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Daniels and Foreign Policy

On foreign policy, he said that he’s a “water’s edge” kind of guy. He is sure that the President is in a position to know a lot more about what’s needed in Afghanistan than he is. He said he didn’t think Obama had “made the case” for the Libya intervention, though this doesn’t mean there […]

On foreign policy, he said that he’s a “water’s edge” kind of guy. He is sure that the President is in a position to know a lot more about what’s needed in Afghanistan than he is. He said he didn’t think Obama had “made the case” for the Libya intervention, though this doesn’t mean there is no case. Pressed to say something critical about Obama’s foreign policy, he said that he was “uncomfortable” with the President’s “apology tours.” But he didn’t look comfortable saying it.

Jamie Rubin asked him a clever question, right out of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”: if he had just one phone call to make about some foreign policy issue and he could call either Richard Lugar or John McCain, which would it be? After a little hemming and hawing, he said that he is “always comfortable” talking with Lugar. Though of course he respects McCain, too, he hastened to add. Maybe he was just being nice about his state’s senior senator, but I hope he was expressing a preference for diplomacy (Lugar’s M.O.) over warmongering (McCain’s).

Asked about what else he was doing while on the East Coast, he said he was going to Washington to accept an award from the Arab American Institute. “I happen to be one,” he said—an Arab American, that is. His paternal grandparents immigrated from Syria. Somehow I hadn’t registered that aspect of Daniels’s background before. I guess it makes Daniels even less likely to traffic in the kind of disgusting, racially-tinged, Muslim-baiting, xenophobic hate-mongering that some of his “brethren” (and sistren) have flirted with. ~Hendrik Hertzberg

Via Andrew

To take the last point first, it is likely that Daniels isn’t going to engage in demagoguery about “Ground Zero mosques,” “Islamofascism” or “creeping sharia” because he doesn’t have the temperament of a demagogue, and not because his grandparents were Syrian Christians. Incidentally, Hertzberg’s remark reinforces the conflation of Arab and Muslim that conveniently obscures the existence of Arab Christians. That said, the argument from biography or genealogy is not very compelling. Daniels has not yet addressed many of these questions, so we can all project onto him whatever it is that we would like to see. Likewise, his critics can impute all sorts of views to him that he may not hold.

During his speech at the Arab-American Institute, Daniels said, “May Syria and all the lands near it soon become places of peace, and freedom and self-determination.” That’s fairly unremarkable, anodyne stuff, which is entirely appropriate to the occasion and unobjectionable in itself. It also doesn’t give any clues as to whether Daniels thinks there is a U.S. role in any of these developments or what it would be if there is one. Meanwhile, Daniels’ attendance at an AAI event in his honor will be held against him by the people in the GOP who care about such things*. I have no idea what Daniels’ views on Israel and Palestine might be, but it is fairly certain that if he doesn’t adopt hard-line positions he will be subjected to the same sort of attacks that have been leveled at Obama for more than four years.

Daniels has been very reticent on foreign policy, which hasn’t bothered me. Still, if his silence is the product of a lack of interest or lack of detailed knowledge of the subject, what are the odds that he is going to turn out to be an unconventional Republican on foreign policy questions? Isn’t it more likely that Daniels will feel the need to minimize his differences with the rest of the field on other issues in order to separate himself on the fiscal issues that do interest him? As the rather lame effort at criticizing Obama for non-existent “apology tours” shows, Daniels may not have his heart in using these standard Republican lines on foreign policy, but he appears to be willing to use them anyway.

It is somewhat encouraging that Mitch Daniels would prefer Lugar’s advice to McCain’s, but this can also be explained by personal loyalty and familiarity with Lugar. Daniels was once Lugar’s chief of staff. Assuming that there is more to it than that, it isn’t quite as encouraging as one might think. Recently, Lugar has been right on some high-profile issues, such as the arms reduction treaty and Libya, but he also backed the invasion of Iraq and the bombing of Yugoslavia. Those aren’t minor oversights. On some of the biggest policy errors of the last fifteen years, Lugar has been on the wrong side, which is to say that he has been on the same side that McCain was.

* Daniels’ association with the AAI doesn’t automatically mean anything about his foreign policy views one way or the other.

Update: Following the appearance of the Hertzberg story, Erick Erickson has declared Daniels to be the “anti-Tea Party candidate.” The Tea Party has nothing to do with any of this, but it’s interesting how one of the most outspoken fiscal conservatives in elected office has been disqualified on the grounds that he was merely associated with Lugar and the AAI.

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