Daniel Larison took excerpts from a Dave Weigel profile of prospective GOP Presidential candidate Herman Cain to argue that Tea Party aligned Presidential candidates won’t “bring anything new or remarkable to the substance of the primary debates for the next cycle.” This may be true as far as Herman Cain is concerned, but one hopes Cain’s words speak for his own views rather than those who do not share them–especially if they happen to be Tea Partiers.

Cain can refer to or style himself himself however he chooses, but I have a hard time believing to him be “very sharp and much, much more policy-oriented than Palin, or many of the other 2012 contenders for that matter” or that he will be able to “articulate and defend them more ably than most of the other candidates,” especially when he says things like this:

…we’re going to be in this war forever…The people of Iraq, they wanted to become a democracy. If they did not want to become a democracy, I do not think President Bush forced it upon them. Once it was clear that they wanted to become a democracy, President Bush pledged to help them do that. I know enough from the reports that I’ve read that this is something the Iraqi people wanted.

Sadly, Mr. Cain will take up valuable time in GOP debates spouting this childish nonsense, further draining the water out of the candidate pool as he dives toward arguments with John Bolton and Rick Santorum over who is more hawkish. But to say Tea Party aligned candidates (and in the 2012 field everyone is going to be Tea Party “aligned,” with praise coming as standard as hosannas to Ronald Reagan) will bring nothing new to the foreign policy debate within the 2012 campaign is not accurate. We don’t know the make-up of the entire field and if it’s true that politicians like Cain are taking their cues from the Tea Parties and will say anything outlandish in order to impress them, they may well be sending different signals in 2011-12 than they did in 2007-08. I give as my reason these hard facts about the government the Tea Partiers say they want to reduce, as provided by Andrew Bacevich:

The national-security state continues to grow in size, scope, and influence. In Ike’s day, for example, the CIA dominated the field of intelligence. Today, experts refer casually to an “intelligence community,” consisting of some 17 agencies. The cumulative size and payroll of this apparatus grew by leaps and bounds in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Last July, The Washington Post reported that it had “become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.” Since that report appeared, U.S. officials have parted the veil of secrecy enough to reveal that intelligence spending exceeds $80 billion per year, substantially more than the budget of either the Department of State ($49 billion) or the Department of Homeland Security ($43 billion).

The spending spree extends well beyond intelligence. The Pentagon’s budget has more than doubled in the past decade, to some $700 billion per year. All told, the ostensible imperatives of national security thereby consume roughly half of all federal discretionary dollars. Even more astonishing, annual U.S. military outlays now approximate those of all other nations, friends as well as foes, combined.

Tea Partiers cannot accomplish what they wish for unless they tackle the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower spoke about. A small federal government does not carry 17 intelligence agencies. If they mean what they say, then Tea Partiers will demand that defense expenditures be reduced, U.S. overseas commitments ended, bases closed, and foreign policy changed to reflect fiscal realities. If they don’t, Larison will have been proven right to be skeptical and I will be proven wrong for being naive. We shall see. But if I am right, then the politicians will follow along too–in order to get their money, support, and votes. Even Herman Cain. If he doesn’t, I’m certain the Alan Keyes-wing of the Republican Party will be happy to have a new spokesperson.