New Isolationism, Same Old Mistake  By Joshua Muravchik; Joshua
Muravchik is resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute Published: August 28, 1990  So far, the chief critics
of President Bush's bold military action in the Middle East are
not liberals but conservatives such as Patrick Buchanan, Robert
Novak and Edward Luttwak - yesterday's most redoubtable hawks
and interventionists. Strange new world! The sudden
disappearance of the cold war has pulled the rationale out from
under the internationalist foreign policy that America has
pursued for 40 years. With a victory over Communism behind us,
why care what happens to the Emirate of Kuwait?  One answer is
oil, but the larger answer that has resonated in President
Bush's statements is collective security. No longer divided
automatically along East-West lines, the community of nations is
joining to repulse an unmistakable act of aggression -just as
President Woodrow Wilson hoped it would when he dreamed up the
League of Nations. When we recognize in