[Peace-discuss] David Gergen worried about Republican "isolationism"

[David Green]

KING: Does it -- does it matter? This is a soul searching is what a primary 
process is about, finding a new leader. But does it matter when you have -- it's 
a Democratic president, but when you're in the middle of these crises -- the 
country is dealing with these crises to have a party that is essentially trying 
to sort it out? 


GERGEN: Well it does matter because it will clearly send a signal to others -- 
other nations if the Republican Party is split over a muscular foreign policy. 
You know they may just want to wait it out. They may get something that's much 
different. I mean this is -- the Republicans have been the hawks. 


I mean the neoconservatives after all you know picked up that banner and charged 
into Iraq and charged into Afghanistan and to have the Republican candidates now 
basically say let's get out of Afghanistan as quickly as we can, or to attack 
the Libyan thing, you know if you're Gadhafi and watching this, you might take 
-- you know I don't want to go too far with this because Gadhafi is -- I think 
he's going to be gone soon, but -- and good riddance -- but you know a lot of 
Republicans were pushing President Obama to be much more aggressive and muscular 
in Libya.

And John McCain, Lindsey Graham and others thought that we ought to lower the 
boom on Gadhafi. It was not that long ago, of course, that President Reagan went 
after him with some bombs after terrorist attack in Berlin. You know, 
Republicans have traditionally taken a very hard line against Gadhafi and a lot 
of these terrorist activities, so I was surprised last night by this and I also 
wonder where it's going to lead in terms of defense spending among these 
candidates. If they want to spend -- if they refuse to cut spending, what is it 
the military is supposed to be for when we got terrorists facing us? It almost 
seems like in some ways a repudiation of lot of what George W. Bush was trying 
to do and I was surprised.

KING: An interesting point. Not only criticism of the Democratic president but 
in many ways perhaps criticism -- you used the word repudiation of George W. 
Bush. We'll keep an eye on this. It's a very interesting debate within the 
Republican primary.

David Gergen, as always, thanks for your insight.
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