Last week, conservative author, journalist, and former Bush administration speechwriter David Frum announced that he had parted ways with the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank where he had been a resident fellow since 2003. As is typical of Washington’s navel-gazing pundit class, the news elicited a flurry of commentary, ranging from the vicious (Frum’s erstwhile AEI colleague Charles Murray) to the vapid (Steve Clemons’s typically self-referential musings on his and Frum’s mutual affection for dogs). Many liberal pundits have opportunistically jumped on the news as yet further evidence of the American right’s self-marginalization as it falls increasingly under the sway of tea partiers, Christian evangelicals, and other assorted extremists.

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This narrative obscures the fact that Frum’s criticisms of the GOP—including “Waterloo,” the fateful article criticizing Republican strategy toward health care that was the alleged last straw—have largely been over tactics and style rather than ideology. It’s the temperament and rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh with which Frum has problems, not the general ideology. As Frum himself admitted in his Newsweek cover story bashing the right-wing radio host:

“On most issues, I doubt Limbaugh and I even disagree very much. But the issues on which we do disagree are maybe the most important to the future of the conservative movement and the Republican Party: Should conservatives be trying to provoke or persuade? To narrow our coalition or enlarge it? To enflame or govern? And finally (and above all): to profit—or to serve?”

Where Frum does substantively disagree with the GOP, his beef has more to do with the trumpeting of divisive social issues, which he believes to be self-defeating. Where Frum adamantly does not diverge from the Republican Party or the conservative movement is in the realm of foreign policy and counterterrorism. Indeed, it is on these issues where he has been particularly outspoken. Yet in all their gloating over Frum’s alleged defection from conservatism, liberals are entirely ignoring that he is completely at odds with them when it comes to the war in Iraq, Iran’s nuclear program, military tribunals for terrorism suspects, enhanced interrogation, or the Arab-Israeli conflict. Clemons writes that, “Frum basically split then with the neocons and pugnacious nationalists who dominate Republican Party politics.” And while it’s true that Frum was one of the most outspoken conservative critics of Sarah Palin, Frum hardly “split” with “the neocons” or “pugnacious nationalists” (what’s the difference?) on foreign policy. As a cursory search of Frum’s writings, interviews, and discussions will show, Frum has not strayed from the tough blend of American primacy, intervention, and pre-emption in the fight against Islamist terrorism and rogue regimes that characterized his writings and ideas during his earlier, supposedly “true conservative” days. Just take a look at the series of Bloggingheads.tv debates (and this back-and-forth for The Economist) he did with Daniel Levy, the maven of the far-left J Street, which argues incessantly for Israeli capitulation to its enemies. This is still the man who coined the phrase “Axis of Evil.” This is still the man who earned the undying enmity of paleoconservatives for his explosive National Review cover story from 2003, “Unpatriotic Conservatives.” You can judge a man by his enemies, and with each passing day, David Frum accumulates more of the right ones.