Maybe Chuck Hagel just got a little hung up on his words yesterday, but this was a bizarre passage in his “Face the Nation” interview:

I’m not happy with the Republican Party today. It has drifted from the party of Eisenhower, of Goldwater, of Reagan. The party that I joined, it isn’t the same party. It’s not. It’s been hijacked by a group of single-minded almost isolationists, insulationists, power-projectors.

How can you be an isolationist (or an insulationist, for that matter) and power-projector at the same time? And isn’t that an odd pejorative to throw at someone: You SOB, you want to project American power!

Meanwhile, Hagel continues to seem to me someone who strikes a credible pose of thoughtfulness without ever really thinking things through. He kept on saying that we need “to get our young men out of the middle of a civil war” and instead get our troops “into the counter-insurgency against al-Qaeda.”

This is deeply confused. Stoking the civil war is central to al-Qaeda’s strategy. You can’t let the civil war blaze out of control and hope to wage a counter-insurgency among terrified people utterly riven by genocidal hatreds. The chief threat to al-Qaeda in Iraq over the long term is the creation of a somewhat stable, competent, fair-minded central government that can wage the fight against it without the taint of being an occupying army. And a full-on civil war is al-Qaeda’s best way to try to stop that from happening.

So we are waging a counter-insurgency against al-Qaeda, no matter what Hagel thinks it should look like in his imaginary world. Whatever Hagel is, please don’t call him a realist.

UPDATE

E-mails:

– Hi Rich-
I think Hagel (R-France) is just speaking the patois of the foreign policy cognoscenti, wherein “isolationist” is defined as “the projection of American power without the prior approval of our (sometimes nominal) allies.” It’s a peculiar definition, and he’s wrong on the merits, but in the echo chamber in which he’s speaking, it does have a certain internal logic.
–Is that more weird than this?
–Dear Mr. Lowry,
… allow me to offer my interpretation of what Hagel is saying, which seems pretty clear to me: that today’s Republican Party is an unholy alliance of the old Isolationist Right, with its contempt for the rest of the world beyond the Ohio-Mississippi-Missouri Valley (esp. France and New York and Boston), and the Imperial World Savers, Wilson and TR. The worst of the old isolationism was its sneering and ignorant dismissal of everything outside Peoria, much like NRO’s equally sneering and ignorant dismissal of the French and Continental Europe more generally. The worst sin of the Imperialist faction (on both left and right) is the kind of insensate and callous idealism so perfectly captured in Graham Green’s THE QUIET AMERICAN.
Combine those two, and you get today’s GOP. They’re natural foes, but they’re together at last in today’s Republican Party.
You might not like my diagnosis of what ails you over on the right side of the aisle, but I stand by it.