No, the obstacle is the military-industrial complex, war profiteers, the intelligence services, and the Israeli and Gulf State lobbies.

By Damon Linker, The Week

Three of the most prominent populist conservative writers around — Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Gladden Pappin — have taken to The New York Times to launch a broadside against Republican foreign policy hawks, especially those otherwise aligned with the party’s Trumpian shift in style and substance. The result is an important intervention, but also one deeply ensnared in the GOP’s internal contradictions.

The authors argue that conservatives need to “make a clear break” from the military interventionism that has dominated the Republican Party for decades in favor of a commitment to foster “material development at home and cultural nonaggression abroad.” Prioritizing foreign policy “restraint,” they claim, will place the GOP firmly in the camp of those Americans who have historically embraced a vision of America as an “exemplary republic” attempting to perfect self-government at home rather than striving to spread liberal democracy abroad by military force. Ahmari, Deneen, and Pappin somewhat polemically describe the latter, more imperialistic approach as a vision of the country as a “crusader nation.”

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