Yet for someone whose campaign has already adopted a view prioritizing global issues, and whose announcement in front of the statue of liberty this week was purposefully constructed to spark recollections of Ronald Reagan’s run against Jimmy Carter, Huntsman’s publicly-expressed foreign policy views seem to have more in common with Carter than with Reagan. ~Ben Domenech

Many conservative pundits of various stripes have a bad habit of invoking Reagan as supporters of policies that Reagan would not have supported in real life, but hawks are often the worst offenders when they pretend that Reagan would have supported whatever policy they happen to prefer. It is questionable whether Reagan would have endorsed an open-ended American mission in Afghanistan in the first place, but it seems likely that he would not have favored Obama’s escalation of the Afghan war. Considering his willingness to withdraw from Lebanon, it is hard to treat Reagan as someone who would insist on “staying the course” no matter what. Setting Reagan aside, what is obvious is that Huntsman is representing the views of a significant part of the GOP in his position on Afghanistan (as well as his position on Libya).

Republican opinion on Afghanistan is now quite divided. No position commands overwhelming support within the GOP, but according to Pew withdrawal as soon as possible even has the backing of 43% of Republicans. Supporters of total withdrawal, some “counter-terror” half-withdrawal, or the administration’s stated policy of a much slower, more limited withdrawal all have a claim to representing some part of the contemporary Republican Party, and all of them can draw on Republican foreign policy views from the last thirty years to defend their positions. Huntsman’s preference for a “counter-terror” policy is one that many other Republicans share. I have disagreed with that position in the past, and I still regard it as the worst of both worlds, but other Republicans that Domenech will have to dismiss as having “more in common with Carter than Reagan” include those from George Will to Dana Rohrabacher to Jason Chaffetz. It’s a ridiculous position for Domenech to take, but it is typical for hawks to issue denunciations of this sort instead of making arguments for the merits of the policy they favor.

Domenech says near the end of his post:

One does not have to accept the view of Washington’s neoconservative elite in order to take a view of America’s role in the world that has been consistent in the Republican Party since the post-Nixon era.

That’s true, which is why it is bizarre that Domenech would make support for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan into a litmus test for what makes someone a real Republican on foreign policy. Virtually the only other people on the right who believe that it should be treated as a litmus test are neoconservatives and their allies in Washington. Huntsman is re-introducing an internationalist, Republican realist perspective into the debate, and in the process he is proving that he “does not have to accept the view of Washington’s neoconservative elite in order to take a view of America’s role in the world that has been consistent in the Republican Party since the post-Nixon era.”

Update: According to Rasmussen’s new poll, 40% of Republicans favor either immediate withdrawal (24%) or total withdrawal within a year (16%). A very slim majority of Republicans opposes a timetable (51%).

Second Update: Josh Trevino manages to avoid the substance of this post entirely. As usual, Trevino misrepresents what I have said here. This post has nothing to do with thinking Huntsman is “great.” I don’t support or even like him. I am responding to Domenech’s laughable attempt to define what it means to belong to the modern foreign policy tradition of the Republican Party.

Trevino also misrepresents my views on the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, and he resorts to the cheap, lazy, and untrue “apologist for Putin” charge. I have maintained from the time that the war broke out until now that the Georgian government was responsible for escalating the conflict, which produced the entirely predictable Russian reaction, but I also said at the time that the Russian response after it expelled Georgian forces from South Ossetia was excessive and wrong. No one disputes this latter point, but Saakashvili’s defenders in the West regularly deny the first. No one should ever trust Trevino to describe my views with any accuracy.