Conservatives are generally underwhelmed by the domestic policy sections of the GOP’s “Pledge to America,” and they have every reason to be, but like Kevin Sullivan I was actually a little bit glad to see that the treatment of foreign policy was minimal and superficial. Jonathan Bernstein is right that the foreign policy section was “amateurish and pathetic,” but it could have been so much worse than that. I don’t disagree with Bernstein when he says that “it’s a sad piece of work that really does not reflect well on the party,” but compared to what some of the would-be 2012 Republican presidential contenders have been saying in recent years on the subject it is refreshingly dull.

From the Republicans’ perspective, it’s better that they produced something amateurish and pathetic rather than something demagogic and absurd, especially since that is what most criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy from the right have tended to be for the last two years. As Kevin says, 2010 is an election focused entirely on domestic issues, and this document is the first hint I have had that Republican leaders realize that attacking Obama on foreign policy right now is pointless. First of all, most voters don’t care about it under present circumstances. Second, Obama’s approval rating on foreign policy is better than most of his other ratings, so there simply aren’t as many votes to be had by attacking the administration on it.

The House GOP probably also realized that they will have no power to change anything in foreign policy even if they win a majority. Even if they manage to win the House, they will have a razor-thin majority and little power to influence foreign policy. They have no power over treaties, so there was no need for them to wade into the debate over START. It’s not as if Republican gains are going to represent broad public disgust with administration failures overseas. I would argue that 2006 definitely represented that, but there’s simply no serious way to claim that the GOP is making gains because of, say, the “reset” with Russia or the troop escalation in Afghanistan. Everyone understands that Republican gains this year will be a product of high unemployment, slow recovery and discontent with things at home. It would have been genuinely foolish for the House GOP to stake out a full foreign policy platform when it would mostly provide fodder for their critics and potentially alienate voters they might have otherwise won over. Nothing would more quickly remind many Americans of why they drove the GOP out four years ago better than a lot of confrontational, jingoistic rhetoric and promises to plunge the country into new wars. The bad news is that I suspect this is exactly what would have been in the document if it weren’t a pre-election campaign document.

This is where I think Kevin gets it wrong:

Ideological rigidity, or, in the specific case of Iran, radical statements about preparing for a regime change, make for good soundbites and exchanges on the Sunday morning shows, but they don’t resemble, as far as I can tell, the actual Republican plan for governance regarding the Islamic Republic – and that’s a good thing.

Unfortunately, the Pledge doesn’t appear to be a plan for governance. It is a means of getting Republicans elected, and as such ideological rigidity and radical statements that alienate most Americans wouldn’t be included. That might seem reassuring, because it suggests that Republicans have some awareness that their foreign policy ideas are political liabilities in much of the country, but that just means that they are going to be more circumspect about what they believe during election season. There’s still no evidence that the GOP leadership understands that it has been wrong about many foreign policy questions in recent years. So far, it has only managed to discern that most Americans think they have been wrong, which is a small improvement over being completely oblivious.

Like much of the rest of the document, the foreign policy section was aimed at taking positions that a majority of Americans would find uncontroversial. Militarists and hawks are likely going to be disappointed, because many of them very much wanted to make 2010 into some sort of referendum on Obama’s foreign policy, but this was never going to be a document that satisfied hard-liners and activists, and it also wasn’t going to please political observers and pundits. It’s true that their unwillingness to touch any military or security-related spending or anything related to entitlements is proof of their fiscal unseriousness, but that’s hardly news. What is interesting is that some Republican leaders seem to have recognized that re-litigating the “surge” or the entire Iraq war is a loser for them, so they go largely unmentioned. The House GOP probably could not come up with anything substantive to say about Afghanistan because it would put most of them in the awkward bind of basically agreeing with the administration’s policy.

The main things they say that they will do in the document presumably all poll fairly well. There is something comical about a Republican foreign policy statement reduced to the bare essentials of keeping detainees at Guantanamo, missile defense and sanctioning Iran, but it is amusing because that is almost the whole of affirmative Republican foreign policy in the Obama era. After that, there is automatic rejection of anything Obama does or doesn’t do, and much of that has taken the form of demagoguery and distortion. Most of it has been intended for consumption by other conservatives who believe in the main myths about Obama.