Reid Smith has drawn up the first part of a list of top security threats to the U.S. I suppose we should be relieved that Russia comes in no higher than tenth, but Smith makes a curious statement in the middle of his description:

Regional conflagrations in South Ossetia and Abkhazia threaten NATO member states.

Which NATO member states? How could conflicts over the separatist republics possibly threaten any member states in NATO? Put another way, which NATO members were threatened during the war in 2008? The answer would appear to be none. What has changed in the three years since then that makes these disputes more likely to threaten NATO members? If anything, NATO members’ security is less threatened by renewed conflict in the Caucasus than it was three years ago when Georgia was still being taken far too seriously as a prospective member. Indeed, one of the contributing factors leading to the escalation of hostilities in 2008 was the misleading impression that the U.S. and NATO would come to Georgia’s defense in a crisis, which was created by the Western willingness to entertain Georgian aspirations for alliance membership. It’s just one sentence in Smith’s post, but it is so thoroughly wrong that it merited some comment.

Smith also says that “the threat of military intervention in Ukraine and direct conflict in Georgia looms,” and it’s worth pointing out that neither of these things is true. One could imagine how the first could happen if Ukraine were ruled by an openly anti-Russian, hostile government, but it isn’t ruled by such a government, and it is not likely going to be in the future. Georgia can’t afford another direct conflict, and Russia has no need to start one. So these things don’t loom. One of them is extremely unlikely, and the other is hard to imagine at present. I would also point out that neither of these scenarios has anything to do with threats to “American territorial security, national sovereignty and interests abroad,” which is what the list is supposed to include. Smith refers to the current state of affairs as a “Cold Peace,” and yet U.S.-Russian relations have scarcely been better during the last two decades. “Cold peace” is what we had in the previous decade, and the differences between then and now ought to be obvious.

Ben Armbruster noticed part of a Mitt Romney radio interview in which he argues that the U.S. should “carefully reconsider” and possibly downgrade relationships with numerous other states if they vote for Palestinian statehood at the U.N. At one point, Romney says:

I think that people who vote against us in significant ways have to understand that there are consequenses of that and we will see them in a different light and our support for the Palestinian people will be adjusted if they continue to pursue this desire to have a separate vote and to be established as having a quasi-state status within the U.N. This is something which will end our support in foreign aid to the Palestinian effort. It will at the same time reshape our policy with regards to nations that oppose us [bold mine-DL]. People have to recognize that we’re nice but we’re not crazy.

This is a good example of what I was describing earlier in the week. Obama has made it clear that the U.S. will veto the Palestinian application for statehood, and the U.S. has been actively lobbying current members of the Security Council in the hope that the veto will not become necessary. In all likelihood, recognition will receive the necessary nine votes to pass, so the U.S. will have to exercise its veto, but there is absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind that the U.S. will do this. Since Obama has already taken the official “pro-Israel” position, there would seem to be no way for Romney to attack the administration for being insufficiently supportive, and there is nothing right now that Obama is doing on Israel and Palestine to which Romney objects. How does Romney demonstrate that his “pro-Israel” position is even more hard-line and unreasonable than this? He threatens to wreck numerous other international relationships for the sake of “punishing” states that vote the other way. How this proves to the rest of the world that “we’re not crazy” is unclear.

Would Romney really be willing to undermine or sabotage good relations with as many as a dozen other countries over this one issue? He seems to be saying that he would also “reconsider” relations with states that voted for recognition in the General Assembly, which as Armbruster notes would require Washington to “reconsider” its relations with most other states on the planet. I have my doubts that Romney would do this if it were up to him, but the worrying thing is that he is willing to take a position this far out because he thinks this is what some people in the party expect him to say.

Ross isn’t buying my argument in this post referring to Christie and Huntsman:

But if Larison can’t think of any reason why Republican primary voters might prefer Christie to Huntsman, then I would submit that he needs to spend a little more time in front of the television (or on YouTube) and familiarize himself with their respective public personae.

I am familiar with the differences. Christie cultivates and seems to revel in a combative style, and Huntsman has a diplomatic one. Huntsman goes out of his way to distance himself from the majority of Republicans, and Christie basks in their overwrought adulation. Even if I don’t quite get the hero-worship that goes along with it, I can understand why many Republicans are interested in Christie. Most of them don’t know much about him, except the outtakes from Christie’s public appearances that his team circulates and the glowing coverage from conservative media that he receives. It’s also worth noting that many of them do not know anything about him. If he were running, it would not be hard for competing campaigns to drive up his negatives quickly and easily.

He isn’t going to run, but if he did his ideological flaws and underwhelming debate performances would dog him just as they have dogged Perry. There really would be no reason to expect him to win a lot of support, much less become the default rallying-point for dissatisfied voters. Christie occupies more or less the same political space as Romney inside the GOP, and he is actually well to the left of Romney c. 2011 on at least a couple of issues. There just isn’t much room in the field for a challenge to Romney by a candidate with an overall more moderate profile than Romney. Charisma is important, but it isn’t magic.

My point wasn’t that primary voters can’t or won’t overlook candidates’ ideological differences. When talking about Romney’s chances, I have acknowledged that many primary voters aren’t demanding ideological purity. This is one reason why the elites’ search to find someone to replace Romney (which is what the Christie boomlet represents) seems so odd. If someone felt compelled to search for an alternative to Romney and Perry, there would be no need to look outside the current field. It is strange that some party elites are desperately clamoring for a last-minute Christie bid when Huntsman was already available to be turned into the acceptable alternative. I won’t discount the importance of a candidate’s visceral appeal, but I would point out that the things that conservatives may find viscerally appealing in politicians also tend to be the things that make them politically toxic to many others.

There have been many reactions to the news that Putin will return as president next year, and most of them have not been very interesting, but Tony Blankley‘s stands out for making the least sense:

Mr. Obama’s personally implemented, failed Medvedev-centric Russian policy has turned Mr. Putin – a George W. Bush friend – into a personal enemy and a lost strategic asset. Only a new American president can start repairing that vital Russian link in our China-containment policy.

It is fairly original to criticize the “reset” for its role in jeopardizing U.S.-Russian relations. Of course, had administration officials never criticized Putin, they would be accused of “cozying up” to him. After almost three years of trying to derail the “reset” at every turn and another decade of supporting policies that drove the relationship into a ditch, administration critics are suddenly very concerned that relations with Russia might be adversely affected by something.

Medvedev was always politically the weaker partner of the tandem, but it’s not clear how the administration was supposed to pursue the “reset” except to engage with the person currently serving as president. It’s true that the administration has sometimes made some weaker arguments that ratifying New START and supporting the “reset” would help Medvedev and disadvantage Putin, which was an unpersuasive way to mobilize some Americans’ dislike for Putin into support for more conciliatory policies, but the opponents of the “reset” (including Blankley) wanted no part of these policies no matter which Russian had the title of president.

If the “reset” has seemed “Medvedev-centric,” that’s because he was in office when the “reset” policy began, but it doesn’t follow that Putin has any interest in returning to a more antagonistic relationship. Policy differences between Medvedev and Putin have been exaggerated all along. One thing that could throw a wrench in the works is a new administration in Washington that believes it has to sabotage the relationship for political reasons. It is a fairly common habit of a newly-elected President in our country to repudiate certain foreign policy decisions of the previous administration to distinguish himself from it or to placate his party, and none of the likely Republican nominees has had anything good to say about the “reset.” If a Republican is elected next year, the odds are that U.S.-Russian relations will begin to sour, because the new administration will likely be intent on doing things to weaken those relations.

To call Putin a “friend” of Bush is grossly misleading, and it creates the impression that U.S.-Russian relations were better during Putin’s last term than they will be in his next one. Whatever personal rapport the two may have had at one point, Bush-era policies toward Russia and its neighbors were perceived in Moscow as a series of provocations, and the two “friends” presided over the worst state of relations between our two governments since the end of the Cold War. In fact, Putin was initially quite cooperative with the Bush administration, and in return he watched as the U.S. withdrew from the ABM Treaty, NATO was expanded into the Baltics, U.S. bases were set up throughout Central Asia, other ex-Soviet states were being put on a path to future NATO membership, the U.S. and our allies recognized Kosovo, and American officials berated Russia over its internal affairs. There is a real danger of making the same mistake that many Americans made during Putin’s earlier tenure, which was to make U.S.-Russian relations a matter of personalities that might be worsened or fixed when the head of state changes. Just as Medvedev did not herald any large or meaningful changes in Russian foreign policy, Putin’s return to office need not lead to any change in the improved relations that the U.S. and Russia have been building. As I wrote a while back:

The more we acknowledge that Russian policy is dictated by Russian perception of their national interests, rather than by the preferences of a particular leader, the better chance we have of recognizing where our interests are shared and where we can accommodate their objections.

Steve Benen doesn’t understand why Christie’s reference to “earned” American exceptionalism hasn’t provoked outrage among Republican hawks (via Andrew):

To hear Christie tell it, American exceptionalism is hollow — indeed, it may not even exist — unless the nation, to his satisfaction, has “demonstrated” and “earned” it. I’m fairly certain this isn’t close to what the right has in mind.

Put it this way: what do you suppose the reaction would be if President Obama declared that the United States still has to “earn” American exceptionalism. I suspect the right would be apoplectic; his Republican rivals would speak of nothing else, and the White House would never hear the end of it.

If Obama said something similar, Republicans very well might be apoplectic, but then many of them have spent the better part of two years throwing a fit over remarks Obama made during a visit to Europe two years ago in which he explicitly endorsed American exceptionalism. Critics have latched on to the first part of his answer on this, and then deliberately ignored everything that followed it. That suggests that there is nothing that Obama could say in connection with American exceptionalism that would not be misconstrued or turned into meaning the opposite of what he intended to say.

Turning to Christie’s speech, we see that he didn’t say quite what Benen thinks he said. He said this:

A lot is being said in this election season about American exceptionalism. Implicit in such statements is that we are different and, yes, better, in the sense that our democracy, our economy and our people have delivered. But for American exceptionalism to truly deliver hope and a sterling example to the rest of the world [bold mine-DL], it must be demonstrated, not just asserted. If it is demonstrated, it will be seen and appreciated and ultimately emulated by others. They will then be more likely to follow our example and our lead.

This is comparable to what Andrew Ferguson wrote last year:

Thanks to the ingenuity, persistence, and sacrifice of earlier generations, our obligation now is to conserve the arrangements that make us exceptional, reaffirm them, and prepare to pass them on, with an abiding faith in personal liberty. And this much should be obvious: If Americans don’t believe “we’re the greatest country ever,” we won’t be for much longer.

Both Christie and Ferguson take for granted that America has been and must continue to be exceptional and better, they acknowledge the possibility that Americans can fail to maintain or preserve this status in the future, and hold out the prospect that ours might cease to be “the greatest country ever” if we do the wrong things. No one is more anxious about declining power than a hegemonist. If American exceptionalism is defined in terms of global power and preeminence, as hegemonists have tended to define it recently, there is always the chance that America can cease to be exceptional, which is why they are so hostile to anything that hints at reducing the U.S. role in the world or trimming the military budget.

Christie’s entire speech is a warning that current leadership is jeopardizing exceptional status, which he then claims will have various undesirable consequences around the world. It is not quite as annoying as Paul Ryan’s speech to the Hamilton Society a few months ago, partly because Christie steers clear of offering any specific comments on history or international affairs, but in its overall message it is very similar. In short, Christie doesn’t face condemnation for “heresy” because he hasn’t really contradicted the Republican hawkish line on American exceptionalism. He is saying that current leadership (including Republicans in Congress) has been undermining U.S. leadership in the world, and for the most part that is something that Republican hawks have been arguing for quite a while.

He isn’t advocating for undiluted neoconservative foreign policy the way that Ryan and Rubio do, but he also hasn’t gone as far as Daniels or Huntsman in questioning the value of certain aspects of the U.S. role overseas. For example, Christie shows no sign of wanting to reduce, trim, or even reform the military budget:

The United States must be prepared to act. We must be prepared to lead. This takes resources—resources for defense, for intelligence, for homeland security, for diplomacy. The United States will only be able to sustain a leadership position around the world if the resources are there—but the necessary resources will only be there if the foundations of the American economy are healthy. So our economic health is a national security issue as well.

While it is true that he made some remarks about not using coercion to force principles on others, most Republican hawks are not going to be unduly offended by this because they believe that the U.S. doesn’t do this. Christie also says that we need “to limit ourselves overseas to what is in our national interest,” which sounds promising, but Christie doesn’t lay out what that entails. Depending on how expansive Christie’s definition of national interest is, he might be endorsing an extremely ambitious foreign policy or a cautious and modest one. Regardless, even this limitation is something that will only last as long as it takes to “rebuild the foundations of American power here at home.” These are “foundations that need to be rebuilt in part so that we can sustain a leadership role in the world for decades to come,” which means that Christie sees any reduction in the U.S. role abroad to be nothing more than a brief pause before the U.S. resumes a hegemonic role later on. Unlike Daniels, he isn’t entertaining ideas of cutting Pentagon funding for the sake of fiscal sanity, and he says nothing that would lead us to believe that he thinks there are any overseas deployments and commitments the U.S. should give up.

Like Pawlenty, Ryan, and Rubio, he even sets up the ridiculous isolationist strawman, but doesn’t use the word:

The argument for getting our own house in order is not an argument for turning our back on the world.

So we see that Christie accepts the hegemonist argument that the only two choices are global leadership (apparently forever) and “turning our back on the world.”

Update (9/29): The Wall Street Journalapproves of Christie’s interpretation.

Nate Silver asked yesterday whether Christie would be the anti-Romney or anti-Perry candidate. He ends his post this way:

Mr. Romney could still win under this view if several candidates split the conservative vote and he has the moderate vote to himself. But the entry of Mr. Christie would complicate his equation and lower his odds, while posing less threat to Mr. Perry’s campaign.

Christie really isn’t running, so it’s a moot point now, but Silver seems right about this. Christie boosters expect that he would quickly become the consensus candidate. They never explain why this will happen, and they overlook the liabilities Silver lists, but the hope seems to be that Christie will simply replace Romney and siphon off support from Perry at the same time. In other words, the Christie candidacy some Republicans are clamoring to have is a fantasy.

The effect that Christie’s entry would have would be to undermine Romney enough without driving him from the race entirely, and this would then throw the contest to Perry. What Silver doesn’t mention and none of the Christie boosters address is why they need Christie for this. If Christie boosters are so desperate to find an alternative to Romney and Perry, and they’re willing to accept someone with some moderate positions in his record, Huntsman is already running, he has more experience, and he has fewer liabilities than Christie. Of course, no one seriously thinks that primary voters are going to rally behind Huntsman, so it’s not clear why anyone thinks they would have rallied behind Christie.

Huntsman’s candidacy is showing that there is not much demand for another center-right candidate in addition to Romney. That’s one more reason why the demand for a Christie candidacy makes no sense. Since Christie isn’t running, and Huntsman isn’t having much success, the remaining conservative contenders are more likely to draw support away from Perry and hobble him enough to let Romney eke out enough wins to secure the nomination.

Tim Carney reflects on the dreadful inevitability of Romney:

This leaves Republicans with the unthinkable: Romney, who ran to the left of Ted Kennedy in 1994 and who could have been Obama’s health policy director, is now the most likely man to carry the GOP nomination in 2012.

Carney’s analysis is sound. My only objection is the description of this outcome as unthinkable. Undesirable? Certainly. Intolerable? Absolutely. One thing that it isn’t is unthinkable. A Romney nomination is the outcome that many movement conservatives openly preferred four years ago, and it was mostly the unexpected and (to party elites) unwelcome spoiler role of Huckabee that kept it from happening. Opposition to McCain was understandable and laudable, but in the drive to find someone to thwart McCain many movement conservatives embraced someone who had zero credibility as the viable conservative alternative. Because of this mistake, they invested Romney with legitimacy and credibility among Republican voters that he could never have had otherwise. As fashionable as it is to throw inconvenient policy positions down the memory hole, it is harder to persuade most voters that the candidate who was acceptable enough to the movement yesterday must be rejected tomorrow. It ought to be unthinkable that Romney can win the nomination, but it’s very likely what is going to happen. Consider it another one of the terrible legacies of the Bush era.

Steve Benen remarks on the central lie of the Romney campaign (via Andrew):

But this plainly dishonest claim is at the core of Romney’s entire campaign message — it’s in every speech; it’s in every debate; it’s even in the title of his book. And the underlying point of the lie isn’t just over some routine policy dispute — Romney desperately wants Americans to question the president’s love of country. The “apology” claim is a lie, but it’s also an ugly smear.

Obviously, I agree with this, and I have been saying something similar about the “apology tour” and Romney’s part in perpetuating this lie for the last two years. Beyond the basic dishonesty of it, the frequent reliance on the “apology tour” attack tells us a lot about mainstream Republican foreign policy arguments. Obama has largely continued Bush’s national security policies, and he has not made very many departures from Bush’s foreign policy, except on Russia (where the departure has been fairly successful) and to a much lesser extent on Israel (where he has nothing to show for it). There isn’t very much that Obama has actually done abroad in the last two and a half years that clashes with what Romney thinks the U.S. ought to be doing, which is why he has to exaggerate the few differences that exist and otherwise repeat nonsense about Obama’s non-existent apologies.

When Romney started using this attack, I didn’t understand why Romney was focusing so much attention on issues related to foreign policy. Romney is notoriously bad when it comes to the substance of foreign policy, which is all the more striking given his reputation for being a quick study and technocratic, wonkish type, so it didn’t seem to make sense that he would make this one of his main critiques of the administration. Later on, I realized that this rhetoric about apologies and other conservatives’ charges that Obama didn’t believe in American exceptionalism were never meant to refer to anything that Obama had actually done. Instead, they were opportunities for the people making these charges to wrap themselves in the mantle of American nationalism, define belief in American exceptionalism in such a way that it could only apply to people who agreed with them, and to impute anti-Americanism to anyone else. The entire exercise is clearly fraudulent, but it is also one that many Republicans find quite satisfying. Romney can reconcile his habit of saying whatever people want to hear with his need to satisfy partisans during the nomination contest: who better to make an absurd falsehood into the core of his campaign than Romney? Looked at this way, Romney’s shameless willingness to say anything could be more of an advantage in securing the nomination than anyone thought possible.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will not be accepting Bill Kristol’s request to serve as “the rough beast” of the Apocalypse:

Mr. Christie’s aides say the governor hasn’t budged from his months-long insistence that he won’t enter the presidential fray, despite what one described as a “relentless” stream of calls over the last week from prominent Republicans urging him to run.

The Christiehype has nevermade much sense to me, but then I can’t quite understand why so many party elites are in such a panic so late in the year. If enough of them concluded early on that Romney was unacceptable to them, the time for drafting their preferred candidate was six or eight months ago. There has been a steady hum of Ryan and Christie boosterism for the last several months, but it didn’t amount to much publicly until August when it was probably already too late for either of them to organize effectively. What makes this all the more puzzling is that Romney isn’t unacceptable to many party elites, but many of them are acting as if he were. He is “one of them” in many ways, and he would never be in the position he is today had it not been for their (sometimes grudging) acceptance of him four years ago. Party and movement leaders created him as a viable national candidate, and now they seem to regret what they have wrought.

Trying to lure Mitch Daniels into the race always seemed a very half-hearted affair. Unlike speculation for just about every other would-be candidate, Daniels speculation was focused on all the potential “problems” with his candidacy: he talked about a “truce” on social issues, and he wasn’t eagerly promoting more foreign wars. Daniels received all of the scrutiny and criticism that the other would-be candidates such as Ryan and Christie ought to have been receiving all along. Compared to the embarrassing adulation being heaped on Ryan and Christie for much of this year, there was never all that much enthusiasm for a Daniels candidacy, which is quite strange when we consider that Daniels has more credibility as a fiscal conservative than Ryan and has none of Christie’s liabilities. Daniels would have faced criticisms had he joined the race, but I wonder if one reason Daniels chose not to enter the race was that he was encountering so much resistance so early on. Having helped to run Daniels off, party and movement elites are scrambling to find someone, anyone, to fill the gap.