As more time goes by and Daniels shows little interest in the presidential race, it becomes harder to believe that he has any intention of running. If he isn’t running, there’s no reason to expect that he would say anything about foreign policy issues. If he is going to run, he would have a strong incentive not to stake out too many positions before he organized a campaign and took some time to study the relevant issues. I would rather have competent candidates who know that they still have a lot to learn about policy subjects they haven’t worked on very much in the past. There are already more than enough Republicans spouting half-truths and demagoguing foreign policy issues they don’t understand. We don’t need to add more.

Ben Domenech doesn’t like this:

Perhaps worst of all, it is profoundly disturbing that Mitch Daniels, a darling of the intellectual right, has as far as I can tell been completely silent on the matter – just as he has been nearly entirely silent on every foreign policy issue over the past several months. His comment in response to a question on Egypt in January was simply jaw-dropping: “I don’t have a lot to say about it. I’m just a provincial governor out here.” This is fine if one is interested in staying a provincial governor, but it is an unacceptable dodge from anyone interested in becoming Commander in Chief.

As I recall, when the 2000 Republican presidential field was starting to take shape in the spring of 1999 during the Kosovo war, George W. Bush wasn’t making many statements on the war, and he was the front-runner, establishment favorite, and almost default nominee at the time. Unless I have forgotten something, Bush’s response to Kosovo was a very conventional, cautious expression of support for the military operation, and he didn’t have much else to say about it. The most important reason why holding his tongue was the right thing to do was that Bush didn’t know anything about foreign policy, and during the campaign he avoided saying anything that Condi Rice hadn’t told him to say. Unfortunately for him and the rest of us, Bush became much more involved in foreign policy-making after he became President without correcting this flaw.

Gingrich has been outspoken in attacking Obama on Libya, but this is because Gingrich acts more like a pundit than a serious presidential candidate. The more Gingrich says about ongoing controversies, the more likely it is that he won’t run or that he will prove to be the horrible candidate we all expect him to be. Romney is most deserving of criticism. This isn’t just because he is the leading Republican candidate with the best chance at the nomination, but because he has made a point of attacking the administration’s foreign policy decisions and pathetically pandering to national security hawks whenever he can. He hasn’t relented from making these attacks in recent months despite giving every indication that he doesn’t really disagree with Obama on Egypt or Libya.

I don’t take Barbour seriously as a presidential candidate, but all that Barbour did was ask the question, “Why are we in Libya?” This is a question that the administration hasn’t answered very well or convincingly (and certainly not to the satisfaction of anyone not ideologically committed to humanitarian interventionism), and it’s perfectly appropriate to ask that question. If this is all it takes to be labeled an “isolationist,” Domenech may be surprised to find just how many “isolationists” there are in this country. Barbour also raised the issue of nation-building. Libyan war supporters are very keen to reassure everyone that the U.S. will have nothing to do with this, but that’s a promise that’s more easily made than kept. Of all of the states where the U.S. has intervened in the last twenty years, Libya is probably the one in the greatest need of “nation-building,” especially in the event that the war succeeds in driving Gaddafi and his sons from power. It doesn’t follow that this will have to be something that the U.S. will be suckered into doing, but that was what many of us assumed about intervening in Libya. In the end, the tiresome and wrong “where we can, we must” argument tends to prevail.

Like Barbour, Bachmann is hardly an “isolationist,” and it’s a measure of how bizarre the Libyan war debate has become that someone can be tagged as an “isolationist” for opposing intervention in another country’s civil war. Domenech complains that Bachmann didn’t offer a solution for Libya, but why would she have offered a solution? She has argued that intervening in Libya does not serve U.S. interests, and by pretty much any objective measure she is correct. How does it become the responsibility of possible presidential candidates who oppose American involvement in a foreign crisis to offer solutions to a political problem that interventionists appear clueless to solve?