Will the Tea Tempest Storm the Pentagon?

Hopefully, the libertarian part of the Tea Party movement will win out on this and the pleas of the war drum beating neo-cons will be ignored.


Will the Tea Tempest Storm the Pentagon?

by Christopher Preble and John Samples

This article appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on November 4, 2010.

Some hawks are getting defensive about the budget.

With a number of tea party-backed candidates victorious and on their way to Washington, there is much speculation about how they might affect foreign policy. "It's hard to divine because they haven't articulated clear views," explains James Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations. "We are left
wondering: What exactly would they do?"

...

It's absurd to argue that there's no room for cuts. The Pentagon's budget has grown nearly 86 percent in real terms since 1998.

...

Given their attention to fiscal realities and our government's constitutional obligations, tea partyers are particularly well-suited to lead a movement for more foreign policy restraint and put a brake on global adventurism and massive military spending — hence the preemptive shot across their bow by a few Washington think-tankers.

Will the tea party's candidates side with the Washington consensus when they move inside the Beltway? Or will they stay true to their small-government principles and remind Washington insiders that the Constitution provides for "the common defence" of ourselves and our posterity, not of the entire world? We will find out soon enough.

- rest at www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12533