The World

The Tea Party rally  over the weekend attracted hundreds of thousands of people to the mall in Washington – and doubtless caused its fair share of shudders around the world. Glenn Beck, the rally’s central figure, is much less famous outside the United States than other leading figures in the American conservative movement like Sarah Palin, who also spoke - or even Rush Limbaugh, who has been around longer.

But I suspect that Beck will now begin to get much wider international coverage – and that it’s not going to be flattering. I am certainly not going to argue with the widespread perception that Beck is both a fruit-cake and a charlatan. But I do think that the easy assumption that the Tea Party’s foreign policy would simply be George W.Bush on steroids may well be wrong.

As this interesting piece on the Foreign Policy web-site makes clear, there is a deep division on foreign policy within the Tea Party movement. On the one hand, Sarah Palin clearly has embraced the musucular militarism of the neo-cons. On the other hand Ron and Rand Paul, who are also idols of the movement, are basically old-fashioned isolationists, whose talk of an “American empire of more than 700 military bases in more than 120 countries” could easily come from Noam Chomsky or Chalmers Johnson.

That’s a pretty important division. And, interestingly, Glenn Beck seems to be moving gradually away from the neo-cons and towards the isolationists. In fact, he has called for American troops to move out of Korea, Japan and Germany.

Why should I care, I hear you ask? The man is a talk-show host. Yes, but he’s also highly influential. Beck’s books regularly top the best-seller list. At some point, there is an argument to be had within the Republican Party about the direction of American foreign policy. Beck’s voice will count. And it might help to push the party in some unexpected new directions.