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Huntsman (or Zakaria) for State

The guys at MSNBC allege that Senator John McCain’s campaign against the nomination of UN Ambassador Susan Rice as the next Secretary of State and his entire pre-occupation (obsession?) with the Benghazi thing is driven in part by racism. As someone who was accused of racism and misogyny after bashing another African-American female and foreign […]
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The guys at MSNBC allege that Senator John McCain’s campaign against the nomination of UN Ambassador Susan Rice as the next Secretary of State and his entire pre-occupation (obsession?) with the Benghazi thing is driven in part by racism. As someone who was accused of racism and misogyny after bashing another African-American female and foreign policy professional named Rice (“You probably hate your mom,” emailed an angry reader of a column in which I proposed that Condoleezza Rice was kind of an intellectual light-weight. See some of the reactions here). I beg to differ.

No. McCain is not a racist but a cranky old man (there I said it) who sounds like a parrot on crack when he goes on and on calling for arming rebels, changing regimes, bombing countries, and then invading them. I suppose that this is the point in which I need to state that McCain was a war hero (he was) and that we should thank him for his service (we should). But let me remind you that General Douglas MacArthur was fired from his job by a U.S. president; which brings me to my next point, that Republicans should retire McCain as their leading spokesman on foreign policy and national security, a position that has to involve more that just reading editorials from the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal on the Senate floor (I think).

But personally I do no think that Susan Rice would be a great choice for SoS and not because she is “unqualified.” Like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski her main selling point is that she is an intellectual with advanced degrees from Ivy League institutions. But unlike those two and more like her namesake, she has never authored any groundbreaking book or article that tried to advance new ideas about America’s role in the world.

While I must admit that I have never followed her career closely, my impression is that Rice comes out of the liberal interventionist foreign policy wing of the Democratic Party which is the intellectual twin sister of neoconservatism on the political right (which explains perhaps why Robert Kagan has come to her defense).

Indeed, Rice was a driving force behind the Obama administration’s decision to take military action to oust Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi from power, and as Maureen Dowd suggests in the New York Times (quoting Senator Susan Collins), Rice’s initial insistence that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was not perpetrated by Al Qaeda terrorists may have been driven by her concern that that “would destroy the narrative of Libya being a big success story.”

My guess is that if nominated to the job, Secretary Rice would go out of her way to placate McCain and other Republican critics by burnishing her humanitarian interventionist credentials, including by promoting “doing something” in Syria and elsewhere.

In any case, it does not make sense for Obama to pick-up a major fight with the Republicans over her nomination. And the idea of John Kerry getting the job instead of her is making me drowsy already, recalling what comedian Bill Maher said about Mitt Romney: “Ambien takes him when it cannot fall asleep.” What a bore, indeed.

So here is my idea. In the spirit of bipartisanship and a lot of common sense, President Obama should nominate another Republican Mormon who ran against him for president in 2012. Jon Huntsman would be perfect for job of the top U.S. diplomat. The former Ambassador to China and Singapore who is (supposedly) fluent in Mandarin and has some business experience is just the kind of person we need now at a time when the U.S. is shifting its strategic priorities from the Middle East to East Asia and responding to the rise of China as a geo-strategic and economic power.

Moreover, Huntsman comes out of the more pragmatic and “realist” foreign policy wing of the Republican Party, and while his nomination will probably deprive the GOP of a great presidential candidate in 2016, managing American foreign relations for four years would help demonstrate to Republicans the kind of foreign policy agenda that they need to embrace: Cautious when it comes to the use of military power, but bullish when it comes to protecting U.S. security interests and advancing its economic status. From that perspective, Huntsman could become in his new job the most visible Republican speaking on foreign policy.

I also like the idea of recruiting foreign policy commentator Fareed Zakaria for State. He is also a Republican conservative intellectual with Realpolitik inclination, and has all the making of another Kissinger or Brzezinski.

And it would be kind of cool that an immigrant from South Asia with an exotic name (mm.. like, say, Dinesh D’Souza?) would occupy the same position once held by immigrants from Germany and Poland with exotic names. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Fareed Zakaria. Now just saying that should get someone angry.

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