Michael Cohen comments on Rick Perry’s “deeply clownish” press conference:

If Rick Perry truly believes that the Obama Administration is “appeasing the Palestinians” he either has no idea what is happening in the Middle East or he doesn’t know what the word appeasement actually means.

Perry may not have any idea what’s happening in the region, and it’s always possible that he doesn’t know what the word means, but the answer is more straightforward than that. Perry doesn’t have to know what’s going on to denounce the administration’s policy, and all that he needs to know is that the word is a loaded and negative one that his advisers said would do political damage to his opponent. Perry is going treat anything that Obama has done or failed to do on these issues as appeasement, because the accusation of appeasement is the inevitable line of attack that he and other Republicans are always going to use when it comes to policy on Israel and Palestine. Accusations of appeasement are very much like accusations of “isolationism,” and their utility comes from how wildly inaccurate and inappropriate they are. If Obama reiterated and briefly took seriously standing U.S. policy on settlement-building on occupied territory, to take one example, that will be lumped in as an example of appeasement. The goal is obviously not to describe the policy or even to contest the policy on its merits, but to define it as a policy that is supposedly both treacherous and weak, which then allows it to be dismissed out of hand. The point is to make policies that Perry et al. reject politically toxic. Naturally, anything that can conjure up associations with enabling Nazism or its modern-day equivalent also serves Perry’s purpose in making the charge.

Will Saletan reacts to Perry’s “clear directive to support Israel” statement (via Andrew):

Whoa. That’s something George W. Bush never did. Bush never said he had a Christian duty to stand with Israel, because to say such a thing would have been stupid and dangerous. By framing U.S. foreign policy in terms of a religious alliance between Christians and Jews, Perry is validating the propaganda of Islamic extremists. He’s jeopardizing peace, Israel, and the United States.

It may not be something that Bush said publicly, but it was likely part of his thinking. More to the point, this is a common view among a significant number of evangelical and other Christians, and Perry has made a concerted effort to identify himself as one of these people. This is the view espoused by CUFI activists, and it is one that would meet with few objections even among secular “pro-Israel” Republicans because it is useful for mobilizing support for their preferred policies. The main reason that an organization such as CUFI exists is the belief that its members have that they have a primarily religious obligation to lend political support to a small eastern Mediterranean secular state because of the ethnic identity of the majority of its population. That is far from being a consensus view among conservative Christians, and it isn’t a defensible one, but I would have been much more surprised had Perry not given the answer that he did.

Let’s consider the main claim that Perry makes. He says he has a “clear directive” as a Christian to support Israel. That suggests that he believes there is some obvious and authoritative command from God to do this, and presumably this means that somewhere in Scripture this directive can be found. Tendentious readings of Old Testament passages aside, there is no such “clear” directive, and there is no way that there could be. The most troubling thing about Perry’s answer is not that it validates jihadist propaganda. That propaganda would likely frame the actions of largely post-Christian Western governments in terms of crusades in any case, and in the end it is the willingness of those governments to invade and bomb Muslim countries that is a far more important factor in stoking hostility abroad.

What is obnoxious is that Perry takes it as a tenet of his faith that he ought to endorse a particularly close relationship with another state. The “clear directive” doesn’t leave room for considerations of national interest or changed circumstances. That suggests that he would support that relationship in its current form no matter how costly it might become to the U.S., and it would mean that there is virtually nothing that an Israeli government could do that would make him change his position. Then again, there is something a bit more honest in straightforwardly admitting to uncritical and reflexive loyalty instead of pretending that support depends on supposed strategic value or shared political values.

Perry’s statement reminded me of something Eric Cantor said a couple of years back. Cantor told a CUFI gathering that “we must insist as Americans that our policies be firmly grounded in the beliefs of the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which this country was founded.” Cantor’s formulation was more indirect and was making a more general argument on the basis of cultural tradition rather than religious obligation, but it goes without saying that Cantor’s audience would have held a view very much like Perry’s. This is the foundation for much of what popular support there is for U.S. policy towards Israel. It’s long past time that we stopped treating it as if it were some shockingly new or unfamiliar belief.

Andrew Exum comments on Perry’s Middle East speech and notes that he was speaking at the same press conference with Likud MK and deputy Knesset speaker Danny Danon. He asks:

Why is there no penalty for fraternizing with Israeli extremists?

I realize Exum isn’t trying to be funny, but he must know as well as anyone why there is no penalty. There is no penalty because the position that Danon holds on settlements does not bother the voters Perry needs to win the nomination (it might even help with some of them), and no one in any position of influence within Perry’s party thinks there is anything wrong with the company Perry keeps. On the contrary, having Perry appear alongside a Likud politician more nationalist than Netanyahu sends an unmistakable signal that Perry wants to be aligned publicly with some of the most uncompromising members of the current coalition government*. That is just what many Republican hawks want to see. Under those circumstances, how could there be any penalty?

Who would enforce such a penalty if not voters, party elites, or donors? If there were very many editorial boards strongly opposed to Danon’s position, newspapers might publish disapproving editorials, but Perry would ignore them and his supporters would dismiss them. As much as many American hawks might sometimes pay lip service to official U.S. policy on settlements and the two-state solution, they regard these official policies as obstacles to be overcome or removed. Danon says openly what they tacitly take for granted. If they must invoke the Oslo process to bury the process, that’s what they’ll do.

* It really doesn’t hurt Perry to be seen alongside pro-annexation hard-liners, since it allows him to appear that much more reasonable by comparison.

Rick Santorum will not be ignored:

Rick Santorum lambasted Rick Perry as a lightweight on Israel policy Tuesday, dismissing Perry’s speech in New York as boilerplate rhetoric crafted by political handlers.

This more or less echoes Jennifer Rubin’s complaint from a few days ago that Perry could not possibly have written the WSJ op-ed published under his name, because his foreign policy views are so “rudimentary.” Rubin and Santorum are probably right that Perry didn’t write the op-ed or the speech, and it is almost certainly true that he is reading from a foreign policy script that someone else prepared for him. I assume that is a major part of the appeal that Perry has for hawkish Republicans. Somewhat like Bush, he will adopt and recite whatever his advisers decide to give him, and there will be no danger that this will conflict with any strong pre-existing views. Just as Bush’s supporters argued in 1999-2000, Perry’s boosters will invoke the importance of having the “right instincts,” and dismiss the importance of specialized or in-depth knowledge. As it turned out, instinctive decision-making and ignorance were not a winning combination.

It is a bit rich for Santorum to lecture anyone else on using boilerplate rhetoric, but it has to be very irritating for Santorum to have spent all these years toiling away as a reliable hawk only to see someone with a passing interest in foreign policy sweep past him. How would you feel if you were inanely warning about the “gathering storm” of the Iranian-Venezuelan axis for the last five years, and then you were somehow not taken seriously on foreign policy? Of course, it’s perfectly true that Perry is lightweight on this and all other foreign policy questions, but it doesn’t follow that the GOP need Santorum’s kind of “expertise.”

I also don’t know where he gets this stuff about Perry “flip-flopping” on Israel. The most recent line of attack against Perry for flip-flopping has targeted his somewhat confused position on Afghanistan, which hasn’t been flip-flopping so much as it has just been a jumble of nonsense, but it’s hard to see what position he held before on Israel that he has since abandoned. Did he previously favor annexing the Sinai, and then changed his mind? This Santorum-Perry quarrel is amusing partly for what it shows about the GOP: the fastest way for one of his rivals to try taking Perry down on foreign policy is to cast doubt on the intensity of his blind devotion maintaining the status quo on Israel policy.

Matt Yglesias invitesunchecked Bolivian aggression against a stalwart democratic ally*:

There are lots of countries whose security isn’t crucial to the United States. Chile, for example. And yet we still enjoy a nice, healthy, state-to-state and society-to-society relationship with Chile. It’s not a slam on Chile to observe that Chilean security isn’t critical to American welfare.

If we went through all of the allies deemed “critical” to our security, we would find that a large number of them could be fairly described as “a very small country that simply isn’t very important.” Indeed, many of our allies have become our allies because they hope to enhance their security at U.S. expense, and oddly enough many Americans have convinced themselves that it is imperative that we cooperate. These alliances and patron-client relationships often make sense for the other party, but very few of them make sense for the U.S. any longer.

Of course, that’s the point in repeatedly describing allied security in such exaggerated terms. It’s the flip side of threat-inflation, and it is an integral part of hyping foreign threats. Most of the states being hyped as threats nowadays don’t meaningfully threaten U.S. security at all, and Americans are conditioned to think of them as threats mostly because they are perceived as threats by hard-liners in allied countries. If most of these alliances were judged according to how they actually contribute to American security, they wouldn’t last very long.

* No, not really

Jonathan Tobin makes a good case that Christie 2012 hype is misguided, but then makes this odd statement near the end:

The hoopla over Christie ignores the fact many of his stands on social issues may not work in Republican primaries and that, unlike someone like Ryan, he has never articulated a vision about foreign policy or defense [bold mine-DL].

Until three months ago, Paul Ryan hadn’t articulated a vision on foreign policy, either, which never stopped his boosters from promoting a presidential bid before that. Ryan probably would have never bothered giving that awful speech to the Hamilton Society over the summer if there had not already been an effort to draft him for the presidential race underway, and it is doubtful that anyone would have paid much attention to the speech had it not been so closely linked with speculation about his possible candidacy. If giving a bad speech larded with ideological slogans is all that one needs to do to acquire credibility on foreign policy in the GOP (and unfortunately it may be), that wouldn’t be much of an obstacle for Christie to overcome. If candidates are going to be expected to know something, Christie’s lack of foreign policy experience could be a serious problem.

On social issues, Christie has started positioning himself as a newly-converted pro-lifer in the finest tradition of Romney-like pandering. His position on marriage is not going to satisfy some social conservatives, but by itself it is not going to make him unacceptable to most primary voters. The main problem for Christie is that he hasn’t been in office very long, and he hasn’t done very much so far. It simply doesn’t make sense for him to enter the 2012 race.

Michael Gerson believes that economic anxiety will drive Republican voters to support Romney:

But Romney has a better case in a time of economic fear — like the one we may be entering — when competence becomes a desperate political demand. In this case, Republicans may choose, once again, not the purist they love but the old hand they trust.

It is likely that enough Republicans will turn to Romney for him to win the nomination, but this explanation as to why they will doesn’t seem very persuasive. What Gerson doesn’t address is that Romney isn’t “the old hand” Republicans trust. Romney isn’t a trustworthy candidate. If the GOP follows its typical pattern and nominates him despite this, it won’t be terribly surprising, but it won’t be because he inspires very much trust.

It’s also not clear that economic fear and anxiety drive voters to what Gerson calls the “reassuring center.” That doesn’t seem to be true in general elections, unless we automatically identify the eventual winner as the candidate of the “reassuring center,” and I don’t think it always holds true in Republican nominating contests. Certainly, insurgents from right and left failed to topple sitting Presidents who were seeking re-nomination, but it was the incumbents’ vulnerabilities that made these challenges from inside the incumbent party possible. The conditions that made primary challenges possible also led to the incumbents’ defeat.

In an open field during poor economic times, Republicans once opted for the candidate who was both familiar and relatively more conservative than the main competition. The Bushes and Doles have typically won their nominations when economic anxiety is not so great, which suggests that Republicans usually prefer more bland nominees in good times, but they may be willing to gamble on a perceived ideological candidate when economic conditions are poor. What Gerson is proposing is that the party out of power will opt for the “safe choice” in tumultuous times, but this only makes sense because Republicans have usually preferred the “safe” or at least familiar candidate regardless of economic conditions.

Greg Scoblete reaches much the same conclusion about Rubio’s latest foreign policy address that I have:

In fact, the most curious thing of all about Rubio’s foreign policy speech – which Marc Thiessen hailed as a “clear foreign policy vision”- is its lack of substance. There is no mention of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis (which, in case you haven’t noticed, is having a rather direct impact on the U.S. economy) and outside of the reference above, there is absolutely no mention of China or the rise of Asia and what U.S. policy should be in response. Rubio isn’t a presidential candidate, so maybe it’s unreasonable to expect anything other than Wilsonian boilerplate, but it’s certainly not a “clear” vision of anything.

I have followed Rubio on foreign policy since he was a candidate, and I have found that he doesn’t offer much except for “Wilsonian boilerplate” and party-line whining about how everything Obama has done has been too slow or insufficiently aggressive. He spends a lot of time in this new speech running through a Santorumesque check-list of governments he doesn’t like. He insists on treating them as intolerable threats, he makes a lot of broad claims about how America must fulfill its “rightful role” as hegemon, and he refuses to consider any meaningful cuts in military spending.

Most of all, he’s predictably unsatisfied with almost everything the administration has done or not done. Rubio’s complaint about delayed free trade agreements is probably the least persuasive. Rubio doesn’t even pretend that these agreements will do much of anything to benefit the U.S. There is no mention of the merits of these agreements, which are simply taken for granted because they are dubbed “free trade” agreements. Rubio argues that they should be passed so that we “stand with our allies,” as if that were sufficient reason for endorsing a trade deal.

It is grimly amusing to see him hold up Reagan’s grudging, belated abandonment of Marcos as an example of “morality in foreign policy” in action. The most annoying thing about this speech is that it tries to conflate hostility to detente with support for democratization in the Reagan administration. One constant theme in Reagan’s attacks on Carter was that he was too accommodating to the Soviets and too hard on authoritarian allies, and for most of his time in office Reagan did not follow Carter’s example in pressing allied governments to reform or make concessions to their domestic opposition. If Rubio thinks that Obama has been hesitant and slow to support democratic protesters overseas, he would have found the waiting for Reagan’s support to be excruciating.

Rubio also rehearses unproven claims about the security benefits of global democratization as if they were gospel. He presents an updated version of Karl Rove’s risible claim that “we were not involved in the world before 9/11, and look what happened.” Rubio said:

Now some suggest that America should heed the famous words of John Quincy Adams and go “not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” The problem is if America turns inward and ignores the monsters abroad, they are likely to come here.

I assume that Rubio knows that America was not turning inward during the 1990s. The 1990s were a period of hyperactivity abroad. This is just an amazingly dishonest claim by Rubio, especially as it relates to the 9/11 attacks. He is essentially saying, “If we aren’t constantly meddling all over the world, we will be attacked.” Of all the bad arguments for global hegemony, this has to be one of the worst. It treats excessive entanglement in world affairs and military overstretch as necessities for both the U.S. and the world, and they are nothing of the kind.

Perhaps the least tenable claim Rubio makes in the entire speech comes near the end when he says that “freedom cannot survive without us,” meaning that the U.S. cannot reduce its commitments at all without jeopardizing “freedom.” It can’t possibly be the responsibility of the United States or our government to ensure the continued survival of freedom all over the world, and it’s more than a little arrogant to insist that “we” are essential to preserving freedom worldwide. If freedom cannot survive without us, that would seem to suggest that it may not be this universally-demanded thing that all nations yearn to have. If freedom cannot survive without us, that doesn’t say very much for all of the nations that belong to what Rubio called “freedom’s domain.” Of course, the long-term survival of freedom in other countries depends entirely on the people in those countries, and Rubio vastly exaggerates the need for U.S. involvement in the world to make this possible.

Jennifer Rubin demands that more Republican politicians waste their time running for president serve their country in its time of need (via Andrew):

The only thing standing between the GOP primary electorate and a better choice is the misguided belief that there is no alternative to the current crop. Well, that and someone who is willing to make a “sacrifice” of a few months to see if he can capture the nomination and give his party a better shot at the presidency. We just went through a weekend of tributes to the sacrifices of servicemen and women and their families (not to mention ordinary civilians caught up in an attack on America). In light of those sorts of sacrifices, it really too much to ask for one of these Republicans to give the presidential race a try?

The endless complaining about the quality of the 2012 field has become quite tiresome, but what’s worse is this phony call-to-duty rhetoric that keeps cropping up whenever a pundit sees flaws in the declared candidates. “How can [X] ignore his obligations to America by continuing to do the job he was already elected to do?” The comparison with people who died in the line of duty is simply wrong. Trying to win a presidential nomination isn’t a sacrifice on behalf of others. Once we get to the heart of the matter, it is the pursuit of enormous power. While it undoubtedly takes enormous energy and endurance to seek the office, it is not a selfless or self-sacrificing act. It is not a failing on the part of the various governors and former governors Rubin lists that none of them is angling for a presidential nomination.

The reality is that Republicans have the field of candidates from which they will select their next nominee. If the field continues to underwhelm a lot of partisans, that says something about the quality of candidates that the party is capable of producing, and it also says something about the insatiable character of many conservative activists and pundits. Adding one or two more candidates isn’t going to improve matters, especially at this late stage, because the flaws of the new candidates will come to light just as that Bachmann and Perry have revealed their weaknesses before a national audience. Besides, any candidate joining the field so late will begin with the large liability of having no organization and lower name recognition, which will compound whatever existing problems he might have had.