Although most Republican still reject Isolationism, a small, but clamorous contingent of the MAGA Coalition has embraced what Rebecca L. Heinrich calls the 1939 Project. Tucker Carlson has emerged as the leader of this endeavor, striving to delegitimize American intervention in World War II and America’s post World War II role in the world it catalyzed. What began as a fringe movement is alas on the threshold of morphing into a mighty threat to U.S. national security now that Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation – Ronald Reagan’s favorite thinktank, has joined the ranks of such “restrainers.”

Writing in the American Conservative, Roberts hailed arch-isolationist Pat Buchanan as one of the great heroes of the conservative movement and recommended that President Trump award him the Presidential medal of freedom. The President should respond categorically not. Bushanan is not only the most unabashed defender of the Isolationist Right that peaked before World War II, but the Godfather of Tucker Carlson’s incendiary contemporary variant of America First neuralgically anti-Ukraine, anti-Israel and pro-Putin. Sebastian Gorka, Deputy Assistance to the President and Senior Director for Terrorism at the White House put it best, blasting Carlson as a” poor substandard repackaging of neo-Buchananite Isolationism.

Consider Buchanan’s Republic Not an Empire, his most systematic defense of an “America First” Foreign Policy demanding the withdrawal of American power and protection from most of the world.  By piling up open-ended, extravagant, and provocative commitments unrelated to the true national interests of the nation, Buchanan’s argument runs, American leaders “have reenacted every folly that brought great powers to ruin. Buchanan assails NATO expansion as a prime example of “folly of our reigning foreign policy elites. We must, Buchanan declares, jettison our outdated Cold War Commitments that risk American involvement in major conflicts in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Instead, he promotes a return to his rendition of the America First tradition that governed American Foreign Policy between 1976 until 1917.

Buchanan’s assertions about the history of the 20th century repudiate the core premises of Post World War II Republican Foreign Policy --- the moral democratic realism of Reagan, the Realpolitik of Nixon, and President Trump’s Jacksonian conception of America First. Buchanan insisted that American intervention in World War II was a mistake, that FDR foolishly and deceitfully maneuvered the United States into the war. “Hitler had not wanted the War in the West. But when the West declared War, he overran France to secure his rear before conquering the East. “

Buchanan does not believe that hundreds of thousands of American boys should have been killed in Europe and Asia fighting Hitler and Tojo,” because he does not believe that America was threatened by Japan’s bid for Empire in the Indo-Pacific or Nazi Germany’s domination of all of Europe. Instead, the United States should have stayed out of the war that “made Europe safe for Stalinism and Asia safe for Maoism.’

No doubt FDR made major mistakes, particularly in dealing with the Soviet Union. He understood, however, that Hitler not only strove to dominate the European continent but the major power centers of the world. Would the United States have reduced the cost and risks of an inevitable confrontation waiting even longer than it did to enter World War II?

Buchanan defies massive evidence to the contrary deriding Winston Churchill, also one of Tucker Carlson’s favorite targets to demonize. The British Prime Minister rightly envisaged collaboration with the Soviet Union as a tactical arrangement, to last only while the war lasted and for the limited objective of defeating Hitler, then the graver immediate danger. Once the entry of the United States into the war made victory over the Nazis certain, Churchill rightly attempted to gear Anglo-American operations to minimizing Soviet influence in the post war world.

Granted, there were intelligent, honorable defenders of isolationism before World War II. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, one of the great heroes of the Cold War, came to Congress in 1941 an opponent of American intervention, a position he did not abandon until December of 1941. Arthur Vandenberg, Gerald Ford, William F. Buckley and many other stalwart internationalists after World War were also isolationists until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Yet these statesmen repented their mistakes, while Buchanan and Carson have double down on defending the indefensible.

Buchanan exposes his darkest and most perverse side in his full- throated apologia of Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh not only opposed American entry into the war, but admired Hitler whom he met during a visit to Nazi Germany in 1936. “ While I still have many reservations,” Lindberg observed, Hitler is undoubtably a great man and I believe he has done much for the Germany people.” On September 3 Lindbergh delivered his most infamous speech charging Jews with using their influence in Hollywood and the press to manipulate the United States to intervene in World War II “The leaders of both the British and Jewish races, for reasons that are understandable from their point of view as they are inadvisable for ours, for reasons that are not American, wish to involve us in the war.”

Strikingly, Buchanan devotes only two pages and a handful of selective references to the foreign policy of Ronald Reagan. Although the Reagan in whose White House Buchanan served may “have been no Wilsonian.” He was no Buchananite either. Reagan, who considered Churchill a a hero, not only contested Soviet totalitarianism from start to finish, but championed the defense of the democratic zone of peace and its expansion within the bounds of prudence. Unlike Buchanan and Carlson, Reagan was also lifelong philo-Semite. Writing in An American Life, Reagan said he held no conviction more deeply than the imperative of ensuring the survival of Israel” and preventing another Holocaust.  Buchanan is again off the mark claiming Reagan’s foreign policy was “crafted to prevail in a long- term struggle by putting ideological, not military, pressure on Moscow.  What about Reagan’s military buildup or the Strategic Defense Initiative, which Margaret Thatcher and the Soviet Archives identified as “a vital factor in ending the Cold War?

Reagan’s understanding of himself also demolishes Buchanan’s tendentious attempts to portray him a “restrainer” rather closer—though not identical --- in word and deed to the neoconservatives Buchanan and Carlson revile.  Speaking at the University of Virginia on December 1988 as his Presidency wound to a close, Reagan attributed the improvement in Soviet-American relations to his policy o unremitting across the board economic, political, and military pressure, not conciliation.

No doubt the Tucker Carlsons of the world will cheer Kevin Roberts casting aside Ronald Reagan’s Legacy and that of Heritage’s venerable Founder Ed Feulner, an exponent of Reaganite Conservative internationalism with no pale pastels. Roberts should not expect President Trump, however, to take the plunge into his strategic and moral abyss. Although President Trump rightly has insisted on renegotiating the terms of America’s role in the world to suit the conditions of the 21st century rather than the 20th, his is no admirer of Pat Buchanan for reasons he laid out forcibly in An America We Deserve:

Buchanan’s…. “ starting view that the Western allies should not have stopped Hitler is repugnant When he said that, he totally lost it. Hitler was a monster and it was essential for the Allies to crush Naziism. To say that Hitler had no ‘malignant intentions” towards the United States is beyond belief (Twenty Years ago Buchanan was less cautious, he called Hitler a man of great courage, a soldiers soldier… a leader steeped in the history of Europe and talked about other extraordinary gift. My grandfather was a German. But I am proud of the vital role the United States played in defeating the Third Reich. Buchanan denigrates the memory of those Americans, who in the Second World War, gave their lives to the effort to stop Hitler. Moreover, his remarks about Hitler suggest that Buchanan would adopts a foreign policy today that is absolutely guaranteed to encourage the most oppressive, anti-American dictators in our own times.”

May President Trump heed his wise words and just say no to Kevin Roberts --- for his Party’s sake and the nation’s.