Chait admits that "some Republicans are sounding anti-interventionist notes now" but argues that the "Republican fear of reckless American intervention … will disappear again as soon as a Republican takes the oath of office." Douthat counters:
[I]f you were placing bets on how a particular candidate would govern, the fact that Jon Huntsman seems to be trying to ride the anti-interventionist wave whereas Tim Pawlenty is more likely to channel John McCain provides a decent reason to wager that a Huntsman administration would tilt more realist-Hamiltonian in its foreign policy, and a Pawlenty administration more neoconservative-Wilsonian. And placing bets, in a sense, is all that primary voters ever do.
And the sheer cost of the unending war, given the fiscal crisis, is also an obvious factor. I think deeper shifts are driving this: the massive costs and barely visible benefits of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the incoherence and expense of the Libyan intervention, and the sense that is now endemic that America has over-spent, over-borrowed and over-reached. In a recession that is the new normal, expensive nation-building efforts in foreign countries will have to cede to nation-building efforts at home. And now that Obama has decimated al Qaeda and killed bin Laden, the casus belli has been fulfilled. Hence the record number of Americans favoring immediate withdrawal.
I think Chait under-estimates the collapse of neoconservatism as a governing philosophy. It's alive and well at TNR, butressed by a liberal interventionist chorus, but not in the GOP.
The Dish 