March 1, 2012 8:41AM # The GOP Foreign Policy Establishment Is Still Neoconservative By [Justin Logan](https://www.cato.org/people/justin-logan) --- SHARE Karl Rove’s and Ed Gillespie have written a [piece](http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/how_to_beat_obama?page=full) arguing that the conventional wisdom is wrong because a) foreign policy can be made into a big issue in the 2012 presidential campaign, and b) Obama is vulnerable on the subject. I did not find the piece persuasive at all, and my disagreement with it has produced not just a [podcast](https://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/rove-wrong-foreign-policy-again) on the subject, but an appearance on *bloggingheads*. The University of Kentucky’s Robert Farley and I discuss a range of subjects, from the Rove/​Gillespie piece, to burning Qurans in Afghanistan, to the future of U.S.-China relations. To give you a flavor, here’s a clip where I denounce the GOP foreign policy establishment: For what it’s worth, I think the only way to solve the problem I identify above is a decades-long project to build a counter-counterestablishment of foreign policy thinkers who could staff the foreign policy wing of a notionally sensible GOP presidential candidate. I have not yet read [this book](http://www.amazon.com/Neoconservatives-Foreign-Policy-Ronald-Reagan/dp/0801895499/), but in reading reviews of it, my understanding is that it does a good job describing how the neocons built their counterestablishment, which I think by now has essentially become the establishment. The neoconservative insurgency benefited from remarkable largesse from their funders, a large bench of aspiring policy professionals, and a sharp-elbowed ability to successfully fight within bureaucracies. If people wish to reverse the course of GOP foreign policy, I suspect a similar effort will be needed on the part of realists. (We’re working on it. Happy to talk to any Democrats, too.) For the entire bloggingheads video, go [here](http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/9077). For my podcast on the Rove/​Gillespie piece, go [here](https://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/rove-wrong-foreign-policy-again). For my prior denunciation of the Beltway foreign-policy establishment, [here](http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/dan-drezner-partly-wrong-about-realism-6360). My thanks to Farley and the *bloggingheads* people for having me on. ##### Related Tags [Defense and Foreign Policy](https://www.cato.org/defense-foreign-policy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).