This is delicious. Donald Trump’s anti-interventionist foreign policy ideas are causing panic among the neoconservatives. Clearly this branch of the Republican establishment will leave the party over Trump.

Neoconservative Washington Post writer Jennifer Rubin is outraged that Chris Christie would endorse Donald Trump despite “months and months of careful coaching” in foreign policy by “outside… experts.” That’s how the Israel lobby works, by coaching politicians. This is what the neocons have successfully done with Marco Rubio: gotten him to be a robot on the Israel issue.

Notice the Christie gaffe Rubin cites, that those experts helped him overcome:

In fact, after months and months of careful coaching by outside foreign policy experts, his initial gaffes (e.g. “occupied territories” was how he referred to the West Bank) stopped and he became proficient on national security. One former adviser told me he “absolutely” would never have helped Christie had he known he would endorse Trump. He said of Christie’s endorsement, “It’s an absolute disgrace.” It is exactly that, because Christie knows better. It is deeply sad he would then sweep away months of high-minded speeches to enable a man he knows to be unfit for the presidency to attain that office at a time of such urgency.

And then this. Neoconservative Robert Kagan, also in the Washington Post, is endorsing Hillary Clinton because of Trump’s xenophobia and demagoguery and racism, but also the foreign policy:

Have his foreign policies, in particular, contributed to the fraying of the liberal world order that the United States created after World War II? Yes, and for these failures he has deserved criticism and principled opposition. But Republican and conservative criticism has taken an unusually dark and paranoid form. Instead of recommending plausible alternative strategies for the crisis in the Middle East, many Republicans have fallen back on a mindless Islamophobia, with suspicious intimations about the president’s personal allegiances.

Kagan is the man who brought us the Project for New American Century letters that helped get the country into the Iraq War.

So Hillary Clinton is the shop for muscular internationalists. Bernie Sanders keeps beating up on her friendship with Henry Kissinger, and that’s a good thing. But why doesn’t he talk about her affection for Benjamin Netanyahu and Dennis Ross? Netanyahu has terrible favorability ratings, especially among black Democrats, many of whom boycotted his speech to Congress a year ago. But Hillary Clinton wants to have him into the White House in her first month in office.

Remember that some neocons also left the Reagan Bush team when Bush got tough on Israel, and crossed the aisle to Bill Clinton. The Israel lobby transcends party.

Thanks to Scott McConnell, Peter Voskamp, and Glenn Greenwald: