Ramesh: It’s a good question (and I like your piece in the current issue on the charge). I wrestled with the topic a while back in the magazine. Greenberg’s essay is typical of the genre. Conservatives own their intellectual history, even when it’s not relevant or they’re ignorant of it, or when that history is not quite accurate. Liberals meanwhile never own their intellectual history. Here’s the opening of the piece, still behind the digital firewall.

It was a typical New York Times article. Among the themes: Iraq is a disaster; it’s the neocons’ fault; the GOP is flirting once more with its dark addiction to “isolationism”; proof that George W. Bush is growing in office can be found in his realization that Bill Clinton’s policies were right; and so on. There was only one problem with the page-one story by David E. Sanger titled “A Bush Alarm: Shun Isolation”: It was a pile of nonsense.
According to Sanger, Bush has been blindsided by an “unexpected uprising” among newly isolationist neoconservatives. This “rising chorus of neo-conservatives, who urged Mr. Bush to topple Mr. Hussein, say that, having liberated Iraq, the rest is up to the Iraqis.” What neoconservatives did Sanger have in mind? Well, he names only one, presumably the ringleader: William F. Buckley Jr. But the inconvenient fact is that WFB isn’t a neoconservative and never urged Bush to topple Saddam Hussein. Moreover, there is no “uprising.” Of the major neoconservatives who “urged” the Iraq war — Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Reuel Mark Gerecht, Robert Kagan, Eliot Cohen, Paul Wolfowitz, Fouad Ajami — none has called for bugging out. They’ve offered criticisms, to be sure, but not of an isolationist flavor. Nor have the more traditional or mainstream conservative outlets, including this magazine, offered such an opinion. In other words, WFB was ascribed to a rebellious movement he never belonged to — and which isn’t rebelling. But other than that Sanger got it just right.
Well, not really. The flaw in Sanger’s analysis runs deeper than an error in ideological taxonomy. Here’s a rule of thumb to keep in mind when studying the history of American foreign-policy debates in the 20th and 21st centuries. When liberals don’t want to do something on the international scene that conservatives favor, it’s because liberals are any of the following: prudent, pragmatic, realistic, idealistic, peace-loving, clear-eyed, moral, restrained, or all of the above. When conservatives don’t want to commit to a liberal foreign-policy agenda, there’s one catchall word: isolationist. And even when conservatives subscribe to the same foreign-policy agenda as liberals, they’re doing it for isolationist reasons.
For example, in 2004, Franklin Foer, then a senior editor of The New Republic (he’s now editor), wrote a long essay on conservatives and isolationism for the New York Times. It began by noting that conservative columnist George Will had recently voiced some second thoughts about the Iraq War. Will’s reservations, according to Foer, were “hardly surprising” given the conservative movement’s isolationist history. Of course, The New Republic had itself supported the Iraq invasion as much as Will had, if not more so, in 2002 and 2003, and had subsequently come to have grave and strident second thoughts. But no one would suggest — least of all The New Republic’s editors — that they were retreating into isolationism. George Will’s second thoughts are apparently driven by whispers from the America First Committee, while The New Republic’s doubts are the stuff of wisdom and clear thinking.
This nasty idea, a defining theme of elite conventional wisdom, works its way into everything from popular culture to highbrow political commentary. And it’s a lie. Or, more accurately, it’s a half-truth, which is the most pernicious kind of lie. Of course there were, are, and always will be isolationists on the American right. But isolationism isn’t a uniquely conservative phenomenon, nor is it written into conservative DNA. If anything, isolationism’s natural home is within the mainstream of the Democratic party and New Republic liberalism.