The American Conservative

All Republicans, and those inside and outside the USA who are convinced that all Republicans are warmongers, need to read these excepts from the mission statement of "The American Conservative".

...And yet there is a great, often unarticulated discomfort in the ranks of many who considered themselves conservative during the past few decades. A friend of ours recently told of an encounter with one of his colleagues. "You're a conservative," the colleague said, "so you must agree with Paul Wolfowitz that we should attack Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and all those places."

Well, no. Not all conservatives do agree that the United States should engage — for reasons that hardly touch America's own vital interests — in an open-ended war against much of the Arab and Muslim world.

We will be different.

Many voices will appear in the pages of The American Conservative — often in disagreement with one another. We are of course in considerable part Buchananite — well disposed to the web of ideas that drew millions of voters during three Buchanan presidential bids. But our magazine's mission is broader: to ignite the conversation that conservatives ought to have engaged in since the end of the Cold War, but didn't.

And we will discuss, frequently, America's role in the world, turning a critical eye on those who want to cast aside every relevant American foreign policy tradition — from Robert Taft-style isolationism to prudent Dwight Eisenhower-style internationalism, in favor of go it alone militarism, where America threatens and bombs one nation after another, while the world looks on in increasing horror.

We believe conservatism to be the most natural political tendency, rooted in man's taste for the familiar, for family, for faith in God. We believe that true conservatism has a predisposition for the institutions and mores that exist. So much of what passes for contemporary conservatism is wedded to a kind of radicalism — fantasies of global hegemony, the hubristic notion of America as a universal nation for all the world's peoples, a hyperglobal economy. In combination with an increasingly unveiled contempt for America's long-standing allies, this is more a recipe for disaster.

Against it, we take our stand.

Music to my ears!