The Zombie Foreign Policy Consensus Shambles On

Unfortunately, the bipartisan foreign policy consensus shambles on no matter how many times it seems that it should have perished.

Fareed Zakaria declares bipartisan foreign policy consensus to be dead:

The stakes are high — and they are made much higher by the fact that, for the first time since the World War II era, the basic issue of America’s engagement with the world is becoming a partisan issue.

Zakaria does cite some polling that shows significant partisan differences on a couple of questions, but he is reading far too much into these results. It’s true that most Republican respondents in recent Pew poll said that they favored concentrating more on problems at home, but this is not new. If we look back at earlier polling, we can see how much public opinion has shifted back and forth on this question since the start of the century.