Centerfield

A Conservative Foreign Policy

George Will does something in his recent columns that's becoming kind of rare.

I get the increasingly uncomfortable feeling these days that a lot of commentators, and a large swath of Americans, are defining their views and perspectives on highly individual terms. They identify with a trusted leader, or a leading commentator, and they pretty much accept the specific statements, views, and arguments of that trusted person.

It's almost like ideology were a manifestation of what a certain group of people do, rather than a set of principles to think about and apply consistently.

In his latest column, Will asks if the foreign policy views currently floating around and increasingly identified with conservatism are really all that conservative:

Bush and Blair and many people called neoconservatives believe that moral objectives in politics are universally applicable imperatives. If so, then either national cultures do not significantly differ, or they do not matter or they are infinitely malleable under the touch of enlightened reformers. But all three propositions are false and antithetical to all that conservatism teaches about the importance of cultural inertia and historical circumstances.

Blair followed ... with these words of Lincoln's: "Those that deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." Lincoln's subject was Americans' complicity in American slavery. But Blair's muddled implication is that a nation that refuses to use force on behalf of all unfree people is denying them freedom.

The premise -- that terrorism thrives where democracy does not -- may seem to generate a duty to universalize democracy. But it is axiomatic that one cannot have a duty to do something that cannot be done.

Watching cable news, you'd be excused for concluding that "conservatives" are the militarily aggressive camp who want to export democratic values to rogue nations, and that liberals are the ones holding up anti-war picket signs.

But conservatives have long felt distinctly uncomfortable with nation-building exercises, or anything that relies on dramatic reversals in existing social or political structures.

There's an uncomfortable coexistence of fact and principle in the soul of conservatism today. Will gives us a nice overview of it.