By holding the segment of the electorate that is looking for a mature, pro-free-market candidate with executive experience, Romney has deprived Pawlenty of a unique message for his campaign. Or to put it differently, by failing to go for the jugular on health care, he gave Romney a free pass and fumbled away the rationale for his own candidacy. ~Jennifer Rubin

Romney didn’t deprive Pawlenty of a unique message of his campaign. The trouble is that Pawlenty’s “unique message” never existed apart from telling stories about his working-class upbringing. Like Huntsman, he has been trying to run as a virtual copy of Romney without Romney’s baggage. His candidacy had no rationale, but he started running anyway. This may be why those who knew him in Minnesota have no idea what happened to the Pawlenty they knew. As Sean Scallon said in his TAC profile:

Pawlenty, like the proverbial five-star recruit, has a great deal of potential as a national politician, but there’s a reason his polling numbers are dismal—an explanation beyond simple lack of name recognition. In a new era where the search for authenticity dominates our political discourse, Pawlenty’s lack of it makes him a has-been before he ever was.

One strange thing about the nomination contest so far is that Romney has benefited greatly from the exaggerated importance that almost everyone attached to his health care record. This was the thing that was supposed to doom Romney’s chances, but this was always based on the far-fetched idea that Republican primary voters were deeply concerned about Massachusetts’ use of an individual mandate. As Romney has pledged to repeal the Democrats’ federal health care legislation, this never made much sense to me. So the idea that Pawlenty sabotaged himself by not attacking Romney on health care is a bit odd.

According to one consultant Rubin contacted, this makes Pawlenty a “punch-puller,” but this puts far too much importance on one moment at one debate. Pawlenty’s main problem is that he has generated so little support in Iowa despite all the time he has spent there and the organization he has built up in the state. No doubt his debate performance didn’t help his fundraising, but his fundraising was already fairly poor. There may be an even more straightforward explanation than this. The Ward/Stein article related this detail:

“He surrounds himself with people that say ‘yes’ and tell him how good he’s doing, but he doesn’t have a lot of people who can take the chance at critiquing him, and that’s a problem he’s had for a long time,” Molnau added.

It is possible that Pawlenty has continued to struggle so much in Iowa and nationally because he is doing something seriously wrong and no one around him will tell him. Perhaps it’s just as well. We have had our fill of Presidents living in a bubble and surrounded by yes-men. If that’s what we could expect from a Pawlenty administration, we’re better off if his campaign fails now.

Update: James Joyner says that there was never a reason to take Pawlenty seriously as a top-tier candidate:

Pawlenty is . . . some guy few people have ever heard of who is considered a major contender because the press has inexplicably touted him as one.

It’s not at all clear what his claim to fame is supposed to be. He wasn’t a particularly noteworthy governor and left office after two terms with lukewarm approval ratings. Indeed, he was probably best known for a mullet, which has thankfully been retired. He’s not charismatic. His positions on the issues are boilerplate, indistinguishable from the serious contenders ahead of him. His dropping out of the race would go largely unnoticed.

I imagine quite a few people will notice, if only to ponder why so many people took him seriously as a candidate, but I agree that it isn’t as important as it is being made out to be.

Whatever one thinks of the current Libyan entanglement, the overarching question is really much bigger, and makes the issue of Libya pale by comparison. A small but vocal and growing minority of conservative opinion leaders and politicians really do seem to be staking out an overall foreign-policy position along the lines long called for Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas), which says that Obama has not retrenched internationally far enough, has not cut defense spending deeply enough, and has not withdrawn from Afghanistan quickly enough. ~Colin Dueck

Dueck’s summary needs some work. Obama has not meaningfully “retrenched” at all. So far, military spending has gone upevery year that Obama has been in office. Here is an analysis of the administration’s budget request for FY 2011:

In inflation-adjusted dollars, the total national defense budget request for FY 2011 is at the highest level since World War II. Even if only the base defense budget is considered, the FY 2011 budget request exceeds the previous peak in defense spending in FY 1985 of $538 billion (in FY 2011 dollars) [bold mine-DL].

There is now a chance that there might be some reduction in military spending, but it will be a reduction from a very high level. Obama has announced a future withdrawal from Afghanistan, but to date he has been responsible for greatly increasing the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. There is no way to confuse what Obama has been doing with what Pawlenty described as “decline, retrenchment, and withdrawal.” For that matter, it is also wrong to identify opponents of the wars in Libya and Afghanistan as advocates of decline.

As I said in the column, Pawlenty’s framing is dishonest:

The dishonest framing of the issues has turned a debate over legitimate competing policies into a stark clash between two radically different roles for America in the world, and Pawlenty would have us believe that only those who wish for American decline can favor non-intervention in Libya, or timely withdrawal from Afghanistan. The less popular and more indefensible an ongoing war is, the more hawks rely on wielding this rhetorical bludgeon to try to marginalize and dismiss their opponents.

As Dueck says, it’s true that most conservative Republicans are instinctively hawkish, and they are “sensitive to any implication of American decline.” That’s why many hegemonists insist on misleading them by claiming that reducing military spending from post-WWII highs and concluding the longest war in American history have something to do with absolute American decline. It’s also why some hegemonists attempt to scare Americans with the fantasy of a world dominated by China or Russia. Supposed anti-declinists want us to believe that U.S. “leadership” as they define it is the only thing standing between the world and chaos, but this is a sign of desperation and the bankruptcy of the policies they defend.

Many more Americans are beginning to appreciate that their way does not offer security or prosperity, but only the waste of national resources and finally exhaustion. Ron Paul has been telling them this truth for decades. Tim Pawlenty is still trying to mislead them into believing that such wasteful policies are essential. If I were Dueck, I wouldn’t assume that Pawlenty’s aggressive, reckless vision is the one that Republicans or Americans generally will favor any longer. That doesn’t mean that Republicans will embrace Ron Paul’s vision in every respect, but more of them are moving in the right direction.

My new column for The Week on isolationism is online.

Daniel Trombly objects to Stephen Walt’s dismissal of Kyrgyzstan:

So while I am glad to see the motley crew of realists and non-interventionists of all stripes pushing for restraint, I wish there was a little more articulation of what areas did matter and an explanation of why we should care. It would make it a lot harder to paint advocates of retrenchment and restraint as isolationists. Then cases for prioritization could rely less on unnecessarily dismissing countries and regions to cater to simplistic ideas of what makes the rest of the world “important,” which, when they are convincing, tend to just aggravate bad policy whenever the US inevitably does face a crisis in a given area. Coming up with an alternative grand strategy or two, and pushing them, is a lot more helpful than insisting that countries are just unimportant.

I should add that Trombly is mainly objecting to the reasons Walt gives for his dismissal, which were these:

Yes, I know that the air base at Manas is a critical transit point for logistics flowing into Afghanistan, but otherwise Kyrgyzstan is an impoverished country of about 5 million people without significant strategic resources, and I daresay few Americans could find it on a map (or have any reason to want to).

Granted, these are not good reasons for dismissing Kyrgyzstan as unimportant. Libya is potentially a very wealthy country with some significant resources, but that doesn’t make it all that strategically important. The more valid point that Walt made is that there is no attempt to set priorities or distinguish between places that really are critically or vitally important to the U.S. and those that aren’t, and I agree with that criticism. Trombly is also right that appealing to public ignorance is probably never something that one wants to do when arguing for a more restrained, sane foreign policy, since public ignorance is a real factor in our inability to hold the government accountable for its policy mistakes and an important reason why those policy mistakes can be made so easily and often.

At a moment when America is mired in misery, at home and abroad, his [Nixon’s] sagacious counsel should not be airbrushed out of the history of the GOP. Back in 1973, one of Nixon’s longtime critics, Walter Lippmann, so Switzer observes, praised him for being the great liquidator of American adventures–the war in Vietnam, the Great Society–[that] were “beyond our power.” Nixon was pleased: “wise observation,” he jotted down.

Such wisdom should make a comeback in the GOP. Will it? ~Jacob Heilbrunn

Heilbrunn cites this Tom Switzer op-ed, which discusses these remarks Nixon made forty years ago in Kansas City. Switzer made a good observation:

Instead of looking at the post-Vietnam world through the prism of American exceptionalism, Nixon and Kissinger envisaged it as an emerging multipolar system to be structured and regulated by a balance of power à la 1815 Congress of Vienna, the subject of the latter’s doctoral dissertation.

This is a sensible way to look at things, but it requires the U.S. to act the part of a status quo power instead of encouraging revolutions and fomenting regime change on a regular basis. That is one obstacle to this way of looking at the world gaining adherents in the GOP. Enough Republicans have been mouthing platitudes about universal rights long enough that some of them may even believe it by now. Another is that the Concert of Europe was the coordination of essentially conservative governments that shared a view that any revival of revolutionary liberalism was unacceptable and dangerous to the entire continent. To put it mildly, there is nothing remotely like this consensus among the world’s major powers.

There is clearly reluctance to acknowledge that there are things “beyond our power.” Many Republicans have endorsed the idea that “decline is a choice” without understanding that they are the ones choosing the self-destructive policies that will hasten the decline they fear. A revival of detente-era thinking will also be very difficult in a party that (mostly wrongly) remembers detente as some sort of shameful interlude that all right-thinking people reject.

I wish to emphasize that I take this position not because I am in support of the regime in Belarus, or anywhere else. I take this position because it is dangerous folly to be the nation that arrogates to itself the right to determine the leadership of the rest of the world. As we teeter closer to bankruptcy, it should be more obvious that we need to change our foreign policy to one of constructive engagement rather than hostile interventionism. And though it scarcely should need to be said, I must remind my colleagues today that we are the U.S. House of Representatives, and not some sort of world congress. We have no constitutional authority to intervene in the wholly domestic affairs of Belarus or any other sovereign nation. ~Rep. Ron Paul

Via Eric Garris

Doesn’t Rep. Paul realize that he is participating in the “decline of the West”? On a more serious note, he is absolutely right that this is a bill aimed at undermining the government of Belarus, and it employs the same dead-end policy of imposing sanctions to penalize the government for being more or less the same authoritarian government it has been for the last twenty years. It goes without saying that it is of no concern to the U.S. who rules Belarus or how. Lukashenko’s popularity has reportedly collapsed because of Belarus’ economic woes, so he may not remain in power much longer anyway. It’s worth noting that it collapsed from a previous position of slim majority support at the end of last year, which is a far cry from how Western media represented things in December.

Reading through the bill, I agree with all of Rep. Paul’s statement. What jumped out me while I was reading was that this is the re-authorization for the Belarus Democracy Re-authorization Act of 2006, which was a continuation of the Belarus Democracy Act of 2004. This legislation is an unfortunate leftover of the heyday of the “freedom agenda.” I admit that I don’t understand why so many Americans feel compelled to make the internal politics of other countries into the business of our government. Some of it is presumably sincere, albeit misguided, zeal for helping others, but that is hardly an excuse.

Update: The bill passed in the House by voice vote.

Francis Ghiles describes the worsening economic situation in Tunisia:

Tunisia’s economic losses since the start of last winter’s revolt can be summed up as follows: an estimated $2bn worth of material damage suffered by buildings and infrastructure during the revolt, with a further $600m added to the existing import bill of oil related products and foodstuffs due to rising prices worldwide. Put another way, this is the equivalent of 5-6 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product, a fall which includes $1.2bn lost from the decline in tourist receipts and $1bn from events in Libya, home to many immigrant Tunisian workers and the destination of many Tunisian exports – white goods, foodstuffs and industrial equipment. North Africa’s smallest economy had benefitted over the years from the many Libyans who chose to spend considerable sums of money in Tunisian hotels and clinics. According to a recent survey by Ernst and Young, many Tunisian businessmen are more worried about the fall out from Libya than from the current situation in Tunisia, having confidence in their own country’s future.

Foreign Direct Investment declined by 24.1 per cent to 580m Tunisian Dinars ($420m) during the first four months of the year and industrial production fell by 9.4 per cent. Production in the mining sector dropped by 60 per cent, due to continued strikes. GDP has fallen by 3.3 per cent during the first three months and is not expected to be above 0-1 per cent for the year as a whole [bold mine-DL].

Unemployment, meanwhile, has increased from an estimated 14 per cent at the end of 2010 to 19 per cent – and is estimated at 750-800,000 people. Should unemployment figures reach one million, that could constitute a political time bomb. Unemployment in the regions where last December’s revolt took root, the western uplands around Jendouba, El Kef, Kasserine – and further south in the phosphate mining area of Metlaoui – is, at 18 per cent, twice what it is on the coast and affects up to 40 per cent of young people.

Tunisia was and remains the most promising of all of the countries in the region that have seen challenges to their authoritarian rulers in the last six months. The country was already going to have enormous difficulty adjusting after the fall of Ben Ali, and the Libyan war has made its plight worse. The longer that war drags on, the worse it will be for Tunisia’s economy and political future.

From Malaya to Algeria to Vietnam, it was the insurgents who won out and the great power that had to withdraw. This is a lesson, van Creveld insists, that has never really been learned despite the many examples. This might well explain why NATO planes are being forced to crank up their activity; in almost all cases where the efficacy of airpower has not been proven, it has led to escalation. The result has usually been a lot more dead civilians. ~Richard Overy on Martin van Creveld’s The Age of Airpower

This is relevant to the current war in Libya for obvious reasons. The Libyan war has dragged on now for 110 days for several reasons. One is that there really was a belief among the leaders of the intervention that bombing would trigger would an uprising that would end the war, so there was no plan that the bombing would dislodge Gaddafi on its own. Another reason is that the mandate to protect civilians has appropriately required precise attacks and it has ruled out targeting the country’s infrastructure. This limits NATO’s ability to escalate its air campaign very much without compromising the mission’s official justification, and as a result the air campaign’s effectiveness will likewise be even more limited. Relying almost exclusively on air power to carry out this humanitarian intervention seems almost guaranteed to prolong the war at the expense of the civilian population’s welfare. Perhaps there should an additional criterion for any future humanitarian intervention (if there ever is another one): if a government isn’t prepared to take the risks that give the intervention the best chance of success, it shouldn’t indulge in half-measures.

Overy notes that van Creveld is more focused on the practical problems in his book:

On issues of morality, van Creveld plays his cards close to his chest. His real beef is not about the ethical questionability of using aircraft in the knowledge that they will also kill civilians, but about the waste of resources and the unredeemed promises which result from the wrong choice of strategy and weapons. It is not perhaps bad faith on the part of the century’s air-force generals—who seem to have sincerely believed in the power of their armaments—but misplaced optimism and blind disregard of the facts. From Libya in 1912 to Iraq in 2003, van Creveld argues that it is really armies that matter (and occasionally navies).

Misplaced optimism would seem to be an excellent diagnosis of much of what is wrong with the Libyan war, and it certainly seems to apply to the air campaign.

Robert Farley explains in a recent column for World Politics Review that reliance on airpower continues to be appealing to governments for political reasons:

Nevertheless, airpower — including such offshore strike capabilities as submarine-launched cruise missiles — remains attractive to civilian policymakers. Air operations carry less risk of military casualties than ground operations, making them more palatable to domestic audiences. Airstrikes also grant civilian policymakers the illusion of control, as precision munitions have given rise to the notion that strikes can be launched against specific, discrete military targets without serious danger of destroying civilian facilities like orphanages, hospitals and other sensitive sites that risk turning public opinion against the intervention. That airpower rarely keeps its promises is beside the point. Few civilian policymakers study military affairs closely, relying instead on military advice, and air force generals and other airpower advocates offer cheaper solutions than “boots on the ground” zealots.

P.S. Micah Zenko has assembled a reading list on air power and its limitations. Here is his Foreign Affairsarticle on the myths of intervention I have cited before.

The Hillreported the latest insights from one of the nation’s leading warmongers:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) warned on Tuesday that Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi is “serious” about attacking European cities in order to pressure European officials to cease their airstrikes against Libya.

“He actually means it,” Graham said of Gadhafi. “Hitler meant it. He means it.”

Greg Scoblete makes the right point that Lindsey Graham might want to consider the possible negative consequences of attacking other countries before calling for military action. The Libyan government has become a security threat to the governments that attacked it, and this was entirely avoidable. The Libyan war created an enemy where one had ceased to exist.

We may hope that Gaddafi’s resources are so stretched and his regime so weakened that he cannot carry out such threats. Despite issuing similar threats against Mediterranean commerce and shipping before the intervention began, Gaddafi has not been able to make good on any of them. What can’t be stressed enough here is that the U.S. and Europe have created a security threat to Europe as a result of interfering in an internal Libyan conflict. It is rather perverse that an alliance designed for collective security has entered into an “out-of-area” conflict that had nothing to do with Europe at the risk of inviting attack on Europe.

The automatic Hitler reference reveals Graham’s limited historical knowledge, and it is so typical that it is almost funny. The comparison does provide an opportunity to reflect on how unwise the Libyan war is. Quite unlike Hitler, Gaddafi was willing to abandon his previous policies towards the rest of the world through negotiations and engagement. The government that was taken in by what have proved to be false promises of security was the Libyan government. No doubt there is a Libyan Lindsey Graham out there somewhere who would like to berate Gaddafi for his Munich-style capitulation to untrustworthy foreign governments.