Republican voters are ready to make a clean split from the neoconservative consensus that has dominated the party’s foreign policy for decades, and shift toward a grand strategy of realism grounded in America’s national interest. The two leading candidates in the Republican presidential primary have proven this, and Washington should follow suit sooner rather than later.

This new alignment reflects a major directional shift in the Republican Party. Poll after poll shows that Americans in general, and particularly Republican voters, no longer want to protect a wealthy continent that free-rides off their hard earned tax dollars.

This urgent debate about the future of our nation’s foreign policy is absent elsewhere. As is tradition, when a Democrat is in the White House, the supposedly anti-war progressives in Congress disappear from the conversation. In addition, the mainstream media, which always stands ready to beat the drums of war, has compared Republican realists to Chamberlain in Munich in 1938.

Despite what the neoconservatives, Democrats, and the mainstream media say, our government’s current foreign policy is unsustainable.

We, as elected representatives, welcome a debate and the opportunity to demonstrate why realism is ascendant and reflects the growing majority in the Republican Party, challenging a quarter-century neoconservative consensus.

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