Is Tea Party Foreign Policy Isolationist, Neocon Or Just End-Times Wingnuttery?

By Steve Hynd

Following up on Russ's post earlier today about end-timers "looking forward to the apocalypse, such that, in Tom Krattenmaker's words:

It's as if one group is rowing the boat in the direction of species betterment (or, at least, survival), while another group sits idly as the vessel drifts closer to the precipice of the waterfall, convinced that the divine hand will pluck them and their religiously correct fellows from disaster.

I found myself reading Josh Rogin's piece for FP magazine on Tea Party foreign policy schizophrenia today. Rogin writes:

Tea Partiers have no unified view on major foreign policy issues. They are all over the map.

Sarah Palin, who spoke at Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally on the Mall Saturday, would like the Tea Party to endorse her quasi-neoconservative approach to national security policy. She advocates aggressive unilateralism, ever-rising defense budgets, unfailing support of Israel, and a skeptical eye toward China, Russia, and any other possible competitor to the United States.

Ron Paul, a founding leader of the Tea Party who has seen the movement slip away from him somewhat, wants the  movement's focus on thrift to extend to foreign policy, resulting in an almost isolationist approach that sets limits on the use of American power and its presence abroad.

In over a dozen interviews with self-identified Tea Party members at Saturday's rally, your humble Cable guy discovered that, when it comes to foreign policy, attendees rarely subscribed wholeheartedly to either Palin or Paul's world view.

But what he did find was an almost universal wish to rely on the Bible for guidance about foreign policy precepts - often right up to the end-times:

Maxwell, like Koss, also referenced the Bible to support Israel's right to the land it now occupies. "The Bible says in the last days, that the Middle East, that's going to be the center of activity," he said.  "If you go back to the Bible, it says there's going to be an army of 200 million men coming out of the East to the Middle East, as part of that whole Armageddon and �end of days' thing."

Back to Krattenmaker:

Opinion surveys over the past decade show that more than half the American public believes that the end times are coming.

A new poll from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press finds that roughly four in 10 Americans believe the Second Coming will happen by 2050. Those enraptured by the rapture tend to view current events through the lens of biblical prophesy, reading everything from the Obama election to the oil disaster in the Gulf Coast as fulfillment of one or another cryptic passage from Revelation.

You can imagine the implications this might have for someone's approach to the here, the now and the times ahead. Work for a better future? What future?

In this view, staving off wholesale destruction is viewed as a distraction from evangelism or, worse, as faithlessness, as getting in God's way.

With their reliance on messages of Islamophobia and the supposed centrality of the Bible to US political philosophy, you have to figure that most Tea Partiers come from that 4 in 10. Beck has, after all, officially and publicly married the Tea Party movement to the Religious Right.

At which point the isolationists would become revealed as those who wish to wait for the end-times to come naturally while the neocon-tending tea partiers are the ones who want to hurry the apocalypse along by application of a warmongering U.S. foreign policy.

However, things are never as simple as they look. All the indications are that the rank-and-file are being manipulated by neoconservative powerbrokers to their own ends. Thus the growing isolation of isolationist and original Tea Party guiding light Ron Paul. Tea Partiers and end-timers beware, you're being hijacked to push an endless American Empire.