I wish you could think of another way to describe this wing of the party, other than McCain and Lindsey Graham. I love John, but that’s like saying we’re embracing Nelson Rockefeller on economics. ~Tim Pawlenty

That’s what McCain gets for having passed Pawlenty over in 2008. More seriously, it is obvious that Pawlenty does hold the same views as McCain and Graham and represents their “wing” of the party. It is understandable that he would be embarrassed to be associated with them. Who wouldn’t be? Think about what Pawlenty has said here. He thinks that being associated with McCain and Graham on foreign policy is akin to being accused of being a Rockefeller Republican on economic policy. Clearly, Pawlenty fears for his reputation as a conservative, and he seems to be aware that his foreign policy views might give some voters reason to question that reputation.

Pawlenty goes on to confirm that he subscribes to the frankly irrational view that the U.S. must persist in misguided or unnecessary interventions for the sake of “credibility.” When Jeffrey Goldberg pressed him to judge Reagan’s decision to withdraw from Lebanon, Pawlenty said:

I guess I would go back and say that my view, without referencing a particular president, is that once the United States commits to a mission, it’s really important that we prevail. Because when you don’t, it diminishes the respect and credibility and awe that other people view the United States with. And our goal here is to avoid as many future conflicts as possible by having our relative position be so strong and so unquestioned and so certain that nobody dare challenge us.

Of course, our relative position in the world is regularly undermined by fighting unnecessary wars until “we prevail” in countries where what “prevailing” means is usually unclear and ill-defined. It is hardly making other major powers nervous or awe-struck to see the U.S. wasting resources and plunging into new conflicts on a regular basis. I would like Pawlenty, or anyone else who thinks withdrawing from Lebanon was a mistake, to explain what it would have meant for the U.S. to “prevail” in the midst of the Lebanese civil war. I doubt that anyone can explain what that would have looked like, and no one could explain why it would have been in the American interest to stay longer than Reagan did.

The issue isn’t whether anyone is challenging the U.S. The U.S. has made it a bad habit over the last twenty years to make other states’ internal conflicts our business. Pawlenty is mixing up the desire to persist in unnecessary interventions to save face with the need to maintain credible deterrence against attack. They aren’t the same things. There is a strange belief that the U.S. has to demonstrate staying power when it blunders into strategically unimportant countries and avoidable conflicts. According to this belief, the U.S. invites attack if we do not show that we are mindlessly stubborn enough to remain committed to an intervention long after it has served its purpose or proved to be a terrible mistake. This is simply false, and it comes from an inability to admit that the goals set for the intervention were either unrealistic or not worth the cost required.