial and leave the Republican Senate cloakroom to Graham and McCain. They can't hear the old duffer.

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It is another of those clarifying moments. Some of us have been saying for quite some time that the Republicans hoped to frame this election around national security and foreign policy. They obviously hope that enough time and distance have passed for a majority of Americans to forget the last GOP president's epic bungling and revert to their old assumptions about the GOP daddy party keeping the country safe from the boogeyman. They believe this is a particularly fertile line of attack against a woman candidate (and they aren't all wrong about that).

Indeed, they seem to be preparing the campaign battlefield around a simple idea of foreign threats coming to kill us all in our beds, whether it be murderous immigrants, ISIS infiltrators or Iranian radicals hurling nuclear bombs across the Atlantic ocean. Last summer they even threw in the ebola crisis as more evidence of our vulnerability to "the other." This does, in some ways, follow the isolationist playbook in that it portrays the U.S. as Fortress America, alone against its evil enemies and unable to count on its pusillanimous allies. But instead of withdrawing from our role as global policemen, these modern Republicans are unabashed imperialists who believe that American might makes right. The lesson of the recent adventures in neoconservatism didn't teach them to be less ambitious but to simply abandon all pretense of trying to spread freedom or prevent conflagration. It's us against them, period.

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In essence, the Republican Party wants to wage its 2016 campaign as a referendum on whether or not to build a wall around our country and then go abroad and wage World War 3. It's unknown whether the people are up for this or not. But perhaps more important, we still don't know if the Democrats and Hillary Clinton will have the fortitude to resist their provocations and wage their 2016 campaign based on reason instead of paranoia. This is an old fault line in postwar American politics and Democrats have traditionally had a difficult time traversing it. (Just ask Lyndon Johnson.) Let's hope they have the fortitude to resist the puerile baiting we see in those GOP presidential candidates' comments. The Internet has a lesson for them: Don't feed the trolls.