Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (MI-11) will announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination tomorrow:

In an interview with POLITICO last month, McCotter previewed some of the themes of a potential presidential run: “The challenge of globalization, the war for freedom against terrorists, the rise of Communist China and whether moral relativism erodes a nation built on self-evident truth.”

McCotter is little known to Republicans nationally, but has a strong following among the conservative media in-crowd.

According to the earlier interview, McCotter regards these four things as “existential threats,” which suggests that he will be competing with Santorum for the alarmist vote. This makes no more sense than Huntsman’s campaign, except that this one has been willed into existence by conservative media outlets. McCotter will probably receive a disproportionate of free media coverage on radio and blogs as a result, but there is no constituency for McCotter that one of the others doesn’t already represent.

Update: Via Mollie Hemingway, here is Jim Antle’s 2009 profile of McCotter.

Jim Pinkerton reviews Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch’s new book, The Declaration of Independents in the new issue of TAC (not yet online), and he finds that their thesis relies heavily on exuberant optimism:

But in their pell-mell urgency to declare that this is “the libertarian moment,” the authors have no time to slow down for subtlety—they have an entire theory of optimistic history to cram into less than 250 pages. Expounding what might be called neo-Whiggism, as an homage to Herbert Butterfield’s 1931 Whig Interpretation of History, Gillespie and Welch unspool a cheery survey of human history inexorably chugging toward Liberty Station: “there is a learning curve here, one that human beings have been struggling with for 40 years, 400 years, 4000 years.” and the result of all this progress will be a “futuretastic world of nearly infinite individual choice, specialization, and autonomy”—but, of course, we first must get the government out of the way.

It is probably one of the most enduring flaws in this optimistic vision that its adherents believe that people desire “nearly infinite individual choice, specialization, and autonomy.” For the most part, human beings have created and organized their cultures along entirely different lines, because maximizing choice and autonomy is not what encourages human flourishing.

Update: Pinkerton’s review is online.

Michael Auslin describes the Chinese challenge to the U.S. in the South China Sea, and he concludes:

More broadly, Washington’s goal, executed through Hawaii-based Pacific Command, should be to create a more active maritime community of interests in the Indo-Pacific arc and to counter Chinese moves where they occur. Greater sharing of intelligence resources, joint training, coordinated (if not joint) patrols and the like will provide the measure of security necessary to ensure smaller nations that their international rights are being protected. U.S. and allied ships should have no compunction about shadowing Chinese naval vessels when they start to approach contested territory.

Finally, political bluntness, such as that of U.S. Senator Jim Webb, who warned of a coming “Munich moment” in Asia, will clarify the issues at stake. Whether it wants to or not, America will have to start nudging some billiard balls around the table.

It’s disappointing that Sen. Webb is indulging the laziest trope in foreign policy debate. It seems most unlikely that there will be any such moment. The concern that I have is that Auslin’s proposals would seem to set the stage for a much more dangerous repeat of the Hainan incident in 2001. That incident was a product of U.S. surveillance aircraft operating in airspace that the Chinese claimed as their own. If the Chinese are serious in backing up territorial claims to disputed islands in the South China Sea, and we assume that they are, shadowing Chinese vessels that approach contested territory runs the risk of an accident or clash that could escalate into something larger.

Tony Karon believes that a political settlement to the Libyan war is near:

Calls for a cease-fire are now coming from key players in the alliance, including Italy (the only country from whose territory air sorties are being flown — most of the combat missions are flown from the French aircraft carrier Charles De Gaulle, which is be rotated out of the theater in September, with no obvious replacement) and Turkey — on whom the alliance will depend to supply any ground forces needed to police a post-conflict situation. Their preference for a political solution now is shared by the African Union and the Arab League, whose political support was vital to enable a third Western military campaign in a Muslim country within the space of decade.

I hope Karon is right, but let’s think about this. As Karon says, Italy is a “key” player in that its bases have been important for waging the bombing campaign in Libya, but it never wanted military intervention, it dragged its feet before committing its planes to the war, and it is pushing for a cease-fire because the Italian coalition government is under pressure from its junior partner, the Northern League, which is strongly opposed to continuing the war. Likewise, Turkey never wanted military intervention, and it has contributed as little as possible to the NATO mission, and its contribution remains limited to enforcing the very arms embargo that the French are so blatantly violating. The intervening governments have never cared what the AU thought, because they consider it a forum dominated by Gaddafi allies, and as soon as they received the Arab League’s “permission” the U.S. and its allies have remembered that they don’t care what the Arab League thinks, either. For these governments and organizations to want a cease-fire is natural, because none of them really wanted the war for regime change that the U.S. and its allies have been waging. When the governments that are most heavily involved in waging the war against Libya (including the U.S.) begin expressing support for a cease-fire, it might actually happen.

There can hardly be a more “pro-American” foreign policy than that espoused by America’s Founding Fathers. The guiding principles and actions of early U.S. foreign policy are a powerful testament to America’s commitment to securing liberty at home and prudently defending it abroad. America was the leading country in the world supporting the cause of republican self-government for the Latin American republics in 1821, Greece in 1823, and Hungary in 1848. ~Marion Smith

On two of these, this is damning with faint praise, and in the case of Greece it is not true. There is much wrong with Smith’s article, but this abuse of history is perhaps the most annoying. When Latin American republics were breaking away from Spain, and when Hungary was rising against the Habsburgs in 1848, there was no other independent state that expressed much in the way of support for their causes. After the Napoleonic Wars, the European Great Powers were actively hostile to any republican or liberal rebellion, and there were no other republics of any consequence that might have sympathized with them. It also hardly needs to be said that American support for these rebellions was purely moral and rhetorical, and involved absolutely no involvement of the United States government. All that the Monroe Doctrine sought to ensure was that there would be no attempt to impose Restoration governments in those Latin American republics that had achieved their independence. In practice, this required the U.S. to do nothing, because there was never any attempt to bring the Restoration era to Central and South America. The Hungarian rebellion was crushed by Russian intervention.

In the case of Greece, whose war for independence began in 1821, the Great Powers were initially wary of supporting a liberal nationalist revolution in Europe, but because it was directed against the Ottomans first the Russians, and then gradually the British and French lent the Greek cause some support. Indeed, without the joint intervention of the three powers’ fleets against the Ottoman navy, it is doubtful that the Greek Revolution would have succeeded. It was their support that secured Greek independence. American sympathy was all very well, but it once again had absolutely nothing to do with the policy of the government, and it had essentially no impact on the outcome of the war.

Smith is simply wrong in finding precedents in the “guiding principles and actions” of the Founders for the sor of interventionism his article implicitly endorses. Neutrality was the established and traditional policy of the United States until 1917. Attempts to find examples of the U.S. government “defending liberty abroad” before then are strained and inevitably misleading.

P.S. Orlando Figes’ The Crimean War contains many interesting details. One of these was that U.S. public opinion was generally in favor of the Russians during the war with Britain, France, and the Ottomans, and that there were even some American volunteers who fought on the Russian side. In fact, the U.S. went so far as to send military officers to advise the Russians, which was more than Washington ever did for the Hungarians. Contrary to the shoddy reasoning Smith employs, this does not show a traditional American preference for supporting Orthodox autocracy against its Western enemies.

It has taken Republicans decades to acquire a reputation as the party voters trust to defend the country. Now they seem intent on frittering it away within days. ~Max Boot

Boot never noticed, but the Republicans frittered that reputation away between 2003 and 2006 in Iraq, and they have yet to give the majority of the public any reason to trust Republicans on matters of national security and foreign policy. There is some hope for them in the emergence of a significant, albeit limited, opposition to the Libyan war among Republicans in Congress. These would be the members of Congress who recognize that support for national defense does not extend to providing for the defense of Cyrenaica against its own government. It has actually been quite valuable for the revival of some minimum of foreign policy sanity that Republican Libyan war supporters have insisted on making support for their blunder into a litmus test, because large numbers of Republicans would sooner reject the Libyan war than embrace such a foolish party line. Opposing the Libyan war is one small way that Republicans in Washington might begin to undo the damage they inflicted on the country and their party’s reputation through the blunder in Iraq.

Boot isn’t finished:

I would reply we can’t afford not to spend adequately on defense. Whenever we have made that mistake in the past—after the Mexican War, World War I, World War II, Vietnam and the Gulf War—we have paid a heavy cost in squandered lives and lost treasure.

Yes, who can forget all the invasions after 1848 that reckless budget-cutting unleashed on America? What heavy cost was paid in “squandered lives and lost treasure” after the Gulf War? Or after Vietnam, for that matter? Is Boot blaming post-WWII demobilization for the outbreak of the Korean War? What on earth is he talking about? It’s as if Boot thinks Pawlenty’s foreign policy speech invoking the “lessons of history” is a real history lesson. No wonder he’s confused.

Imagine if Bachmann had discussed Iraq policy at length while referring constantly to the country as “Iran” and its people as “Iranians.” ~Jonathan Chait

Were Bachmann to make a mistake as bad as the one that Pawlenty made, she would be written off immediately as no better than Palin. In fact, one of the reasons Bachmann had largely been written off until she entered the race is that she has made some bizarre statements on Iran and Iraq in the past, among other things, but the difference is that Pawlenty’s errors are given a pass because he has already been deemed a “serious” candidate. Pawlenty appears to be free to say all sorts of truly ridiculous things without losing his status as a “major contender” for the nomination. For all of the reasons I have laid out before, I don’t believe Bachmann could be the nominee, but this is mainly because I don’t believe the GOP primary electorate supports insurgent candidates when there is an establishment front-runner available.

It is a mistake to dismiss Bachmann’s current position as little more than a bubble. If Pawlenty appears to lack authenticity, Bachmann seems to have it in spades. This was the same intangible quality that made Huckabee into a significant challenger in 2007-08, and Bachmann is poised to build on what Huckabee achieved. Huckabee’s appeal was mainly limited to evangelicals and social conservatives, and even then his appeal was mostly confined to culturally Southern states. Bachmann will be able to have a somewhat wider appeal within the party.

Wilkinson is normally hyper-sensitive to the presence of what he would call Christian nationalism in American politics, but he seems to have completely missed that Bachmann can rely on evangelical identity politics and nationalist appeals to at least as great a degree as Palin and perhaps as much as George Bush before her. She is also closely tied to Tea Party and pro-life activists, and apart from her criticism of the Libyan war no one would confuse Bachmann for a dove. She represents a huge part of the party, she has the potential to become the main anti-Romney candidate to rally conservative voters against him, and she appears to have enough political talent to translate that into a decent showing.

That doesn’t mean that Bachmann can or will defeat Romney for the nomination. He has every conventional advantage in terms of money, organization, and party backing. Romney isn’t going to prevail over her because she implodes, but because there are still more Republican voters who prefer electability.

Within this conversation, I note my concern about Huntsman’s position, and Romney’s as well to some degree: that in attacking Obama from the left on America’s role in the world, they will take an outlier view within the right’s coalition and transform it into something more acceptable. ~Ben Domenech

As usual, there is a lot wrong with Domenech’s post. Romney hasn’t attacked Obama from “the left” on America’s role in the world, and neither has Huntsman. One wonders how making an attack from “the left” would make a position more popular among conservatives. This is a good example of the general uselessness of standard left/right terminology when describing foreign policy views.

After Romney’s initial blunder when he mistakenly referred to the Taliban, he said the following at the New Hampshire debate:

I want those troops to come home based upon not politics, not based upon economics, but instead based upon the conditions on the ground determined by the generals. But I also think we’ve learned that our troops shouldn’t go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation. Only the Afghanis can win Afghanistan’s independence from the Taliban.

In other words, Romney agrees with what I take to be Domenech’s position on Afghanistan policy, and it is hardly just a left-wing view that Americans shouldn’t be fighting wars of independence for other nations. That would be more or less consistent with something called the Reagan Doctrine.

Huntsman actually does favor a more rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan, but this does not seem to be an outlier position on the right. 19% of Republicans endorse the administration’s timetable, and 20% believe that the U.S. should withdraw sooner. There is a substantial constituency in the party that wants withdrawal, and there is nothing about this position that is wildly at odds with Republican foreign policy since 1981. Disagreement over the speed or size of withdrawal from Afghanistan does not really tell us very much about a candidate’s view of America’s role in the world. It is a very poor indicator of how a person views many other foreign policy issues. By all accounts, Huntsman is a fairly conventional Republican internationalist, and he has even made statements of support for an Israeli attack on Iran that should satisfy most hawks. Huntsman isn’t taking “outlier” positions and making them more acceptable. He is adopting mostly conventional Republican positions that Domenech fails to recognize as such. Perhaps Domenech would be able to see this if he spent less time panicking over the presence of prominent realists around Huntsman.

Domenech doesn’t seem to be paying very close attention to the GOP these days. For example, he writes:

Yet because DeMint, Rubio, Bachmann, and other Tea Party leaders spend a great deal more time talking about fiscal issues these days, for obvious reasons, they leave a vacuum filled by speakers who do not share their conservative views.

We could only wish that Marco Rubio devoted himself to fiscal issues this much. That way, we might be spared his tedious sermons and op-eds on foreign policy. Bachmann has been attacking the Libyan war as a mistake, and attacking the administration’s withdrawal plan at the same time. On fiscal issues, Huntsman has a reasonably solid record as a conservative, he has made a point of endorsing the Ryan budget, and he has run away from his previous support for cap-and-trade. There is no gap left by Tea Party leaders, and other Republicans who are speaking out on foreign policy in the presidential race largely do share their conservative views, at least as far as fiscal issues are concerned.

It worries Domenech that Pawlenty alone seems to be saying the things he wants to hear because of Pawlenty’s past record as a big-government conservative:

It will take considered effort, by those who are unsullied by past endorsements of domestic big government and can speak directly and convincingly to the conservative base, to reiterate why a robust defense of freedom and liberty around the world was right thirty years ago, and is still right today.

There might be a reason why there aren’t many “unsullied by past endorsements of domestic big government” who publicly defend Domenech’s foreign policy: supporters of a “robust” American role in the world also tend to believe in government activism and an expansive government role. Looking at Santorum, Pawlenty, Gingrich, and Romney, we see four candidates who are all deeply compromised by their support for activist government at home at one time or another, and it is no surprise that they also happen to be the four current presidential candidates most interested in the “robust” foreign policy Domenech prefers. There is a reason why the signatories of that FPI letter have no firm connection to the party’s base: it is they who are the least representative of the party.

Thirty years ago, the world was remarkably different. The debate over the merits of detente isn’t particularly relevant to modern security threats, and there is no threat today comparable to the one from the USSR thirty years ago. It is odd to think that the sort of “robust” response to a vanished world is at all relevant now. While we’re talking about Reagan, it’s worth pointing out that the foreign policy vision Pawlenty outlined the other day would appear to have very little in common with the much less aggressive policy of Reagan. Pawlenty insists on chiding and pressuring the Saudis to reform internally, but Reagan was famous for attacking Carter for doing exactly this to the Shah. Reagan did not launch military attacks very often, and when he did it was for very specific, limited, achievable goals related to the security of Americans or retaliation against attacks on Americans. Pawlenty favors open-ended wars for regime change that serve no discernible national interest. What we see in the “robust” foreign policy espoused by Pawlenty and Domenech today is one that is both more militarized and more ideological than anything that would have been recognized as Republican foreign policy as recently as twenty years ago.

For Bachmann to choose this moment to say that the loony of Libya poses no threat is to disqualify herself from any consideration for high office. She evidently knows nothing about the four decades of dictatorship and depredation that have led up to this. ~Christopher Hitchens

The issue here is that Hitchens has already decided that Bachmann is unfit for high office for various other (dim-witted) reasons, and then pretends that her position on Libya is utterly beyond the pale. Until the U.S. and allied forces started attacking Libya, it was perfectly reasonable to say that Gaddafi posed no threat to the United States or Europe, and it was quite correct to say that the U.S. in particular had no national security interest in the outcome of the Libyan civil war. The Libyan war is not being fought for allied security, much less U.S. security, and this has been obvious from the first day. The Libyan war turned Gaddafi back into a threat to the U.S. and Europe after he had ceased to be one.

The threat to Tunisia and Egypt that supposedly concerns Hitchens so much hasn’t gone anywhere. By prolonging the war, the intervention will in all likelihood increase the pressure on Libya’s neighbors from the influx of huge numbers of refugees that the fighting has displaced. The conflict in Libya is weakening an already shaky Tunisian economy, which enjoyed significant tourism from and trade with Libya, in addition to the remittances received from Tunisian migrants workers in Libya. Tunisia probably had the best chance of the three North African states that have experienced upheaval this year to transition to something resembling more representative government, but as long as its trade with Libya is curtailed because of the war its chances for renewed growth are undermined. That in turn will make its political transition that much more difficult. According to this preliminary paper, the Tunisian economy will lose 0.4% of GDP growth in the coming year because of the conflict in Libya. Continuing the war isn’t doing Tunisia any favors, and whatever may follow Gaddafi once he and his allies are out of power could have additional adverse effects on Tunisia’s political development.