Walter Russell Mead of Bard College has a nice essay up at Foreign Affairs, which unfortunately requires paid access. You won’t be disappointed to pop for the pdf, though. It’s this kind of analytical and exploratory discussion of the Tea Party that helps out quite a bit in translating what the differences are between this group and standard-issue Pat Buchanan types:
The Tea Party and American Foreign Policy
The comments are interesting, too, particularly the one up front, from a guy named Robert R: If indeed total war and unconditional surrender are Jacksonian principles, they served the United States well in World War II.
The dangers of history, right?–where we think we know what happened, and we take constructed images of the past and indulge in drawing conclusions from a past that never was what we now conclude it was. (ie, the US didn’t fight WWII alone; there were devastating, long-term consequences of working with the Soviets, etc. No lessons from history strike me as particularly simple.)
the us-soviet alliance in ww2 was a devil’s bargain if there ever was one. if stalin hadn’t broken the russo-german treaty by attacking hitler, the allied side would have had an immeasurably harder task. the soviets lost 20 million in the war, 10% of their population. only the poles, who lost 6 million out of 30 million, suffered a greater proportionate loss. us and british casualties, however horrific, get dwarfed by these numbers. the soviets suffered from terrible generalship, but still managed to stall and then roll back the soviets at stalingrad, kursk, leningrad, etc. well before the normandy landings. d-day might never have happened without the soviet resistance on the eastern front.
as a birthday present my parents once gave me a copy of the ny times front page of march 26, 1944, which shows the soviets clearly advancing broadly across the eastern front. they got to the berlin environs noticeably before even patton, if he gotten his wishes, would have been there. That is why the russian zones of the future east germany (and of austria) were so large compared to the us, brit and french ones. and given his druthers, stalin would have killed off even more racial minorities than hitler. at the height of the war, he tried, for instance, to exterminate the chechens and the ossetians, which hitler didn’t much care about and might have even thought were crypto-aryans.