The new foreign-policy populism.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: The Realist

In his parliamentary novel Phineas Redux, Anthony Trollope observed, "The apostle of Christianity and the infidel can meet without the chance of a quarrel, but it is never safe to bring together two men who differ about a saint or a surplice." It's an observation that captures the current state of the Republican party. When National Review, for example, recently created a furor by emblazoning "Against Trump" on its cover, the magazine's editors depicted themselves as defending the conservative citadel from a "philosophically unmoored" interloper. A phalanx of outside contributors, ranging from Glenn Beck to William Kristol, also excoriated Donald Trump. But something didn't quite ring right. For all the indignation and expostulations about the New York billionaire's run for the presidency, as Ira Stoll noted in the New York Sun, the magazine itself had previously supported a number of the policies that it was now attacking Trump for endorsing. "In its own illogical, inconsistent, ad hominem attacks," wrote Stoll, "perhaps National Review is precisely the foe Mr. Trump deserves."

Nor did NR's complaints cut much ice with the Tea Party contingent: the magazine's quondam heroine, Sarah Palin, who was originally discovered during a cruise to Alaska by Kristol and Fred Barnes, hailed Trump in Iowa: "Understand the way the system--the Establishment--works and has gotten us into the troubles we are in. The permanent political class has been doing the bidding of their campaign donor class." As Sam Tanenhaus observes in this issue, the big-government conservatism and crusading foreign policy that the Republican strategist Karl Rove championed during the George W. Bush administration and tried to maintain with his American Crossroads Super PAC is besieged. The former wunderkind, Tanenhaus writes, "has become the hollow man of the Bush years, a figure of fun." When Rove declared in his weekly column in the Wall Street Journal that Trump would be "the dream opponent" for the Democratic Party, he responded by dubbing Rove an "establishment flunky."

With Trump and Ted Cruz warning against promoting democracy abroad, a foreign-policy vision that contrasts with the Bush era has emerged in the GOP. Senator Marco Rubio, the leading exponent of the neocon credo, is attacking them for apostasy:

We have isolationist candidates who are apparently more passionate about weakening our military and intelligence capabilities than they are about destroying our enemies. Words and political stunts cannot ensure our security. ISIS...