Perspective: It's Foreign Policy

 Not sure we can buy this in its entirety, but the author makes a good case against Bill Buckley's Interventionism.

After a short discussion of Murray Rothbard's disdain for interventionism:

 ...Rothbard alleged that the modus operandi of fusionism and especially National Review was to excommunicate the non-interventionist right from the mainstream of American conservatism. Little has changed. It appears that today’s attempted Buckleyite and neoconservative excommunications are less because of bigotry or conspiracism, but more because of foreign policy. ...

Hmmmm.

Buckley dissed John Flynn for Flynn's dislike of interventionism.  Then:

 ...National Review also soon began to enforce an orthodoxy about American-Israeli relations. In an article in the November 1956 edition, defending America against the accusation that segregation would reflect on the nation internationally, Guy Ponce de Leon included a line that caught the eye of the University of Chicago’s Leo Strauss: “Even the Jews, themselves the victims of the most notorious racial discrimination of modern times, did not hesitate to create the first racist state in history.”

Strauss sent NR Editor Willmoore Kendall a letter defending the Jewish state as an exemplar of conservative principles, despite its politics at the time being dominated by Labor Zionists. National Review never allowed severe criticism of the state of Israel to grace its pages again. (James Burnham would argue at times that Middle East policy should not be oriented around it, but nobody was able to tell Burnham off.)...

Whaddya know?  Israel!  Next,:

... the excommunication of the John Birch Society is cited as the shining moment of Buckley’s career. There, we are told, conservatism excised the antisemites and the conspiracy cranks. Never mind that Ludwig von Mises was on the Editorial Board of the Society’s publication, American Opinion, and would defend Welch to Buckley. ...

Welch had the gall to campaign against the VietNam war.  So....

 ...Burnham himself, who had held off from the first round of attacks against the John Birch Society, dedicated his column––Third World War––to attacking Welch for his position on Vietnam. The mastermind behind National Review’s foreign policy had never been a fan of Goldwater, always being more of a Rockefeller Republican. But the John Birch Society’s new stand against the Vietnam War (“Get US out!” their publications and billboards cried) bothered Burnham: "Its stand on Vietnam confirms, not for the first time, that any American who seriously wants to contribute to his country’s security and well-being and to oppose Communism will have to stay clear of the JBS.”...

(We concede that Welch was a slightly conspiracy theorist.  But opposition to the VietNam war was not 'daft' at all; nor was it un-principled.)

... The magazine’s interventionist line was not limited to Vietnam. Later, the Manhattan Twelve—the alliance of Buckley, Burnham, Meyer, and other fusionist hawks—revoked National Review’s support for President Nixon. Their contention was that Nixon had opened talks with Communist China and was thus insufficiently hawkish. (Nixon’s failed price controls would come after the Manhattan Twelve issued their documents.) Skepticism of American involvement with Israel met similar punishment. Buckley’s rambling monograph In Search of Antisemitism would give ground for the media and neoconservatives to attack Pat Buchanan for his criticism of the Israel lobby in the United States. Even if one holds that Buckley did not intend to excommunicate Buchanan, he certainly laid the groundwork for the neoconservatives to finish the job. National Review’s “Unpatriotic Conservatives” condemned those members of the right who were skeptical of the American war in Iraq....

Well.........NR is near-death, if not already dead.  They oppose JDVance because he dared speak ill of Israel's policies.  And it is clear that the American public is sick to death of the Perma-War.

Maybe NON-intervention will win the day soon, as it had done from 1776 through about the time of TR and then, catastrophically, Wilson, Roosevelt, Ike, JFK/LBJ, and the Blob Headed By Bushies.

Let us pray.